Bored with Gothic? Try This.

  This week's update to the graphics in Medieval Writing is for a script sample and paleography exercise of Beneventan script, as expressed in an 11th century Exultet Roll. It is quite fascinating for a number of reasons. First, the script is, like insular minuscule, one which defiantly held up its head and continued when all around were going Carolingian. Unlike insular minuscule, I find it hard to read, but maybe that's my smidgen of Irish ancestry coming in. The letter forms and ligatures that characterised the pre-Carolingian scripts of Europe have become very loopy and mannered. Looks pretty but is a bit hard to untangle, unlike the logical structure of insular minuscule. Can I say that without starting a pre-Carolingian script war?

  The second interesting feature is the form of the manuscript, which is unlike anything in the Anglo-French medieval tradition. Yes, they had rolls for various purposes, but the exultet rolls from Italy were designed in a unique form for a particular purpose. They were the text for the deacon to sing at the Easter ceremony for the consecration of the Paschal candle. The roll was placed over the lectern, so the audience could see the relevant pictures as the deacon sang the passages. Does this drop us a hint at the capacity, or lack thereof, of the laity to actually understand church Latin in the wild? This means that the pictures were upside down in relation to the text, and slightly offset from the particular passage. I think that makes it a kind of medieval Powerpoint presentation.
  The text addresses the usual concerns of Easter, the major church feast of the medieval calendar. A particularly delightful touch is the song of praise for the bees which made the wax for the Paschal candles, accompanied by a rural scene of beekeeping. Nice to think of insects getting a bit of medieval love.
  The other fabulous thing about this example is that the British Library has digitised the entire manuscript here. Once you have a handle on the script, it is well worthwhile to have a lingering examination of the whole thing. Just wish the British Library had put a 180 deg. revolve button on their images so we didn't have to keep standing on our heads in front of the computer screen to see the images properly. Hey, British Library, we love what you are doing these days, and we appreciate your letting us use the results.
  I realised when I was doing this update that I had intended years ago to include an example of early Beneventan or Lombardic. Must see if I can find one with a spiffy colour graphic, rather than the grungy old scan from an ancient paleography book that I had earmarked. All these lovely new resources make for more work, but we are all loving it.

Irish Gospels

  The task of updating graphic in Medieval Writing grinds relentlessly on as a result of the generosity of the British Library in making their colour images available for mere mortals like me to use. The latest update is an example of insular minuscule from the 12th century Irish Gospels of Maelbrigte. The sample includes a nifty initial with beasties and comes with a script example and paleography exercise.
  The passage is one of my favourites from the Vulgate Bible, the beginning of the Gospel of St John. I guess I like it because it seems to be a massive word play in which sentences and phrases hook together like links in a chain, repeating something of the previous expression while introducing a new concept, which is in turn linked back. This is unusual as the structure of the gospels texts is generally plain narrative, although John does have some repeating tag lines for emphasis, like the one which appears in the King James version as "Verily I say unto you ..." I just wonder how this particular passage got there and why.
  Insular minuscule is also my favourite script, partly because of its uniqueness and elegance, and partly because it proudly flew its flag for centuries when all of continental Europe was going all boring and Carolingian. OK, some folks say that makes it hard to read, but it isn't really. It just has its own code. It's really quite consistent and logical within itself. Enjoy it.

Colophons and Marginalia and All That

  I love beautiful medieval illuminations as much as the next time travelling aesthete, but I have always had a fascination for the words. Perhaps even more interesting than the words of the main text, which earnest scholars have translated, edited and argued over for decades, are the extra words which scribes have added in margins, between lines, on flyleaves and at the ends of texts. The little personal prayers that are added into blank spaces in professionally produced books of hours add individuality, even if they are scratched on to the page in less than calligraphic style. They can give you a little peek at how the book was used and regarded by the folks who owned it, wrote it or read it hundreds of years ago.
  This has become something of a fashion in paleographical and codicological studies these days. Scholarly tomes have been written on the subject and there is a website, Annotated Books Online, which provides digital facsimiles of mostly early printed books with handwritten annotations.
  This is why I used the colophon from the Lindisfarne Gospels as an example of insular minuscule writing in Medieval Writing. The graphics for that exercise have now been upgraded courtesy of downloaded colour images from the British Library, where all pages of that historic work are now online.

