Sep 4, 2025
So Chaucer himself used notebooks, wrote about them, and knew the different ways in which they could be used, but most of his compatriots, far from the Italian paper mills and the well-stocked cartolai of the Via dei Librai, didn't.*
* At this point parchment remained much more common than paper across the British Isles for all of the uses which Italy had long adopted the newer material. One statistical illustration: in Cambridge University Library, there are only six English manuscripts on paper dating to the fourteenth century, Chaucer's lifetime, but well over 100 from the fifteenth.
"The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper" - Roland Allen
