Legal Records, Reading Practices, and The Meaning of Paper in Late Medieval English Literature (for the DTP CDA project "Writing Technologies in Trans

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In book history, the Middle Ages are associated with the use of parchment, made from animal hides, in bookmaking,while paper, made from plant matter, is primarily considered the province of later periods. But, in England, expanding ourdefinition of "literature" to include the wealth of administrative records from the period reveals that a surprisingly largenumber of paper manuscripts, the sorts of bureaucratic texts many scribes of Middle English poetry copied for their dayjobs, circulated in the late medieval period. By volume, these files, as Andrew Prescott writes, "are the characteristicscribal productions of medieval England," a fact often ignored by literary scholars, which suggests that the literary andreaderly practices prompted by paper itself deserve more attention. Thus, my project will investigate the little-studiedNational Archives KB145, an archive containing legal records brought to the King's Bench in London from regionalcourts. Focusing on its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century records alongside paper manuscripts of Middle English poetry inCambridge's collections, I hope to elucidate the meaning of paper in late medieval England. What expectations,associations, and physical habits did medieval readers bring to literature on paper, a material used for everything fromepic poetry to wiping up spills? I aim to shed light on what paper, as a technology, meant to readers who graduallyadopted it, an inversion of our world which gradually leaves it behind.