Following the Mediterranean Paper Trail: A Study of European Paper in Late Medieval Cairo (ca. 1350-1600)

Abstract

The Cairo Genizah is a unique repository of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and printed texts that span more than a millennium of Egyptian Jewish history. Nearly all were found in Cairo, but a substantial subset was copied on paper produced in Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. This article traces the emergence of European-made watermark paper in medieval Egypt using manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library’s Cairo Genizah collections. It shows that this corpus is an important resource to further understand the diaspora of watermark paper and its diffusion in Egypt. It also demonstrates how Genizah material can be valuable evidence for the circulation and consumption of paper within a wider history of papermaking in Europe. This approach to Genizah paper ultimately provides new cross-disciplinary opportunities to enhance the study of both European and Middle Eastern book culture.