Cutting Up Manuscripts

  Recently I posted on Twitter a photograph of an isolated medieval manuscript leaf that I own, from a 15th century book of hours. This is all part of the monster process of organising my digital photographic material and easing back into my paleography project which sits forlornly on the website Medieval Writing looking old and daggy because I ran out of energy for keeping up with technological change. This particular leaf had a cursive addendum which I couldn't make out. Here it is.

  This is the bit of added script.

  A keen eyed reader not only transcribed it for me (Pascarii episcopi nannetensis), but recognised the manuscript from which it had been removed, an unusual book of hours from Brittany; not exceptionally fancy or lavish, but which had contained much information about Breton usage. He had tracked down some other leaves from the manuscript, which had been dismantled and sold leaf by leaf by the bookseller from whom I bought my sample.
  I bought a largish number of single manuscript leaves and fragments in the late 1990s, early 2000s to use as exemplars for various aspects of paleography and book design in the Medieval Writing project. At that time, collections of good quality manuscript images on the internet were sparse, and many of them had ferocious restrictions on any sort of re-use. The project mostly relied on old black and white photographs. My budget was modest, so pages, fragments and bits were all that could be acquired.
  Manuscripts have been pulled apart over many centuries. Some of the bits I bought were bookbinders' scraps used in early modern printed books. No respect shown back then. People have chopped out miniatures and initials from old manuscripts since at least the 19th century, leaving the less ornate pages to the oddball collectors' market. I tried to only buy what appeared to be orphaned bits and avoided sellers obviously dismantling books, but a couple of sellers clearly bided their time and only released the odd page at a time. I now know who they are and so does my Twitter correspondent.

  Even fragments can contain a great deal of information when it comes to learning about manuscripts, texts, decorations and illustrations, and how they were assembled and used. The above is a calendar leaf from a different French book of hours containing a load of coded information. Plenty to discuss there.

  An isolated leaf can give information about how manuscripts were made, such as the example from a book of hours above where the initials have not yet been filled in and the prickings are still visible on the untrimmed page.

    They can show some of the tricks of the bookmaker's trade, such as catchwords at the end of a quire to show how the quires should be assembled.

  They can indicate how readers used their books, as in the two sides of this leaf from a book of hours, one side of which shows an image of Veronica's handkerchief which has been much smudged with use and the other shows prayers added into a blank leaf in the cursive hand of the owner.
  So many of the leaves I have acquired show corrections, carried out by various means, that it is easy to debunk the myth that manuscript copies had to be perfect or the scribe was cursed to hell. Either that or there is one hell of a scribal party going on down there.
  The process of pulling manuscripts apart for educational purposes cannot be discussed without reference to Otto Ege, who, in the 1940s, dismantled 50 medieval manuscripts and put individual leaves from them in teaching sets which were then sold to educational institutions. (Click here for a quick description, just google him to find out the various places they got to and where you can see some of them.) Most of the leaves in his sets are from liturgical books, which have been regarded as very stereotyped, not of great individual interest textually, but there is still much to learn from the individualities of books from different regions or traditions. Great efforts are being made to reassemble those manuscripts, in the virtual world if not in actuality, as naturally there is even more to be learned from the whole than from isolated parts.
  Before getting overwrought about the collecting of fragments, just think about how access to these things has changed in very recent decades. Complete medieval books have, over the centuries, crept from the exclusive library collections of the rich and aristocratic to august public institutions. In Britain, some of those private collections were salvaged from monastic libraries at the Dissolution, when they would have otherwise been destroyed. Even in major public institutions, access to these can be difficult and book reproductions of photographs of them have been expensive to acquire and produce. As with much medieval art, there is a tendency for book publishers to reproduce the same pictures over and over again, leading to a false concept of just how much of this stuff there is around.
  Fragments, acquired relatively cheaply and circulated in classrooms and seminars, have provided a sense of reality, and possibly a more accurate perception of the nature and variety of medieval manuscript material than the arty tomes. Not every book of hours was illustrated by the Limbourg brothers. This is not an endorsement of the procedure of cutting up manuscripts, however. Many more options are available if we use them properly. Library collections are being steadily digitised and the restrictions on usage of the images is being eased by major institutions.

  A left handed would be scribe copies from a genuine medieval exemplar (carefully covered in plastic) at a paleography school in 1996 at the University of Tasmania, conducted by Christopher de Hamel.

  Something similar applies to isolated examples of legal documents, such as the Elizabethan final concord shown above. These also float about on the collectors' market. They can be used to indicate the nature, form and wording of documents of a particular type, but they are usually just one step in the legal process of a case, and don't make a lot of historical sense unless placed with other documents pertaining to the case. Mind you, this contextualisation of documents can be a problem in archival collections as well. If you ask a medieval historian what they did with the medieval legal document collections in the National Archives in London when they recatalogued them in the 19th century, take a box of tissues with you. I believe I have seen British Library catalogue entries for boxes of charters which are not even identified individually.

