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

在书史上，中世纪与用动物兽皮制成的羊皮纸在博彩中的使用有关，而用植物材料制成的纸主要被认为是后期的领域。但是，在英格兰，扩大我们对“文学”的定义，将这一时期的大量行政记录包括在内，就会发现在中世纪晚期流传着大量的纸质手稿，这是许多中世纪英语诗歌的抄写者为了日常工作而抄袭的那种官僚文本。就数量而言，这些文件，正如安德鲁·普雷斯科特所写的那样，“是中世纪英格兰特有的经文作品”，这一事实经常被文学学者忽视，这表明由纸张本身推动的文学和阅读实践值得更多关注。因此，我的项目将调查很少被研究的国家档案馆KB145，这是一个包含从地区法院带到伦敦国王法庭的法律记录的档案馆。聚焦于它14世纪和15世纪的记录，以及剑桥大学收藏的中世纪英语诗歌的纸质手稿，我希望能阐明纸在中世纪晚期英格兰的意义。中世纪的读者给纸质文学带来了什么期望、联想和身体习惯？纸质文学是一种用于从诗歌到擦拭溢出的一切东西的材料。我的目标是阐明纸，作为一种技术，对逐渐采用它的读者意味着什么，一种逐渐将它抛在脑后的我们世界的颠倒。

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.