  So why did Aldred, scribe of the gloss, describe himself as an unworthy and most miserable priest? Was it a polite conventionality, or was he truly in awe of the mighty work which had been produced a couple of centuries before? Can you imagine him standing before the abbot jabbering, "What! You want me to write all over this! Are you kidding? Oh dear Lord I am so miserable and unworthy." OK, so I am getting a little imaginative here, but somehow it makes it all a little more human.

Updated Graphics - Again

  Some years ago, when the British Library put up their Turning the Pages digital display for a few of their very finest treasures, I discovered that there were people who thought that the Lindisfarne Gospels was a picture book and that it contained about seventeen pages. I guess my interest in paleography grew partly out of a passion for the words in books. Medieval manuscripts, for all the elegance and beauty of their illustrations in many cases, are still verbal narratives. 
   But they can still look gorgeous. I have updated the images in Medieval Writing for the script example and paleography exercise for the insular half uncial of the Lindisfarne Gospels with new colour images courtesy of the British Library, which now has a full digital facsimile with no turning pages, but all of them displayed.
  While my wee sample is basically about the letter forms, nonetheless the spiffy dragon initial looks awesome in living colour.

Manuscripts and Stained Glass

  It may be giving me a split personality, but I have been dividing my medieval time (I do have other time!) between updating things, mainly links right now, on Medieval Writing and trying to organise my humungous photographic project on Flickr. I am battling my way through a whole swag of pictures of stained glass at the moment, which has prompted a few thoughts. Dangerous.
  The pictures were all taken under urban guerilla conditions, and so are not as detailed, perfect in colour, crispness and verticality as those ones which appear in beautiful art books, but they probably give a better impression of what people, medieval or other, actually saw. That leads to a few thoughts on their function. The traditional take on this is that they were essentially didactic, providing lessons to the illiterate. Hmmm.
  The first time I visited Chartres cathedral, I thought initially it must not be open to visitors as it was pitch dark inside. Then it became apparent that there were people in there, and my husband and myself were both mystified as to why there were no lights on. It was a very bright day outside and we had to stand for about 15 minutes until our eyes adjusted before we dared tackle navigating around. And then something extraordinary happened. The whole place just started to shimmer with colour, constantly changing as the light changed behind the heavily coloured 13th century windows. It looked nothing like a picture in a book, but one can only imagine the impression on the citizens of medieval Chartres, which was probably as dingy and smelly as most medieval cities outside the cloisters. Add all the colour and gold which has been scrubbed off the interiors of medieval churches in modern times and the whole impression must have been dark and colourful, shiny and aromatic, and alive; maybe a glimpse of Paradise.

  See, a photograph just doesn't do it. It just sits there. In the building, all the little figures and scenes tend to dissolve in a shimmer of moving colour. Of course, by the 15th century stained glass had got bigger and bolder and lighter and easier to resolve, but then the populace had become more literate as well.

  The illustrations in manuscript books are right there in front of the reader, able to be interpreted in all their complexity. For modern viewers, they have generally weathered the test of time better as well, not dissolving into confused fragments with repeated repairs to the windows. The owners of manuscript books were not, of course, the poor people, and probably at least a bit literate, even if the pictures were more informative to them than the black scratches on the pages.

  No doubt the windows were reminders of the lessons learned aurally, but somehow I just can't see the illiterate townsmen and women screwing up their eyes to try to follow the narrative sequences in tiny little roundels and matching up the types with the anti-types fifty feet above the floor. There just has to be a little mystery.

Updating Links Again

  I have just had another all too infrequent run through updating links, this time on the Complete Digital Facsimiles page of Medieval Writing. You know, I think Titivullus has got a new profession collecting error 404s. There's a thought for a medievalist cartoonist.
  I haven't attempted to duplicate the mighty collection now accessible through Sexy Codicology. Go there too and you will find more wonders.
  Think I'll have a little rest now and go back to processing pretty pictures of stained glass for my unlikely to ever end Flickr project.

More Updated Graphics - Rustic Capitals

  Creeping along updating some of the Medieval Writing graphics with fancy colour images downloaded from the British Library, we now have amazingly improved visuals for rustic capitals script. The page is unusual in that it uses this script, more commonly used for headings, for the whole page, and there are some unusual features of script formatting. While mostly they just wrote in horizontal lines in more or less continuous form, sometimes the scribes just cut loose. Check out the paleography exercise to see what I mean.

