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A material history of 15th-17th century paper used for
Icelandic handwritten and printed texts from
production to use and reuse
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Silvia Hufnagel
4 days ago1 min read
Paper and Playing Cards
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...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Nov 132 min read
A Mysterious Book Auction in Copenhagen
by Beeke Stegmann As part of our project investigating the third life cycle of paper—its reuse—we have been examining all of Árni...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Oct 162 min read
Paper and Legal Power
The analysis of paper use is one of our main aims in our project Life of Paper . The bréfabækur of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Sep 193 min read
Use and Reuse of Paper in the Pre-Industrial World
On 27-28 August people from ten institutions in seven different countries (on two continents) convened in Cork, Ireland, to present their...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Jun 172 min read
Land Registers and Waste Paper
On this fine Icelandic National Day (hip hip hooray!), we’ll look at a manuscript that contains drafts of a jarðabók, a land register....
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Silvia Hufnagel
May 152 min read
Health and Safety Hazards in Paper Mills
I ended the last blog with a comment that some low paper quality phenomena carry names inspired by the human body, perhaps because paper...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Apr 152 min read
Of Clouds, Tears and Bleeding
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...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Mar 272 min read
Easter Lambs and Watermarks
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...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Feb 161 min read
Behind the Scenes
Together with our cooperation partners from the National and University Library of Iceland and our external contractor from the...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Jan 152 min read
Call for Papers: Use and Reuse of Paper in the Pre-Industrial World
We are very excited to share this Call for Papers for a colloquium that we are jointly organising with the University College Cork,...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Nov 17, 20232 min read
Paper Recycling in the Early 18th Century
A few days ago, on 13 November, we celebrated the 360th birthday of Árni Magnússon, the famous manuscript collector. We have previously...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Oct 18, 20232 min read
Quire structures, watermarks and felt- and sieve-sides
For our Life of Paper project we investigate, among other aspects, the production of manuscripts, particularly through analyses of quire...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Sep 18, 20232 min read
Paper mills and paper historians
The 7th International Conference on Watermarks in Digital Databases was held in Verona, Italy, this year, and on the last day of the...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Aug 15, 20232 min read
Quire signatures, watermarks and repair reports
Today we’ll introduce a paper manuscript that puzzled us for quite a while: Reykjavík, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies...
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Beeke Stegmann
Jul 14, 20232 min read
Árni Magnússon and century-old paper
By Beeke Stegmann As described in our previous blog post, we are systematically going through charter copies in the Arnamagnæan...
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Beeke Stegmann
Jun 15, 20232 min read
Reuse of 17th-century paper in Iceland
By Beeke Stegmann The third life cycle of paper that is investigated in our project "Life of Paper" focusses on reuse of...
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Silvia Hufnagel
May 15, 20232 min read
New publication: Paper Stories
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...
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Lotte Devoldere
Apr 17, 20232 min read
Visualising the physical structure of manuscripts: VisColl
by Lotte Devoldere For our Life of Paper project, we are using the VCEditor, a software that allows us to visualise individual manuscript...
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Silvia Hufnagel
Feb 28, 20232 min read
Quire structures, watermarks and manuscript production
An important part of Life of Paper is the analysis of quire structures* in combination with watermark analysis and textual contents of...
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