“And when the underwear was worn out, it provided a steady supply of material used by papermakers to make books.”
That’s the word out of the recently held International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in Northern England.
Marco Mostert, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who is was one of the conference organizers goes on to say:
The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags…These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased – which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making
Yikes!
Article in the Globe and Mail
Booklust has a great cartoon on the subject