Online Paleography

  I have just done one of my all too infrequent updates on the Paleography Links page of Medieval Writing. Unfortunately there seem to be more sites that have disappeared than new ones appearing. Spain and Italy in particular seem to have virtually disappeared off the paleography map. Some of the survivors are also looking a little elderly and forgotten as well. It has been pointed out before that production of online material has never been given its full regard in academic circles, and many working academics have abandoned their projects to get on with the dreaded peer reviewed olde worlde steam driven print publications in order to survive and progress.
  It is kind of flattering to find Medieval Writing at the top of some lists of paleographical resources, but a little alarming as I am not actually a professional paleographer, more a new media facilitator with an education, and I have not been able to update the site at anything like the speed I would like to. There is much weeping and wailing about the lack of interest by governments in the promotion of the humanities, but providing good quality resources for them in the media where everybody plays these days is probably a better bet than anything that governments can do.
  The latest development in manuscript studies in the media seems to involve the ever increasing provision by libraries and archives of digital facsimiles which are freely available for anyone to use. This is a wonderful thing and to be applauded mightily. Check out Sexy Codicology to find out where to find them all. Cheers to Giulio, the busiest man on the medieval internet.
  Perhaps when we have all stopped drooling over the pretty pictures that we have not been able to admire before, interest may be revived in discovering what these manuscripts are all about, and that involves being able to read them. Sure, there are intricate and erudite studies being produced in English literature departments, but they surely have a broader appeal to those interested in our history.
  OK, now which one of you pinched the steps to my soapbox? I want to get down now.

Addendum: A couple of links on Spanish paleography have been added. Thanks to Ainoa Castro ‏@ainoa_castro on Twitter.

A Leetle Progress

  The images on another British Library manuscript in Medieval Writing have been updated, courtesy of their wonderful website. These include examples of uncial and insular minuscule scripts, and a paleography exercise. It is now seven o'clock in the evening and 37 deg. C., so I think I will now sit down in the bath with a cold beer and a warm sense of satisfaction. One has to set limited and realistic goals in this weather.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

  We are sweltering in a long, long hot spell down here in Oz right now; too hot to be doing thinky things like paleography. So I have embarked on the Great Flickr Project to put all my medieval photographs somewhere in cyberspace, caption and annotate them, organise them into something coherent and useful, and perhaps revive some of my old projects on medieval visual culture. I mean, how hard is it? It's just a bit of digital image jiggerypokery, updating my ever so complete database, doing a bit of sorting and recataloguing, and lo and behold, I will have a smorgasbord of medieval feastery  to play with. Easy peasy.
  The photographs, mainly from Britain but also some from the Continent, were taken during the course of a number of extended visits over the years, but all in the days before digital photography was a goer. I had a reasonably good SLR kit, but it was really urban guerilla photography. Certain sites banned tripods and/or flash and sometimes you had to be pretty quick on your feet. I used slide film, so what was in the box was what was in the box.
  They have been digitised and databased over the years, so I know what they all are (mostly), but they are in totally random order, batched in folders of around 100 images because that was what you could put on a CD-ROM. Coherent sets of images are scattered all over the place, but that doesn't matter because I've got a database, you see.
  It's been great fun upgrading the quality of the images to compensate for having to take the original photographs in a variety of bodgy lighting conditions, trying to do long exposures by bracing myself against a pillar with my shoulders, with knees bent and elbows tucked in. I'm sure some church and castle visitors thought I was practising some strange antipodean form of yoga. But the results give some satisfaction. I can even correct those ones where I slightly lost my sense of verticality. Terrible temptation to sit fiddling with the digital dials to just get it a little bit better.
  Of course, the database isn't quite as comprehensive and detailed as it might be. That means some time spent googling around to get more information. The pictures were taken some years ago, and things have happened. Discovered to my horror that one church I had visited had completely burned out not long afterwards. A quick check of stats says I have over 5500 images in my database, not all of which are mine but mostly. I have currently uploaded 140 and used 0.00053% of my allowed 1 terabyte of Flickr. So far they are all of misericords and other bits of church woodwork. I gotta work faster!

  Meanwhile, does anybody recognise this dude? Not all databases are perfect. Check out here every so often and see how I'm getting along. Maybe the paleography would be easier after all.

