Visual History: Magnifying Glass or Fun Fair Mirror?

  Some weeks ago I got into a slightly testy (but polite) Twitter exchange with somebody from the humanities area of academia who was wanting to know whether anybody out there was doing research on the purely visual aspects of humanities subjects. I pointed out that there were whole disciplines in this area, such as archaeology and art history. These, I was informed, didn't count because people just wrote words about them and critiqued each other's words and didn't actually read the visuals. Er, no. Could I provide some references? Well, every excavation report ever written would make a start.
  Perhaps we had just got our wires crossed and were misreading each other's arguments. That can happen when you break up a discussion into 140 character spasms sent asynchronously across different global time zones. We all read the visuals of our subjects and draw conclusions, or at least cement impressions, from the way we process them. We can look at stuff, we can reinterpret through drawing or photography or computer modelling or re-enactment. We incorporate interpretations based on our previous reading of words on a page or try to interpret the visuals based on other experience. Is this hollow bone with holes in it a prehistoric flute or a bone that a carnivore has chewed? All manner of observations and experiences can be drawn in.

    We all know what this scene, here painted on the rood screen of Hexham Abbey, represents: the Annunciation of course. It's a story from a book; a much read, much reproduced, much studied book. It's a book that was systematically translated, corrected and edited so it could be presented in a standardised form. We know what it is because we know the written story. There are also elements of this picture which are not derived from the book, but we recognise as visual conventions of medieval art: the Virgin kneeling at a desk reading a book, turning her head coyly towards the angel behind her; the haloes; the pot of lilies; the bent over respectful posture of the angel. They not only inform what we see, but how we see it.

  On the other hand, this misericord from St Werburgh's Abbey in Chester has no book to tell us exactly what it means. We are left with a jumble of folklore, reassembled and recast over centuries, and similar images from many other places to inform us that it is not unique or even particularly weird for its location, just not what we were expecting. We can speculate about the psychology of the wild places of the mind and invent symbolic meanings, like the priests quashing the forces of evil with their butts, or something like that.
  How things, tiny or enormous, present themselves, or are presented, influence the way we mentally process them. No historical object is in its original position or condition. We have to fill in from our knowledge and imagination, hopefully in an informed way, but with an open mind  to other than the standard possibilities. We also need to fill in the absences. Sometimes an empty space can tell us something.

  Conwy Castle in Wales, with its massive forbidding presence, had such a profound effect on my four year old son at the time that he claimed he wished we had never called him Edward. "Edward I was a big pig!" he pronounced, and has insisted unto this day that he would be called Eddy. The fact that it was bleak and freezing and snowy only added to the atmosphere. It was an entirely different conception of a castle to that perpetuated by the modern craze of bodies like English Heritage dressing small children up as faux Vikings or soldiers or knights and let them pretend to bash the bejiminies out of each other in the name of good clean medieval fun. On the other hand, a raucous re-enactment of a guard chopping off a prisoner's ear in Lincoln Castle some years later sent my small nephew into the abdabs. He took some convincing that it was just pretend. The places can speak for themselves, with a bit of subtle guidance. Let's not hit the public over the head with a brick.

  Looking out from the top of Clifford's Tower in York, it is not so hard to imagine what an imposing and dominant presence the mighty minster would have been. Just mentally erase the multistory buildings, the fire station across the road and assorted other distractions, sketch in a few animals and aromas and you can see this monolithic building as the commanding presence in a small community by today's standards. You can make out two other church towers in this picture (look carefully), but there were other prominent features that you can't see, because they are not there. York had four friaries, a major hospital, several hospitals outside the walls, a number of parish churches now departed and various buildings adjunct to the minster. A network of religious buildings enmeshed the town. This is the concept we have to work a bit to see.

   This gatehouse in York led into a complex known as the Bedern, where the vicars choral of the minster lived when they weren't attending to their choral duties. Two small restored buildings, including the chapel on the left of the picture, are all that survives above ground, but the space still exists, albeit now occupied by modern housing. The past hasn't gone away.

  St Leonard's hospital was a very large institution, but now represented by just a fragment of ruin. The imposing building behind it is the public library, built on part of the site. Some hospital foundations are under a nearby theatre. New urban institutions have replaced the old, but the space is still defined. You are looking at something that isn't there. The medieval town is not defined simply by its standing ruins, but by its spaces and replacements. 
  Maps are one way of refining the seeing of history. Ancient historical maps may not conform to modern cartographical standards, but they are a conception of a place. They define what features and what spaces were seen as important at the time.

