We are delighted to announce that the 2026 Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Gabriel Moshenska.
Professor Moshenska’s talk is titled Rot with thy author: the history and archaeology of buried books. He writes,
Book burial is a narrow, neglected, but enduring thread in fiction, folklore, history, ethnography and archaeology. In my research I have encountered stories of buried books entwined with the lives of prophets, prisoners, artists, exiles, demons, magicians, kings, soldiers, blasphemous scientists, baffled archaeologists, degenerate poets, and impecunious university administrators. As book lovers know, habent sua fata libelli: books have their destinies, and sometimes it is to be buried in the earth. The domesticity of books and their association with orderly, dry, indoor spaces makes the burial of books in the cold wet ground a fascinating and disturbing idea.
In this talk I will explore some of the histories, archaeologies and mythologies of buried books in search of insights into human-book relations and the nature of books as things. Books are buried to protect or honour them, to dispose of them, to accompany the dead, and to pass them on to future generations. The accounts of book burial presented in this talk are drawn from archaeological reports, renaissance and early modern literature, conversations with conservators, interviews with scholars of Islam and Judaism, and research into time capsules, garbology, lost libraries and hidden archives. The buried books themselves range from the dull ubiquity of a telephone book in a landfill to the astonishing revelations of ancient Chinese bamboo strip manuscripts and the precious fragments of the Faddan More Psalter. I also (almost) found a patron saint of buried books.
The Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture will be given on 16 December during the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at University of Exeter. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. You do not need to attend the conference to come to the lecture. Lecture tickets are free of charge but must be booked. Booking will open in the Autumn.