Painful Progress

  As promised, I am working, excruciatingly slowly, on replacing older graphics in Medieval Writing with better ones, with especial thanks to the British Library for allowing their high quality colour images to be freely used. Some of the images in the first paleography exercise for uncial script have now been updated. Unfortunately it makes some of the other old black and white bits and pieces in the exercise look even worse. Can't win.
  I will try to split my time between this project and my blockbuster epic Flickr project to not only display, but organise, my medieval photographs. That may take a day or two.

Little Scribal Thingamajig

    We all love our little medieval depictions of scribes. Somehow it connects us to the letters they wrote on those dead sheep and cows. I recently received an email from one Bob Green of London with a link to a depiction of a scribe in an unusual medium. At least, it's an unusual medium to be surviving today, being a small metal object that was found through metal detecting. People did lose the oddest things in the past.
  Take a look at it here. Objects like this not only show us what scribes looked like or what equipment they used, they give a hint at the value of the work they did. I'm not expecting anyone to commemorate anything I do in silver gilt any time soon.
  Thanks for sharing that with us Bob.

New Technology - Luv It, But ...

  Starting many many years ago, I made periodic excursions around England and parts of Europe photographing medieval stuff. This was originally to provide teaching materials for the family medievalist who liked lots of visuals in his lectures and tutorials. In those days, photographs were made on little strips of transparent material. You got it right in the camera or it was no good. Heaven knows what I thought I was going to do with about 5000 of the things.
  I crawled under pews, got very good at bracing myself for long exposures in places where you weren't allowed to use flash and found strange and wondrous things in dusty places behind the organ.
  The only trouble with those little strips of transparent material is that they go off, even with the best of care. Over a number of years, once the technology was available, we got them digitised. First professionally, then I did them myself. I stored them on CDs, because that was the way of the future. Then the word got out that CDs are not archival, so I copied them all on to the biggest plugin hard drive I could find. I think it was 300 gig at the time. Then the cloud came into being so they all got copied again to Dropbox. Surely they're safe now.
  Fortunately I entered all the information into a database as I went, at least the most important bits of information, or all would be at sea by now. But somehow I still had a great unsorted mass of images from which the odd few have been plucked for various purposes.
  I have just discovered Flickr. Kid in a lolly shop. They can be re-archived in the great fluffy mass in the sky, annotated, organised into sets and collections, marked on a Google map and shared with whoever is interested. Only trouble is I think I'm going to have to live to be 150 to get through all the work of it. And I did promise to do some more paleography as well. And I've got all those photographs of art and artifacts from Borneo from my PhD days, and the old family photos that were given to me that are all jumbled up in a box. I better eat my veggies and get some exercise. It's gonna be a long old age.
  Have a squizz at http://www.flickr.com/photos/114756006@N06/. There are just a few pictures of misericords there right now, but that's only the beginning. Watch this space.

New Year's Resolution, Right

  Since trying to get my real life / cyberlife balance a bit more in synch, I can hopefully get back to a bit more medieval paleography and beaut stuff like that. I hereby promise that I will spend less time scrolling through amusing pictures of anthropomorphic rabbits and the like in digitised medieval manuscripts on Twitter, and more time on using some of these ever increasing resources to do something useful, if perhaps less entertaining.
  Making a start I have replaced one (Yes one, count it) old black and white British Library image of uncial script with a colour image downloaded from their website with the marvellous new provisions that you can play with it however you like. No bunnies or exquisite Virgins, but much more real and lifelike image of the text. I will proceed from here.
  Now I just have to think about what to do about those now grotty old Flash exercises with the crappy photographic reproduction. Do I just do them all over again with my antique version of Flash (which miraculously still actually works) or is there something easier and quicker? Suggestions gratefully received.
  Excelsior!

We Get More Medieval Every Day

  Long, long time ago I put a post on this blog about how a web page is more like a medieval manuscript than like the page of a printed book. The reverse evolution continues. Now a medievalist is telling us that Twitter, and especially live tweeting in conferences, is like the marginal annotations in a medieval manuscript, in the blog In The Middle. I love the notion that modern media are releasing us from the tyranny of the authority of the printed word and taking us back to the chaotic threads of medieval thought.
  I do wonder what some of those stern old academics of yore would have thought about it. You know, the ones whose conference papers were circulated with "Draft only. Not for publication or circulation." printed all over them. Then the book of the conference wouldn't come out for another five years and everyone would have forgotten about it.