  William Stukeley's map of Leicester shows us how an 18th century antiquarian saw the shape and organisation of the town. You would be hard pressed to untangle that plan from a modern map. Nevertheless topographical maps, Ordnance Survey maps and Google satellite images can all combine to help us image the past and fit it into the present. There is even a space archaeologist working with NASA these days.

  Here are the massive ruins of the huge and stately medieval bishop's palace at Wells. You don't need a literal medieval banquet re-enactment to imagine the lavish doings that must have gone on here.

  Here is an empty space, now filled with a modern cemetery at Northallerton in Yorkshire. You are looking at something that isn't there; a palace of the bishop of Durham. The ditch and bank surrounding the site survives, defining a space from which the material content has been removed. You have to imagine the ceremonies, the banquets, the consultations and plottings that might have gone on here. Their shadows are still lurking.

  This is the site of the church of St Paul in the Bail in Lincoln, possibly the oldest Christian church in the north of England. It has been excavated and several subsequent versions of the church have been discovered on the site. You are looking at chronological layers of things that are not there. I was standing here once when a stranger approached and asked me where Roman Lincoln was. I told him we were standing in it. He didn't believe me. Admittedly you have to go down a lane to see a bit of wall, and another lane to see a turret, another to see the main upper gateway and another way to see the foundations of the lower town gates. I gave him directions and he pottered off bemused. Perhaps he was expecting something like the forum in Rome, but Lincoln has seen a lot of life since those days. Would it have helped if there had been explainers wandering around in metal breastplates and sandals? It might please some, but it makes more sense if you train yourself to see. 

  Bolingbroke Castle might not exactly be the best preserved medieval fortress in Britain but it was the birthplace of one Henry, part of the ever ongoing murderous struggles to determine the monarchy of England. It still sits in a landscape. Far better than banquets and jousts is to sit and contemplate how such a peaceful spot played a role in the gore and splatter of competitive English kingship.

  Does anything epitomise the struggles for control of land, people and wealth like the stark and bleak ruins of the fortified houses, or pele towers, dotted across the Scottish borders? Nothing to be seen for miles but hills and sheep but you locked yourself up in a stone tower before you went to bed. The one above is at Bewcastle, but there are many others, visual reminders of troubled times at least as eloquent as the chronicles that described them.

  "Why" said the family medievalist "are we standing in the middle of a field looking at a small pile of rocks stuck together on top of one another?" Well, Leland described it as a large manor house of the Percies. "But it's not here!" Nope. It is not. The manor house of Seamer is not there. But you can still see it if you try.

What's With Medieval Tombs? Part 11 - The Aesthetics of Armour

  Tombs were functional objects. They had a job to do and to do that job they had to look good. Whether that job was to inspire the congregations to effusions of piety to help the departed in the afterlife, or to emphasise the worldly significance of the commemorated, and his heirs, within their community, the tombs had to be impressive and pleasing to the eye.
  The tombs of knights, as we have mentioned before, always displayed the latest in armour and military accoutrements. It was part of the code. During the period when effigy tombs were in their heyday, the nature of armour and military equipment was changing rapidly. Some of this was no doubt entirely practical as techniques of warfare changed. Armour became more defensive. Some of it may also relate to other changes discussed in earlier posts: competitive social stratification exemplified in tomb fashions themselves, heraldry, eating, clothing, architecture and status markers in general.
  When large military effigies started appearing in the 13th and early 14th centuries, that standard suit of armour for the knightly classes was a full suit of chain mail, over which was worn a long floppy surcoat. This was supposedly a practical measure developed for the Crusades, with the surcoat keeping off the beating sun and useful for displaying the sign of the cross so that the travelling crusader was not mistaken for a vagabond and treated accordingly.

  The above image is drawn after an image in a late 12th century manuscript from Bavaria in the Vatican library and depicts Friedrich Barbarossa as a crusader, identified as such by the large cross on his shield and surcoat. The crusader outfit exemplified the active life as a road to virtue and salvation (a bit of political self-justification, I fear, on the part of Western Christianity), so the depiction of a recently deceased in active, crusading mode was probably yet another reminder of liminality, purgatory and the process of getting the dead to their eternal reward, which I have been banging on about incessantly.

