My research interests revolve around issues of reading practice and book use: Who used books? When? And how? Whose stories get told when we think about reading and making medieval books? How can we use the material evidence of books to tell more diverse stories about people in the past and people today? About who does the work of preserving these objects? And about who gets to see and study them? How can we start to think about book history as a more varied, broader collection of technologies and forms? Will that change the way we think about global development?
By using radiography to access hidden evidence in bookbindings I seek to situate manuscripts within the networks of material and intellectual exchange that supported their production and consumption. The Durham Priory Library collection provides a localizable source of data with intriguing transnational connections: the binding of the St Cuthbert’s Gospel, for example, has long been associated with decorative techniques from Coptic Egyptian traditions. Books—then as now—are fundamentally connective objects.
Developing new approaches to manuscript studies raises ethical questions. In particular, during my postdoc in Toronto—as a white European studying medieval European manuscripts in North American collections—I was concerned about the part the objects of my study, their collection and preservation in North American research libraries, played in an Imperialist narrative. A narrative that positions the Western manuscript (as a symbol of the white European medieval past) as culturally superior to other written objects and as the predecessor of modern technological innovation. My current and future work interrogates and disrupts that narrative through close comparative material reading in tandem with digital and scientific approaches.
My work has appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Journal of the Early Book Society, English Studies, and the collection Interpreting MS Digby 86, edited by Susanna Fein. Further articles are forthcoming in Early Middle English (2021), Textual Studies (2022), and Digital Philology (2022). Recorded talks and lectures can be viewed in the Talks section of this website.
Further mini-projects can be explored via. the side bar!
Micro-CT images of an eighteenth-century cord sewing support laced into the binding of Western University Library, MS Canon Grandel’s Prayer Book, produced by me from scans taken by Andrew Nelson, Department of Anthropology, Western University in collaboration with Deborah Meert-Williston, Jessica Lockhart, and Alexandra Gillespie
Dr Sargan and a colleague set up a seventeenth-century printed book for acute imaging via. dental x-ray with intraoral solid state sensor. Photographed by Jessica Lockhart