That Blog of Geoffrey Chaucer

  My medievalist husband presented me for Christmas with a copy of the book of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog by Brantley L. Bryant (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), now revealed to the world as LeVostreGC himself. The spouse knew I was a great fan of the blog because I used to annoy the hell out of him by reading out all the best bits. He doesn't want to read it now because he says the rest won't be as funny, except for "Margery Kempe at the MLA", which he will read because he is rather fond of old Margery. He thinks the world has given her a tough time. Hmmm.
  Somewhere in this process is embedded some profound concept about the whole changing nature of the written word, from manuscript, through printing to the continually evolving landscape of electronic publication; multimedia, e-books, websites, blogs, Facebook, Tumblr et al and Twitter. I guess we're not finished yet. What is going to be the Next Big Thing for disseminating our words?
  I was a bit disappointed in the book at first because it has some introductory material that is actually serious. The blog itself is very erudite and intellectual, but definitely not serious. But while the reader is cackling away at some bit of nonsense, they can feel they are one-upping the ignorant world with knowledge of some esoteric reference. Classic academic humour.
  The comments to each blog piece are not included. Perhaps there are legal issues relating to copyright here, I don't know, but the comments made the blog a collaborative experience, while reducing it to the work of a single author makes it an authoritative work, as are all printed books (even if they're not). Then (shock, horror) the  author tells us he has edited the entries to remove errors and misfired jokes. So the spontaneity and muddlement of whacking something out on the keyboard and, with devil-may-care enthusiasm, thrusting on to the world with a click of the "publish" button, has been overridden by the editorial process as applied to printed works through the ages.
  And the author is outed. No longer can we wonder "Who the hell is this Geoffrey Chaucer bloke?" as we giggle over his cockeyed view of the world. The author himself asserts that this is partly due to "the expectations of print publication", so the reins of past technology are still attached to the bridle. Authority, editorial correctness and identity, as opposed to spontaneity, collaboration and deliberate anonymity. Bugger. And I was hoping to publish my outrageous novel about the workings of a charity book warehouse under the nom de plume Hipster Bookfairy. But hang on, authors of the past have had nom de plumes (noms de plume, noms de plumes, whatever). What is the rule? Does it have to be a proper nom, but not a nom that already belongs to somebody else particularly if they are dead, famous, or both? It does rather spoil the fantasy of the joke.
  Finally, it naturally has an end. There are postings on the blog that postdate the publication of the book, and while they may be getting sparser in quantity as the author has acquired a career and a life, they are just as good a read. And there is always the hope that there is another beauty still in the offing. Still, it is there in that ready reference, flip-the-pages form and I can have a giggle and hoot at Margery, or King Richard II's rider, or the purported lascivious doings at Kalamazoo, whenever the urge strikes. And if the entire internet suddenly goes foofoo for unexpected reasons, there will still be a reminder of what was in one little corner of it.
  Returning to some of the more serious discussion, Chapter 4 of the book is an article by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen entitled "Blogging the Middle Ages", which briefly discusses the history of blogs and other internet media in medieval studies. He notes that pioneers of the internet in medieval studies did not receive the same kind of recognition for their work as those who put printed ink on paper, and many fine pioneering medieval websites have either languished or disappeared as their authors have moved to other positions or projects.
  Been there, done that. When the medievalist spouse and myself were working on multimedia projects in the mid 1990s, the august  university we were working from was only interested in the production of educational product that could be sold to make money for the university. Never mind about continuity, development, posterity or the minor detail that they weren't actually paying me to work on the project. That is why everything out there with my name on it flies proudly with the banner "independent scholar". An awful lot of effort and brainpower was wasted in those early days on the internet because senior academics spent their time trying to pretend it wasn't happening while the pioneers made the history books (or blogs?) but not the professorships.
  The succession of internet technologies that has occurred does not need to obliterate previous work, as each type of technology serves a different purpose. Ye olde webbsitte is still the best place to build a complex and structured teaching environment. A blog makes a great journal for announcement or opinionated ranting (didja notice?), but its archiving features mean it can have relevance over an extended period. I am amazed from my blog stats that people keep reading old blog posts. Facebook is great for building networks of the like minded, and Twitter is fine for catching people's attention and pointing to more wordy publications.
  I am a little intrigued by the compilation sites like Tumblr and Pinterest, which seem to churn the contents of the internet around like a washing machine without necessarily adding much in the way of content, but I guess we will find creative ways of using it in time. After all, people initially used Twitter to announce to the world what they were eating for lunch. I have a sneaking suspicion that there are some committed souls out there who are using the above to ensure that stuff released as Creative Commons gets dispersed all around and truly becomes the commons before some bureaucrat changes their mind.
  What we need to do now is convince the dinosaurs that this can be real academic work. And it's got to be OK to have a laugh. Keep on bloggin' LeVostreGC.