  Two early 14th century examples in Exeter Cathedral  show the energetic style of chain mail knightly effigies. Their legs are crossed in an active way, suggesting stress and motion. Their torsos are twisted as they grab for their sword handles. Their heads are covered with their chain mail hoods, ready for battle, not uncovered in prayer. They are in action.
  The fact that they are crosslegged and in fighting mood does not mean that they were actually crusaders. It's one of the many literalisations of metaphor found in medieval art. All these iconographic signs embody an idea; a concept of the active Christian life. So get praying, people, and help these boys on their way. Same old message.

  There is also something rather masculine and macho and, well, sexy about this imaging. The surcoat drapes open to show a bit of leg. The figure is lying down but in an energetic mode. There are lions and other tough beasties around the figure. It is a fully three dimensional sculptural entity in which totality of form, the shape and movement, define the entity. The picture above is an odd angle on the figures of a 13th century knight and lady from Bedale, Yorkshire but it shows what I mean.

  The imagery also translates into two dimensions, as in this brass to Sir Robert de Septvans from Chartham in Kent. He still has the active stance, but his head is bared (as it is in the Bedale tomb above but you can't see it from that angle) and his hands are in prayer. His armour and sword belt are meticulously portrayed. I don't know whether men of that time actually wore their hair in bouffant curls, but they were always drawn that way. It comes across as as a sort of androgynous tough image that was much drawn upon by the pre-Raphaelites.

  This effigy in East Harlsey church, Yorkshire, shows this style of effigy in three dimensions. The legs are still crossed, the drapery still cascades open, but the pose is more restful, although alert, the head is bare and the hands are in prayer. It is not a picture of a corpse. The figure has life and is fully sculptural. If the stone that the figure was carved from is fine grained, then the most precise details of the armour and accoutrements can still be seen, even though the colouring which was once on these figures has disappeared. They have been much studied by re-enactment enthusiasts.

  If the underlying stone is coarse, the detailing may have been added by surface treatment, such as covering the effigy in gesso and imprinting designs before colouring it. The detail may have become lost, especially if it has been out in the weather as appears to be the case with this knight from Routh, Yorkshire, but the underlying vigorous sculptural form is still there. These figures still have character, even in very damaged state.

  Even an elegant looking tomb may lack surface detail. There is no depiction of the actual mail on what survives if this effigy from Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire, but it is most likely that it had surface treatment and colouring in its original form. He still cuts a striking figure.

  Wooden effigies were even more dependent on the surface treatment for their detailing, and this was highly destructible. These two wooden effigies from Allerton Mauleverer church in Yorkshire are little more than cores, lacking intricate surface detail, but they still display the distinctive general shape of the two styles of crosslegged knightly effigies. The one in the foreground holds his shield and reaches for his sword in a twisted pose; that in the background lies reposefully with his hands in prayer.
  I suspect that it is the underlying aesthetic quality of the form of these early knightly effigies that has help preserve many of them that are actually in quite poor condition. Even if they have been out in the rain, buried underground in the churchyard or upside down under the floor, they have retained a striking presence. They are the essence of medieval romantic.

  Towards the mid 14th century, armour began to change from mail to plate. Initially the process essentially involved adding plate protection to the arms and legs as well as helmets. These things all have technical names but we won't worry too much about that here. The surcoats, or jupons, became shorter and just covered the mail shirt. I guess it's hard to cross your legs while wearing plate armour on them, and probably difficult to depict it convincingly. Crosslegged knightly effigies disappeared.
  There was a tendency at this stage to depict figures, in manuscript paintings and in sculptures, in mannered poses with a sinuous body shape. I'm sure that people didn't actually walk around like that; they just drew them that way. The tomb effigies, like the one from Bedale in Yorkshire above, retained this lively curve through the body in a relaxed, supine position.

  The brass of a 14th century knight in Aldborough church, Yorkshire, displays that little mincing flick of the hips along with some wicked brass studs on his legs. Shields had also become shorter, allowing that bit of body wiggle to be displayed.

  By the end of the 14th and early 15th century plate armour extended from neck to toe, with only the aventail hanging from the helmet over the shoulders being made of mail. This forced the whole body into a rigid posture. The shape of the torso was defined less by the shape of the human form inside and more by the awkward and exaggerated outlines of the body armour. The example above is from Swine in Yorkshire, and has lost its arms, which shows the narrow waist and bulging thorax imposed on the chap by his armour. They were not done this way because the carvers had forgotten how to depict the human form, but because they were basically depicting a suit of armour.

