2026 Sandars Lectures Focus on History of Paper

The prestigious annual 2026 Sandars Lectures series will be given this year by Professor Marina Rustow on the subject of Flax to Folio: The Global Diffusion of Early Paper and the History of Textiles. 

Rustow, currently a professor in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and History and director of the Princeton Geniza Lab, is a social historian of the medieval Middle East working with sources from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 folio pages and fragments preserved in an Egyptian synagogue.  

The two-part series will examine the history of papermaking technology from ancient China to Europe, and then from the flax fields of Egypt to writing desks across the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Rustow's theme is that the history of texts and textiles are inseparable.Lectures will be held in-person at Robinson College, live-streamed and recorded.

Lecture 1, The Path of Paper: New Evidence for the History of an Old Technology (November 17, 5pm-6pm) will concentrate on how recent archaeological and archival discoveries have affected received views on the history of paper, looking at the Sogdian origins of Arab papermaking, an 11th century North African treatise, and documents from the Michaelides and Cairo Genizah collections in Cambridge that are the earliest known dated, physical evidence of paper use in Egypt and the Iberian peninsula. 

In the second lecture (November 18, 5pm-6pm) Tax and Flax: Textile Manufacturing in Medieval Egypt
, Rustow will focus on medieval Mediterranean paper which was made from recycled rags, following the trail of newly deciphered fiscal documents to illuminate textile manufacturing in medieval Egypt’s countryside and cloth exports to Sicily and Oman.

The Sandars Readership in Bibliography was established in 1895 and continues today in the annual series of Sandars Lectures. The lectures are free and open to all but require booking via the Sandars Lectures web page here.