Medieval Studies Faculty Colloquium – “Reading by Candlelight in Late-Medieval Britain”

Join Medieval Studies for our next faculty colloquium with Spencer Strub, Lecturer in English and Associate Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities.

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP.

Medieval people read, and sometimes wrote, at night. To do so, they needed a source of light. In premodernity, that light was invariably cast by burning organic matter—wood, beeswax, animal fat—that had been crafted for the purpose and brought to consumers through a web of economic processes: a single candle might reflect a history of animal husbandry and slaughter, craft-guild organization, huckster retail, and routine domestic labor. Late medieval England provides a rich record of that multiform economy of light. The London guilds of Wax Chandlers and Tallow Chandlers, for instance, helped formalize the trade in relatively expensive forms of light starting in the late thirteenth century, while local piecework across the country brought cheap rushlights into the homes of the poor. Collating such records with the glancing references to nocturnal reading and writing in English and Scottish poems, letters, and chronicles, this talk offers a new history of the entanglement of textual culture and the preindustrial energy.

This event is open to Princeton University faculty, students, and staff only.