  By the time that the neck was also encased in plate, the poor knight was stranded on his back like an inverted turtle. The only bit of human being visible is generally the face and the whole depiction, including the tough, droopy moustache, has become very stereotyped. I blame the Black Prince, or at least the makers of his tomb. In the above example from Chichester Cathedral the knight and his lady are depicted holding hands, a rather sweet gesture sometimes found on three dimensional tombs and brasses of this era. The lady's body is slightly turned in order to reach her encased husband.

  This era of plate armour coincided with the increasing use of alabaster for tombs, a relatively soft, fine grained stone that allowed to the carving of intricate detail. The effigies may have lost their colouring, but the detail survives as it was not dependent upon surface treatment. The above example is one of several from Harewood in Yorkshire. Sword belts were chunky but elaborately detailed. The articulated fingers of his gauntlets are carefully displayed. His SS livery collar is a particularly fancy one. The band around his helmet is detailed and his head rests on a lifelike depiction of his crest, a horse's head. Rather than being a sculptural and lively depiction of the human form, it has become a stiff and stereotyped shape, based on a suit of plate armour, in which many messages can be encoded through the complexity of the surface adornment.

  Nonetheless the figures could exude a certain rugged masculinity, whether depicted in stone, alabaster or brass, as in this rubbing of a brass effigy from Harpham, Yorkshire. The only problem with the brasses is it always looks as if their spurs are tangled up.

  By the later 15th century the armour itself was becoming fiddly and complicated, with multiple hinged and jointed plates and extra protective pieces. The figures really look like a depiction of the latest military technology rather than something that relates to a former human being. The proportions are starting to look a bit drastic as well. Can you really fit the waist of a burly knight into that tightly cinched shape? Victorian ladies' corsets had nothing on it. This alabaster figure is from Halsham in Yorkshire. And yes, he is lying on somebody else's tomb slab with a brass indent in it. Something else for another day.

  Encase the head in the late 15th century fashionable salade helmet, as on this tomb from Beaumaris in Wales, and you have something rather like a medieval robot. The material is beautiful and the detail is intricate, but the sculptural form is stereotyped and inelegant.

  A trend of about this time, particularly noticeable in brasses, was the exaggeration of certain features of the armour. Yes, they did have heavier duty protection for their shoulders and elbows, but this depiction from Howden church in Yorkshire makes them look enormous and somewhat unworkable. The cinched in waist is so tight the poor chap would have been unable to breathe, let alone clobber people. His pointed footwear in peculiarly long. And yes, his spurs are tangled together. But I guess he's quite a handsome bloke, in a slightly anatomically peculiar kind of way. He doesn't look like he is about to fight his way through the heathen in the active Christian life; more like those ceremonial suits of armour propped up in the castle hall.

  This fellow, an early 16th century depiction from Roxby in Yorkshire, shows much the same characteristics of armour and anatomical disproportion. This difference is he is plain plug ugly. One does suspect that the crafters of brasses had become less skilful in their art.
  Once you get to post-Reformation monuments, many human figures were depicted, not in the reposeful, liminal, supine posture but as if they were alive; resting on one elbow or kneeling at a prayer desk. Try doing that in a suit of armour. The sculptors seem to have given up on any attempt at gracefulness or movement and the figures are as rigid as sticks and look very uncomfortable.
  Are these changes in depiction anything other than vagaries of fashion? It seems that there is a changing conception, from the depiction of a knightly ideal with generic qualities of virtue displayed through the active life, to the concept of an inanimate symbolic object, the suit of armour, adorned with surface objects that signify the subject's identity, affiliations and status. Both can be aesthetically pleasing, but in different ways. The earlier figures have their bold, lively forms; the later ones their delicacy and intricacy of detail.
  Neither style survives in their original form. Loss of gesso and paint and gilding, loss of detail and colour means they are pale shadows of their former selves. They have been scrubbed back to later centuries' concept of proper mortuary sculpture. Nevertheless they have certain aesthetic characteristics which have caused them to be preserved, because in their decay they are beautiful.

Preservation of Books or Texts?

