Dr Stephanie Lahey

Oschinsky Research Associate 2023-24

Email: sjl219@cam.ac.uk

Stephanie J. Lahey completed her doctorate in 2021 at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her SSHRC (Canadian Social Sciences of Humanities Research Council)-funded dissertation focused on statistical analysis of the use of scrap parchment in manuscript books produced in later medieval England. The dissertation was awarded the Canadian Society of Medievalists’ Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize for 2022, as well as the University of Victoria’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in the Humanities, and has been accepted for publication by York Manuscript and Early Print Studies as Scrap Parchment in Later Medieval British Manuscripts.

She comes to Cambridge from the University of Toronto where she applied scientific methods to the study of medieval parchment as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and the Old Books New Science Lab. In Autumn 2024, she will return to the University of Toronto to continue her work on scientific and quantitative approaches to medieval manuscripts as the Mark Andrews Fellow in Book Science.

Oschinsky Research Associate Project:
Law of Numbers: Analysing the Medieval Statuta Angliæ Corpus

Stephanie's work as Oschinsky Research Associate engages with medieval Statuta Angliæ manuscripts—unofficial compilations of English common law statutes, produced in Britain from the mid-13th- through late-15th-centuries—focusing on the sixty-four copies held by the University Library and Cambridge’s colleges and museums. Part of a larger book project involving quantitative analysis of all extant medieval Statuta Angliæ manuscripts, this research explores shifts in the textual contents and material features of this distinctive group of law books through a mix of statistical analysis and case studies of selected exemplars. It aims to advance our understanding of the production, reception, and contexts of use of Statuta Angliæ, highlighting avenues for future research; lay a foundation for comparative work with other medieval legal corpora; and offer a model for similar large-corpus, mixed-methodological Book Historical studies.