Melissa Moreton is a codicologist and cultural historian who studies the material aspects of old books and manuscripts and the people who made and used them. Her research started in Italy, but has broadened to include the study of global manuscript culture, the spread of book technologies, and book use across Africa, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. She combines interdisciplinary methodologies drawn from material book studies, history, art history, and the quantitative sciences, and has been known to make parchment, paper, and to bind books. She is currently a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and helped organize the current exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, entitled “Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads.”

Melissa joins us to talk about that “Hidden Stories”, which our own Suzanne was one of the curators of! (Hence why we’ve been a little quiet recently.) Chris, Suzanne, and Melissa discuss how the objects in the exhibition tell stories both as texts and as objects, what it’s like to put together such a show during a pandemic, and some of the marvellous pieces they were able to put on display.