  I have recently resigned from a charity volunteer position which involved selling secondhand books for fundraising for a valuable cause. Never mind why. Charities do occasionally go through phases of losing their sense of direction. Suffice to say I might have a bit more time for medieval books and paleography now, with fewer big gaps between postings. And yes, I have found another good cause to devote some time to, but which might not eat up my whole life.
  The secondhand books are all donated by the public and sold at several huge bookfairs each year. The time in between was filled with sorting, pricing, processing and packing for the next blockbuster. People give the charity a helluva lot of books. Why? Because they are getting rid of them. They are downsizing, their parents have died, their kids have left home, they have bought e-readers or some other reason. Secondhand book dealers are becoming progressively more rare, don't want to buy big collections and their only alternative is to send the lot to paper recycling.

  The oversupply means that a significant proportion of the books end up in paper recycling anyway. Sometimes they are in ratty condition and frequently they are titles which appear in such numbers that they could not possibly all be sold at the bookfairs. The recycling hopper was at one time euphemistically referred to as the Dan Brown file. Sometimes there are strange old books that nobody wants to buy and you wonder if they should be preserved as historical curiosities.
  Now that so many medieval manuscript books in public collections are appearing in facsimile on the internet, interested folks are becoming aware of just how many of these survive. Of course, we know there have been massive losses as well. Fire, flood and vermin, not to mention deliberate destruction in order to replace dated texts with ones that were deemed to be more correct, all chomped up medieval libraries. Medieval monks and scholars made decisions about preservation and disposal as well.
  Every manuscript book which survives, however, is unique, not only in the decoration and presentation, but in the text. Apart from in liturgical books, the concept of the written content was still rooted in the oral tradition, with change and evolution of the text occurring all the time. This has made lifetime careers for some academics.
  With printed books, every example from a given edition is identical, and some books, whether modern bestsellers or older classics, have been printed in gazillions of copies over the years. There is a question of how much we should worry about the destruction of these identical industrial artifacts. Is it important to preserve the physical objects, or should we only worry about conserving the texts? There is a collectors' market which gets all excited and splashes money about for rare editions, but is this a reader's interest or merely an investor's ploy?
  The book will never die. There is too much pleasure in grabbing a favourite off the shelf and thumbing through it. But when I depart for the great library in the sky, somebody will sort through my eccentric collection and select what to keep and what to dump. Most unscientific. And you never know, one day Sotheby's might just sell the last ratty paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code.

Manuscripts and Naked Hands

  It's been a long time between drinks, But hopefully I can get back on the airwaves again. Well sometimes reality interferes with your cyberlife.
  I was intrigued by the latest newsletter from e-codices, the totally fantastic and amazing manuscript website from Switzerland which not only lets you look at a vast array of medieval manuscripts in great detail, but allows others to use them through a Creative Commons licence. Truly sharing our cultural heritage. But this item was a little intriguing.
  The ultimate iconic image of a manuscript researcher has long involved a pair of white gloves. This is supposed to show how much we care for the conservation of the precious artifacts that we are handling. Valuable manuscripts and white gloves; like bread and butter, horse and cart, love and marriage (well, perhaps that last is a dated reference). Now the conservators of Switzerland are telling us that it is actually a bad thing to wear gloves while handling manuscripts, as it reduces the sensitivity of the fingers, thereby making it more likely that the manuscript might be damaged. As well, dirt and muck from manuscripts is actually transferred to the white gloves and can be spread to other items. Just regularly wash your hands, they say - just like doctors and nurses.
  This opinion is corroborated by no less an institution than the British Library, as described in a blog posting. It seems the white gloves thing is just a bit of spin. Mind you, I have experienced the difficulties of this many years ago, when attempting to photograph a medieval manuscript in a library where they insisted on white gloves, but I was unable to work the camera with them on. A compromise deal had to be worked out in which one person wore the white gloves and turned the pages and I took the pictures, promising not to touch the manuscript. Funny thing is, it was a book of hours, which had probably been handled every day with naked fingers in the course of somebody's daily devotions.
  Those people who work with the less luxurious class of manuscripts, such as legal documents, often prefer to wear white gloves because the things are so filthy that otherwise they get muck all over their hands. There is something a little bit worrying about medieval grime.
  Anyway, having broken the ice, I will see if I can get back to some work on Medieval Writing. A diligent user has found a couple of minor typos in my transcripts, so I had better start with those and then progress to something new.

What Not To Do with Your Manuscripts

  Latest additions to the site include a small expansion to the section on Handling Manuscripts, having come across some more little bits that have been mishandled.

