About
Stephanie J. Lahey completed her PhD at the University of Victoria in September 2021. Her
SSHRC-funded dissertation—a quantitative analysis of scrap parchment in medieval English manuscript codices—was jointly supervised by Iain Higgins (Victoria) and Erik Kwakkel (UBC iSchool). Awarded both UVic’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in the Humanities, and Canadian Society of Medievalists’
Boyle Dissertation Prize, it is forthcoming as a monograph from
York Manuscript and Early Print Studies (2024). Since October 2021, she has been expanding upon this research as a
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s
Centre for Medieval Studies and
Old Books New Science Lab. In 2023–2024, she will be Cambridge University Library’s
Oschinsky Research Associate, and Fellow of Girton College; 2024–2026 will see her return to Canada as Andrews Fellow in Book Science at the University of Toronto. A former Guest Researcher at
Universiteit Leiden, and instructor at
DHSI and at University of Victoria, she is active as a Co-Editor and Editorial Board Member of
Early Middle English, and as a cataloguer in the rare books trade. Her research interests include Book History, Book Science, and Manuscript Studies (palaeography, quantitative- and bio-codicology, materiality, provenance studies, and manuscript production); Digital Humanities; public humanities; legal manuscripts, and
Fachliteratur.
Publications
Monograph
Scrap Parchment in Later Medieval British Manuscripts.
York Manuscript and Early Print Studies, [forthcoming 2024].
Peer Reviewed
- “Transcribing ‘Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience’: Scholarly Editing Covid19-Style”. Digital Medievalist 15, no. 1 (2022): 1–33. doi: 10.16995/dm.8071. [with Laura Morreale, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, Lisa Fagin Davis, et al.]
- “Identifying Offcut Zone Parchment in Medieval Manuscripts”. Manuscripts: From Fragments to Books—From Identification to Interpretation, 68–70. Paris: ManuSciences’19, 2019.
- “On the Origin and Provenance of Victoria, McPherson Library, Doc.Brown.4: Sir Thomas Mowbray’s Care of Newnham Priory”. Florilegium 33 (2016 [published 2018]): 63–91. doi: 10.3138/flor.33.004. Open access.
- “Paratextual Drift? Text / Image Dialogue in George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’”. Interdisciplinary Humanities 25, no. 1 (2008): 56–66.
Media Contributions
- [Podcast interview.] “[Title TBD]”. Inside My Favourite Manuscript, [episode TBD]. Host: Dot Porter. 2023 Jul. [Upcoming.]
- [Social media outreach.] 2021 Oct–2022 Mar. Manager, ‘Old Books New Science’ Twitter: @OldBooksNewSci. (Social media account of University of Toronto’s Old Books New Science Lab.)
- [Social media outreach.] 2021 Sep 20–26. Guest host, ‘Tweeting Historians’ Twitter: @Tweetistorian. (Rotating social media account hosted by a new historical researcher every week.)
- [Podcast interview.] 2018 Mar 29. Kautzman, Kevin. “Fugitive Love”. Righteous Yammer, episode 65. (Topics included parchment-making, uses of low-quality parchment, medieval trade, and popular misconceptions about diversity in pre-modern Europe.)
- [Consulted and cited.] 2018 Mar 08. Zimmer, Ben. “Riders, From Goat Skin to the Oscars”. The Wall Street Journal.
Editorial Work
- [Editorial assistant and copyeditor.] Early Middle English, issues 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1. Arc Humanities Press, 2019–2021. Issue 3.1 reprinted as: The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion. Ed. Michelle M. Sauer and Jenny C. Bledsoe. Early Middle English Books. ARC Humanities, 2021.
- [Research assistant and copyeditor (including bibliographical and indexing assistance) for scholarly monograph.] Adrienne Williams Boyarin. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
- [Co-editor, with Margaret Harry and Christa Beaudoin-Lietz.] Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association / Association de linguistique des provinces atlantiques: Papers from the Thirtieth Annual Conference / Actes du trentième colloque annuel, Nov. 3–4 / 3–4 nov. 2007. Halifax: Saint Mary’s University, 2008.
Projects
2021 Oct–2023 Sep.
SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. “Edge Effects: New Work at/on the Edges of Parchment and Medieval Studies”.
Centre for Medieval Studies and
Old Books New Science Lab, University of Toronto.
Supervisor: Alexandra Gillespie.
2022 Mar–present. Research Associate. “Archival Parchments Rejuvenation: Re‐Engineering Native Collagen Crosslinks for the Test of Time”.
Project directors: Laurent Bozec & Marianne Odlyha. [University College London–University of Toronto Strategic Partnership Project to develop a consolidation agent to repair and increase the longevity of archival parchments.]
2021 Oct–present. Research Associate: Stow Team. “John Stow’s Books and
MoEML”.
Project directors: Alexandra Gillespie and Janelle Jenstad. [Collaboration between
MoEML: Map of Early Modern London and
OBNS: Old Books New Science linking MoEML to digitized versions of Stow’s print and manuscript sources.]
2021 Aug–present. Research Associate: Chair, Mapping Team. “Mapping La Sfera”.
Project director: Laura Morreale. [Project to develop a historical gazetteer based on Gregorio Dati’s
La Sfera, with a website linking editions and transcriptions of the text to digitized manuscripts and early portolan maps.]
