We will be livestreaming this lecture, which is taking place at the University of Virginia, in the Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion..

This presentation explores the legal lives of the hundreds of stationery-bound books that survive in English court archives. Who made them, who used them? How did handfuls of paper stitched into limp parchment covers threaten common law and its parchment practices? A stationery book was just one cog in a legal knowledge machine that bound communities of practice together across generations. What might such books tell us about how that machine worked? How did stationery books change the machine, from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth? How did they change the law itself?