Supposed to Have Been Written: Book Culture in Medieval Bristol

The Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book is pleased to present Supposed to Have Been Written: Inventing the Book Culture of Medieval Bristol with Harper-Schmidt Fellow Joe Stadolnik.

In this colloquium, Joe Stadolnik asks how to study a book culture of the past even when very few of the material books remain. His case study is the mercantile English city of Bristol in the fifteenth century. Bristol fascinates Joe. Books abounded there, kept in parish libraries open to readers, or in private hands of its prospering merchant class. It was a vibrant, international medieval city on the cusp of modernity: sending sailors over the ocean on voyages of discovery, producing humanists, and making a ready market for the new technology of print. Yet historians of the book might be excused for skipping over it entirely: most of late-medieval Bristol’s books are now untraceable. Its book culture, if it is to be studied, will have to be invented: ‘invented’ either in the medieval sense of found out, dug up, or encountered by chance; or, as the poet Thomas Rowley did, imagined into existence.

This event is open to all with registration and will be held in The Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in Regenstein Library.

Visitors to the University of Chicago Library without a university ID may obtain an entry pass by checking in at Regenstein Library’s entry desk and presenting a current, government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license, CityKey, state ID, or passport to confirm identity. Get more visitor information.

Images from the Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives:

Headline Image:

The supposed 'Crypt of St Leonard's Church' (drawing/watercolour)

Artist: ROWBOTHAM, Thomas Leeson

Associated Information: 1827

View in Bristol Museums Collection

Additional Image:

Chatterton in the Muniment Room of St Mary Redcliffe (drawing/watercolour)

Production Date: circa 1830
Attributed to: RIPPINGILLE, Edward Villiers
Date: circa 1830

View in Bristol Museums Collection

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