{"product_id":"on-parchment-by-bruce-holsinger-9780300260212","title":"On Parchment","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFor many centuries, the societies of the premodern world recorded and preserved a good part of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures whose 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 boundless 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe book’s fifteen chapters take up such topics as 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 epoch. Lavishly illustrated and 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 in different ways to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAt the centre of \u003cem\u003eOn Parchment\u003c\/em\u003e is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast cultural record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47426805432556,"sku":"9780300260212","price":71.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780300260212.jpg?v=1774767827","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/on-parchment-by-bruce-holsinger-9780300260212","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}