{"product_id":"on-parchment-animals-archives-and-the-making-of-culture-from-herodotus-to-the-digital-age-9780300260212","title":"On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age","description":"\u003cb\u003eA sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \"Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history.\"--\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era's surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the leather rolls of ancient Egypt to the Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Holsinger discusses the making of parchment past and present, the nature of the medium as a biomolecular record of faunal life and environmental history, the knotty question of \"uterine vellum,\" and the imaginative role of parchment in the works of St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, and a range of Jewish rabbinic writers of the medieval era. Closely informed by the handicraft of contemporary makers, painters, and sculptors, the book draws on a vast array of sources--codices and scrolls, documents and ephemera, works of craft and art--that speak to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents. At the center of \u003ci\u003eOn Parchment\u003c\/i\u003e is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBruce Holsinger\u003c\/b\u003e is Linden Kent Memorial Professor at the University of Virginia, editor of \u003ci\u003eNew Literary History\u003c\/i\u003e, and an award-winning author. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Yale University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50554568737042,"sku":"9780300260212","price":28.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_1104d193-42a9-4c1a-932b-4995dfefbceb.jpg?v=1731720452","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/on-parchment-animals-archives-and-the-making-of-culture-from-herodotus-to-the-digital-age-9780300260212","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}