Book History from the Margins: What Gutenberg Owed to Medieval Romani Printers - Kristina Richardson

In this talk Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia) shows how Roma and other traveling groups, who were known collectively in the Middle East as Strangers, had been blockprinting religious texts since the 900s. They printed in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts. As some Romani groups migrated from Ottoman territories into Bavaria and Bohemia in the 1410s, they may have carried this printing technology into the Holy Roman Empire.

Kristina Richardson is Professor of History and Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She specialises 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). This last one was awarded the Dan David Prize, the Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research from the Medieval Academy of America, and Honorable Mention for the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize. She also co-edited the Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver in 2021. She is currently writing a book on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural laborers in early Islamic Iraq. 

This event took place on 9 May 2024 and is part of the Warburg Director’s Seminar series, which brings leading scholars and writers to the Institute to share new work and fresh perspectives on key issues in their fields.

“It is thought that the actual movement of block printing technology from East Asia to Central Asia and into West Asia, or what we call today the Middle East, was probably facilitated by Buddhists. Buddhists, again, were the earliest printers in East Asia. And it is thought that a particular family, actually they’re called the Barmakids, and they were serving in the administration of 9th century Baghdad as counselors and advisors, and it’s probable that through their connections there might have been the introduction of the print.

So this is a well known phenomenon. However it has been minimized in histories of the Middle East. But what I will argue going forward is that certainly it was Buddhists bringing print, and also paper technology into West Asia, but it was adapted mostly by a minority group who referred to themselves as the Strangers. We would refer to them probably today more along the lines of traveling people, and it was astrologers among them who actually were producing these prints.” – Kristina Richardson, an excerpt from the video lecture below.