Hosted by: SIMS and Kislak Center
First employed by the Dominican Order in the early thirteenth century, the pecia system of book production soon expanded into a major commercial trade operation to supply and disseminate classroom texts and preaching aids across the universities of Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. This talk will explore how pecia manuscripts were mass-produced at a low cost for members of the academic milieu, with surviving volumes featuring rich written and visual evidence of their active use in university activities and wider religious communities. Several illuminated pecia copies further showcase the collaboration between artists and scholars to create original decorative cycles in works of theology, law, and natural philosophy. These manuscripts continued to be circulated by readers in the later Middle Ages through the secondhand market, as demonstrated through examples of Oxford's university loan chest system and the newly rediscovered records of an Italian Jewish pawnbroker.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Online Lecture Series presents regularly scheduled lectures related to the study of premodern manuscript books and global manuscript culture.
Dr Alison Ray is the Collections and Archives Manager of the Royal Irish Academy Library. She has previously held roles at Oxford University, Trinity College Dublin Library, Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, and the British Library. She is currently writing her first monograph on the pecia system and medieval university book trade.
Featured Image: Detail of an Initial P with monk reading at a lectern, from a 13th-century medical miscellany (Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Manuscripts, Oversize LJS 24, fol. 137r)