Source: SWNS

Pressing matter: the mill may have had a role in 16th-century publishing

An academic couple have published a paper inspired by the forgotten history of their first home together ¨C which may have unearthed some intriguing new details about the world¡¯s oldest publishing house.

Leah Tether is principal lecturer in publishing at Anglia Ruskin University. Her fianc¨¦, Benjamin Pohl, is a DAAD postdoctoral fellow in medieval history at the University of Cambridge. When they moved into a 19th-century flat alongside a stagnant brook in Cambridge, it turned out that the building formed part of a complex known as the Old Paper Mill.

The name, said Dr Tether, ¡°piqued our interests as book historians¡±. Although they initially assumed that the name was relatively new, they soon discovered that it ¡°had retained the name continuously, though the paper mill had been here for a maximum of five years in the 1550s¡±.

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As a literary scholar and a historian specialising in the Middle Ages, Dr Tether and Dr Pohl had never expected to collaborate on research and ¡°felt a little out of [our] depth¡± in the 16th century. They embarked on the project as ¡°a little personal thing we wanted to find out, but which turned out to be important¡±.

They discovered that the mill was one of only two thought to have been in existence in Britain before 1588 ¨C more specifically one attributed to a Protestant known as Remigius, who was fleeing persecution in Germany.

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A range of material in the university archives and the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College ¨C leases, indentures, details of debts, even letters from the paper-maker himself ¨C enabled them to track the rise and fall of the mill in far greater detail.

Comparing this with the history of Cambridge University Press suggests that Remigius¡¯ short-lived paper mill was ¡°connected to the birth of CUP itself and part of the business case was that it could service the needs of CUP¡±, Dr Tether said. That would also make it ¡°part of the first attempt to establish a publishing industry outside London¡±.

Such findings and speculations have now been published in a paper titled ¡°Remigius Guidon, Cambridge¡¯s Old Paper Mill and the Beginnings of the Cambridge University Press, c.1550-59¡±, which recently appeared in Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society.

Although the couple are shortly to move to Ghent, Dr Tether said that the Old Paper Mill had proved ¡°a nice place to live and has also fed into our work. It has given us a lot to think about and given us a lot of pleasure¡±.

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matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com