A material history of 15th-17th century paper used for
Icelandic handwritten and printed texts from
production to use and reuse

In the last few months we were rather quiet as we had a truly busy time. But now things have calmed down and we can present some of our...

The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic StudiesReykjavik, Iceland 19-20 June, 2025 During the last decades, printed catalogues of...

A recent find of a playing card on the street reminded me that playing cards were immensely popular in the late Middle Ages and the Early...

by Beeke Stegmann As part of our project investigating the third life cycle of paper—its reuse—we have been examining all of Árni...

The analysis of paper use is one of our main aims in our project Life of Paper . The bréfabækur  of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson...

On 27-28 August people from ten institutions in seven different countries (on two continents) convened in Cork, Ireland, to present their...

On this fine Icelandic National Day (hip hip hooray!), we’ll look at a manuscript that contains drafts of a jarðabók, a land register....

I ended the last blog with a comment that some low paper quality phenomena carry names inspired by the human body, perhaps because paper...

On the last day of the conference in Verona in September 2023 we visited the paper museum in Toscolano near Lake Garda. One of the...

It is soon Easter, and one of the symbols of the Resurrection of Christ is the Lamb of God, or Agnus Dei in Latin. The image of a lamb as...

Together with our cooperation partners from the National and University Library of Iceland and our external contractor from the...

We are very excited to share this Call for Papers for a colloquium that we are jointly organising with the University College Cork,...

Seasonal greetings

A few days ago, on 13 November, we celebrated the 360th birthday of Árni Magnússon, the famous manuscript collector. We have previously...

For our Life of Paper project we investigate, among other aspects, the production of manuscripts, particularly through analyses of quire...

The 7th International Conference on Watermarks in Digital Databases was held in Verona, Italy, this year, and on the last day of the...

Today we’ll introduce a paper manuscript that puzzled us for quite a while: Reykjavík, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies...

By Beeke Stegmann As described in our previous blog post, we are systematically going through charter copies in the Arnamagnæan...

By Beeke Stegmann The third life cycle of paper that is investigated in our project "Life of Paper" focusses on reuse of...

A few weeks ago our book Paper Stories – Paper and Book History in Early Modern Europe was published. It is based on the conference that...