  Take a look at these two images and try to work out what has been going on here, before going to the website to find out. Then when you have found out, do not do it to any little treasures of your own.
  I have also made a slow new beginning to the process of updating the graphics and formatting in the Script Samples section, having made a start on protogothic documents.

Hard Drive, Catastrophe-Proof Bunker or Peat Bog?

   A couple of interesting items have appeared in the news this week relating to the interests of the people who frequent this blog. The first is that the Internet Archive is setting up a facility to preserve paper books that they have digitised. This relates to some issues covered in the posting Reprise on Google, e-Books, Copyright and All That Jazz. The idea is to have one copy of everything they can get their hands on, not for regular consultation, but as a "seed bank" if needed to check or resurrect digital copies. Take a look at the original article by Brewster Kahle Why Preserve Books? The New Physical Archive of the Internet Archive. There has already been considerable commentary on this posting and some on other blogs, some of it thoughtful, some of it a little nutty. I was slightly intrigued by the putative author who thought that archiving his book would be a breach of copyright. It's going to get a bit rough when authors come knocking on your door to see what you have done with their books.
   It was also of interest to note that the Internet Archive preserves old hard drives which contain digitised material, as well as microfilms. Somewhere along the line, I guess we will find out which of these media survives the best.
   The process was evidently inspired by hearing that some libraries were culling their collections after books had been digitised by Google. Now libraries have always culled, but I guess there might be a critical mass developing out there. It is about one good generation since a huge expansion in universities, and their libraries, and there is an ongoing expansion in the number of books, as well as journals, published. We are rarely presented with the definitive work on any subject these days. Decisions must be made about what to preserve and how to preserve it, and we all have our favourite causes. Trashing perfectly good old books always seems like murder. I mean, maybe everybody threw out their copy of A User's Guide to CP/M, like I did not so long ago.
   Meanwhile, in Dublin, the National Museum has just put on display an 8th century psalter found in a peat bog in 2006 and finally conserved so that it can be displayed. The museum has an article on the find and its conservation The Faddan More Psalter. Click on the PDF file link for more information on the conservation and some photographs. The Independent has an article about the item going on display Public gets first look at ancient book of psalms. Now while it seems that a peat bog is not the ideal conservation medium for ancient books, it is better than a damp cellar, inflammable library or bug ridden attic. The book is severely damaged, but it is still there and evidence for ancient Irish written culture. But why was it in a peat bog at all? Is it possible that it may have been culled from a monastic library centuries ago???
   There is a story that Gerald of Wales, the 12th century cleric and traveller through Britain's Celtic realms, saw the Book of Kells. He certainly saw and described an ancient book which he admired, but nothing about it suggests that it was the Books of Kells. Rare finds like this latest remind us that there were many wondrous things that have been lost.

Books Real and Virtual

A recent story from BBC News has indicated that the Italian government is working with Google to digitise huge numbers of ancient books, pointing out that this means that the works will be conserved forever (??!), citing the example of thousands of rare books that were lost in the Florence floods of 1966. Digitising of whole books has been going on in the manuscript world for some time, in a somewhat lurching and uneven way, but the whole process reminds us that conservation and preservation itself has a finite, but ongoing, history.

This is really the conservation of the idea of books, rather than simply the conservation of objects which happen to be books. The antiquarians and collectors who rescued (or stole) manuscript books from monastic libraries, either those rendered redundant by the Reformation in England and other Protestant countries, or those left somewhat neglected in Catholic countries like France, were preserving beautiful and interesting old objects from a disappearing past. The regathering of these, and much other archival material, into formal government repositories, was also largely a conservation of objects. Now the libraries and archives are bursting with vast numbers of manuscript books, documents and early printings, and the conservation of these as objects, as well as the ability to make them accessible to those people who may find them interesting, is a huge logistical and financial issue.

Perhaps preservation of cultural heritage has actually advanced in its own history, and we are not so much in a collecting of objects phase, but an understanding of the ideas behind them, which requires conserving bodies to make those objects accessible to as many interested parties as possible, to allow those ideas to be explored. The idea of books has been kicking around academialand for some time, of course, and there have been whole conferences on the subject. But the attitude of galleries, museums and heritage libraries has tended to be cautious, and it can be hard to shake remnants of the mindset of jealous hoarding of objects.

There is nothing like the look and feel of the real thing , of course, but perhaps we need to be less excitable about finding new stuff, and more engaged with understanding a bit more about the stuff we have already got.