Blockbuster Epic Resource for Paleographers and Historians

  Medieval Latin can be a cantankerous beast. Now the ultimate resource is available to tame it, especially for those who are scholars of texts from England. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS) is a British Academy research project at the University of Oxford, and it is now published, having been one hundred years in the gestation. So you see, good things develop slowly.
  For many of us humble little medieval workers on the periphery of the world, this is a glimmer of hope at this stage. It's an expensive great beast, as you might imagine, and in this world that is tending to regard studies in the humanities as luxuries rather than essentials, you may find it hard to persuade your local library to fork out for one. 
  There are plans for a digital future, although it seems the exact nature of this has not been worked out. It is all part of the increase in accessibility of even the most esoteric resources which will be available when the world works out that not everyone wants or needs to be an IT worker or a manufacturer of better widgets.
  Rock on medieval resources!

Gazumped!

  It had to happen. Some clever person out there has put medieval paleography exercises on to something more modern than ye olde PC. If you want to do your paleography exercises on your iPhone or iPad, there is now an app to do it. Check it out here.
  I'll just crawl back into my dinosaur cave, unless there are still a few old fogies out there whose eyesight is not amenable to medieval handwriting on a small screen. Congrats you guys at Leeds University.

Addendum: also available for Android from Google Play. Will do a review if I can get my head away from my phone for long enough.

Addendum again: sorry, no can do. Even my phone is too prehistoric. Slow down world!

Technology Bites My Bum - Again

  Back in the mid 1990s, Tillotson and Tillotson decided it would be a really good idea to produce some teaching software for medieval history using this newfangled multimedia technology. We thought we produced some pretty hot stuff for a couple of amateurs: amateurs at IT that is. Of course, we all know what happened after that; new operating systems every Thursday, the internet gets useful, then brilliant, development software companies go phut. The Medieval Writing website was the only thing rescued from the wreckage.
  Of course I backed everything up. How dare you suggest otherwise. I have multiple backups on everything from ZIP disks (remember them) to the cloud (just hope it doesn't rain). Only problem is, I have only one antique computer that can run the software I used to create these masterpieces, and it takes up half my study and is showing signs of being about to die.
  Now one of the very good pieces of advice I received at that stage, and dutifully passed on to everyone else, is that you should always keep a copy of the text of whatever you are doing in a simple text format so that it isn't platform dependent. Blush. I now discover that the text material in my multimedia files cannot be exported, or even cut and pasted out without displaying loads of crap code.
  Part of the reason I didn't  do it was because of ideas and experiments in multimedia design. IT gurus assured me that nobody these days would scroll down a page to see what was at the bottom, and that multimedia pages should be designed to fit on the screen. So the text was all broken up into little boxes, some of which popped up out of nowhere when you moused on things and dissolved away when you were finished, or appeared in separate little windows or did any number of those dinky little multimedia things which are SOOO 1990s. That also means I can't just print if off. And now everybody happily scrolls down web pages without having a nervous breakdown about it.
  I once wrote a blog posting about how web pages are more like medieval manuscripts than the pages of printed books, but now I find myself regressing in a less delightful way, copy typing madly like an old fashioned office slave in a typing pool, trying to beat that sneaky red stain which is creeping into the corner of my old CRT monitor and hoping that checksum error on bootup will allow me to ignore it for a bit longer.

  And there's a sample screenshot in all its glory, complete with clunky buttons, 256 colour graphics, popup subheadings on mouseover and navigation buttons all over the place, not to mention a strictly rectangular design that fits even on ye olde 800 x 600 screen (or whatever it was back then). Pity you can't hear the spasm of Gregorian chant that plays while you contemplate which button to push. Only the Glossary has so far made it to the web.

  Hope you scrolled down for a look at it.

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.