BHPC Program Events

The Robertson Davies Library invites you to attend our half-day colloquium presented by the Textiles in Ethiopian Manuscripts SSHRC-funded research project. Co-directed by Professor Michael Gervers (University of Toronto) and Massey Senior Fellow Sarah Fee (Royal Ontario Museum), the project consists of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Toronto and from international institutions who are studying textiles found pasted on the inside book boards of Christian Ethiopian manuscripts from the 15th–19th century. Through these objects, the project’s main focus is to provide insights on Ethiopian culture and the countries/regions from which the textiles originated—insights of which will be shared during this colloquium.

Please also join us for a special viewing of our latest acquisition after the colloquium, a late 18th-/early 19th-century Ethiopian manuscript with a 19th-century textile pastedown and leather carrying case.

In this lecture, we will consider the blockprinting tradition that flourished in Egypt from the 800s to ca. 1420 and its relationship to the emergence of blockprinting in southern Germany in the 1410s.

In addition, Professor Richardson will lead a special seminar for students the day after the lecture (Friday, October 24, 10:00 am) in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. This seminar will draw on materials from the Fisher collection and will develop themes from her talk. This seminar is open to all graduate students in BHPC’s participating units, including students not enrolled in the BHPC program, and to upper-year undergraduates in the BMS program. Advance registration for the seminar is required. To register, contact our Program Coordinator. Space is limited, so please sign up only if you know you can attend.

Kristina Richardson is John L. Nau III Professor of History and Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She specializes in histories of non-elite groups in the Middle East. She is the author of two monographs: Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (2012) and Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (2022). She is currently writing Black Basra: Race, Science, and Slavery in Early Islamic History on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural labourers in medieval Iraq.