Historian explores medieval readers’ notes and scraps

Historian Erik Kwakkel studies what people in the Middle Ages wrote in book margins and on scraps of parchment, Morgunblaðið reported. Such scraps served as note-taking materials and were often later reused in bookmaking.

Kwakkel, a Dutch professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, gave a lecture last Thursday at Edda, the house of Icelandic, organised by the University of Iceland’s Centre for Medieval Studies. His talk, titled “Note-taking in the Middle Ages: Objects and Objectives,” examined the materials people used to take notes and what they wrote down.

“I am a historian, and my specialism is books from before the age of print, when books were handwritten with a quill,” Kwakkel told Morgunblaðið. He said his research looks at the design of handwritten books, who they were made for and how digital methods can be used to study them.

At the University of British Columbia, Kwakkel leads a research programme on reading culture and book production in the manuscript era. He studies how a book’s physical design relates to its content and the circumstances in which it was made and used, including what its appearance can reveal about its readers.

His work includes research on medieval medical texts. His books include Turning Over a New Leaf, published in 2012, Manuscripts of the Latin Classics, published in 2015, and the 2018 textbook Books Before Print. He has also completed a manuscript about advertising by medieval scribes, which is currently under review.