Upcoming Talks and Conferences
Upcoming Talks and Conference Papers
- [Upcoming.] 2023 Jul. “Analysing the Medieval Statuta Angliæ Corpus”. Early Book Society 18th Biennial Conference. University of Limerick / Ollscoil Luimnigh. Limerick, Ireland. [Refereed conference paper.]
- [Upcoming.] 2023 Jul 04. “Law of Numbers: Quantifying Statuta Angliæ Manuscripts”. International Medieval Congress. University of Leeds. Leeds, UK. [Refereed conference paper.]
- [Upcoming.] 2023 May 27. “Statistical Analysis of the Statuta Angliæ Corpus—Some Initial Findings”. Canadian Society of Medievalists 42nd Annual Meeting. York University. Toronto, ON. [Refereed conference paper.]
Selected Invited Talks
- 2023 Jan 26.“Uncertainty in Quantitative Codicology”. Uncertainty and the Handmade Book. Stanford Manuscript Sciences and Stanford Text Technologies 6th International Colloquium. Stanford University. Stanford, CA, USA. [Invited colloquium paper.]
- 2022 Oct 21. “How to Do Things with Scraps: Later Medieval Uses of Parchment Offcuts”. Monash University Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Melbourne, Australia.
- 2022 Sep 11. “Parchment Quality and Scribal Choices in Later Medieval England”. Richard III Society of Canada. Toronto, ON.
- 2022 Apr 20. “From Image to Data: Digital Transcription of Medieval Diagrams”. From Data to Wisdom: IIIF Reader Multilevel Visualization Research. Max Planck Institute for Art History, Bibliotheca Hertziana. Rome, Italy [with Benjamin Kozlowski].
- 2021 Oct 08. “Quantifying the Medieval Manuscript Book”. Medaille College Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Buffalo, NY.
- 2021 Feb 26. “The Cheap, the Bad, and the Ugly: Examining Offcut Zone Parchment in Later Medieval English Manuscripts”. IHR Late Medieval Seminar. Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. London, UK.
- 2019 Nov 18. “A Parchment Prodigal—Or, the Travels of a Medieval Charter ”. Manuscripts on Mondays [Special Collections Public Lecture Series]. University of Victoria. Victoria, BC.
- 2019 Nov 12. “Scribing on Scraps: Medieval Production and Use of Offcut Parchment”. Fairbank Calligraphy Society, General Meeting. Victoria, BC.
- 2019 Apr 28. “Of Cows and Carbon: The Material Book from Parchment to Pixel”. Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild, General Meeting. Victoria, BC.
- 2018 Nov 04. “Skins to Sheets: The Manufacture and Quality of Medieval Parchment”. Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild, General Meeting. Victoria, BC.
Selected Refereed Conference Papers
- 2023 Feb 24. “To Lift or Not to Lift? 11th-Century Fragments in an Early 16th-Century Book”. Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting. Washington, D.C.
- 2022 Jul 05. “Points of Law: Pricking in Statuta Angliæ Manuscripts”. International Medieval Congress. University of Leeds. Leeds, UK.
- 2022 Jul 02. “Scarce and Strange: Medieval English Offcut Devotional Books”. Pfaff at 50: New Devotions and Religious Change in Later Medieval England. University of Nottingham, UK.
- 2022 Jun 07. “Protecting the Page: Safeguarding Medieval Manuscripts as Cultural Heritage”. Canadian Society of Medievalists 41st Annual Meeting [with Alvionne Karpinski].
- 2022 Mar 04. “Digital Transcription of Diagrams in Medieval Manuscripts: Dati’s La Sfera as a Case Study”. New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Sarasota, FL, USA [with Benjamin Kozlowski].
- 2021 Dec 09. “On the Varieties of Medieval Parchment”. English Perceptions of the Material Text: 1300–1600. Online symposium, via Zoom.
- 2019 Jul 08. “British Library, Lansdowne MS 348: Situating Devotion in a Professional Corpus”. Early Book Society 16th Biennial Conference. University College Dublin. Dublin, Ireland.
- 2019 Jul 04. “Into the Zone? Analysing Parchment Flaws in a Corpus of Later Medieval English Manuscripts”. International Medieval Congress. University of Leeds. Leeds, UK.
- 2019 Jun 05. “Patchwork Physic: British Library, Sloane MS 783B”. Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société canadienne des médiévistes, 38th Annual Meeting. Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. University of British Columbia. Vancouver, BC.
- 2018 Jul 04. “Swank Scraps? Gilding Waste Parchment in a Statuta Angliæ Manuscript”. International Medieval Congress. University of Leeds. Leeds, UK.
- 2018 May 29. “Professional Pages, Done Dirt Cheap: On the Genres of English Offcut Manuscripts”. Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société canadienne des médiévistes 37th Annual Meeting. Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. University of Regina. Regina, SK. [Awarded the Canadian Society of Medievalists, M. Jane Toswell Student Presentation Prize for best student paper in any field of Medieval Studies presented at the 2018 Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences].
- 2018 Apr 27. “From Skins to Sheets: Varieties of Medieval Parchment”. Vancouver Island Library Staff Conference. Victoria, BC.
- 2017 Jul 11. “‘Awreke me of these wastours’: Exploring Parchment in Aberystwyth, NLW, MS 733B”. Early Book Society 15th Biennial Conference. University of Durham. Durham, UK.
- 2017 May 27. “Cheap Medicine: Parchment Offcuts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1378”. Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société canadienne des médiévistes 36th Annual Meeting. Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Ryerson University. Toronto, ON.
