48b. Bonus: Melissa Moreton on Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads.

The Spouter-Inn; or, A Conversation with Great Books

The Silk Roads aren’t stuck in time. They’re so often depicted as just a certain period of time and a certain geographic range, and I think we’re kinda blowing that apart! [These objects span] a thousand-year history, but also [range] from Japan all the way to Mexico. We’re breaking outside the box and really thinking about: Wait a second. What do we all have around us today that was influenced by this intercultural trade and exchange of ideas? And it’s everywhere.

Melissa Moreton is a codicologist and cultural historian who studies the material aspects of old books and manuscripts and the people who made and used them. Her research started in Italy, but has broadened to include the study of global manuscript culture, the spread of book technologies, and book use across Africa, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. She combines interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from material book studies, history, art history, and the quantitative sciences, and has been known to make parchment, paper, and to bind books. She is currently a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and helped organize the current exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, entitled “Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads.”

Melissa joins us to talk about that “Hidden Stories”, which our own Suzanne was one of the curators of! (Hence why we’ve been a little quiet recently.) Chris, Suzanne, and Melissa discuss how the objects in the exhibition tell stories both as texts and as objects, what it’s like to put together such a show during a pandemic, and some of the marvellous pieces they were able to put on display.

Show Notes.

Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads is at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto until February 27, 2022.

The digital companion site to the exhibition, where images of many of the objects we discuss can be found.

The textile Qur’an.

Two unexpectedly preserved pieces.

The baptismal register.

The antiphoner (and its music).

The list of all the objects in the exhibit (still under construction).

The Women’s Studio Workshop.

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