  Cutting up has occurred in this market too. The French deed of sale above has had the seal hacked off, because there are folks who collect seals.
  I think one answer to the problem is that libraries and institutions which are digitising and distributing images of manuscripts need to concentrate a bit more on the nature of the texts and the way they are written, and not focus quite so strongly on the pretty manuscripts with beautiful illuminations and decorations. These are lovely. We all adore them. But they don't show the diversity of the same text in different manuscripts within this tradition. They don't indicate the range of quality of handwritten copies. They don't show the regional variations and why a scruffy little volume may be of value in its entirety because of its content. And please, put up some more document collections in a freely available format, because these are part of the history of writing as a process.
  Those wonderful academics who post segments from the manuscript tradition on social media could also occasionally venture away from their killer bunnies, monstrous beasties and medieval donuts to show something of why the writing on these manuscripts is interesting and important. It just might inform people as to why chopping a text up into bits and dispersing it is a loss of historical information. Those marginalia bits are fascinating, but the folks posting them understand their context. To many less esoterically educated viewers they are digital cuttings. Fortunately if you collect them in your Tumblr or Pinterest scrapbook, you do no harm to the original.
  It is notable that the British Library has recently digitised the Paston Letters and the Book of Margery Kempe, both collections of writings of words, not art galleries on vellum. More power to them. The National Archives in London has digitised a large collection of wills, but you have to pay for each one you download. This is not helpful if you are not looking things up by personal or place name, but wish to scour through a lot of documents for reference to something in particular, like ownership and disposal of books. Yes, it involves masses of work and a lot of money, but these projects are being done at an ever increasing rate, so it would be nice if they included some diversity of content.

  So there should be no excuse for chopping up manuscripts for profit these days. They can be made available to all without dismembering them. Meanwhile, there is probably still a point in collecting up the genuine orphans, binding fragments and unregarded scraps. You never know what question we might want to ask next. Meanwhile, one little Florentine initial will never find its way home, but at least I liberated it from the piece of brown non-archival cardboard that was eating it from the back.

  Thanks to Jean-Luc Deuffic for the transcription and for inspiring me to write this piece.

Hurray for Brewster

   I have grumped before about the ephemeral nature of the web, and now I am going to grump again. I have just upgraded the graphics and formatting for the script samples for formal diplomatic hands, most of which are papal documents. I had not gone into these in great detail as the Vatican Secret Archives website used to have a really good, extensive section on The Diplomatics of Papal Documents. It has apparently disappeared. It can be found on The Internet Archive here, so all is not lost.

   I can understand that some older web material might look a bit olde worlde after a few years. After all, that is why I am upgrading my own stuff. Some material is ephemeral or topical by nature. But when somebody (or somebodies) has taken the trouble to produce work which is of enduring interest, even if minority interest, and of educational value, and otherwise hard to come by, and very attractive to boot, why would you just remove it? I mean, when a paper book exhausts its print run, the existing books are still out there. When a website is gone it is gone. Well it would be, were it not for Brewster and The Internet Archive. May he and his mighty project live forever.

Paleographical Passion and Archivist Angst

  Much of the basic groundwork in paleography and in the study of archives was done a long time ago. That is not to say that good work is not still going on, but to get back to the roots of it, it is necessary to ferret out some rare old books. That has had me ratting around in The Internet Archive and printing out great tomes at painful speed, or more recently downloading bad scans of imperfect copies of old books to my Kindle. It all has deficiencies, but better than not being able to get your hands on things at all.
  A noticeable feature of academic writing of earlier times is that authors were allowed to express their passion, and by crikey did they get passionate about their subjects. The following is a series of quotes from Hubert Hall 1908 Studies in English Official Historical Documents Cambridge University Press. This is a working guide to the English Public Records, with a bit of concise history about the various classes of records and what happened to them over the centuries. Pretty dry stuff, you might think, but the following decontexted grabs express some of his feeling about how the records were treated during the 18th and 19th centuries:
  “... we have to deplore almost incalculable losses through premature decay and systematic abstractions. These losses are chiefly due to the deliberate neglect of later official custodians and to the still more wanton refusal of the parliaments and ministries of the 18th and even the 19th century to adopt the simplest precautions ofr their safekeeping.”

  “...the anxiety displayed by enlightened antiquaries to save some specimens of historical evidence from these putrid heaps of parchment ...”

  “By dint of groping on his hands and knees amidst the dust and corruption of the low-roofed cock-lofts of the Exchequer treasuries  ....”

  “Almost within living memory the public Records have been sold for glue by the soldiers and workmen employed to remove them from one pestilential vermin-haunted den to another...”

  “... after a further period of official procrastination, illumined by various destructive fires, the Records are still found in festering heaps...”

  “... the officials who should have been engaged in their jealous preservation were employed as sub-commissioners in preparing worthless texts, imperfect calendars, and misleading indexes...”
  Hubert Hall would no doubt be much delighted with the way in which the Public Records are now housed, and made available for study; another subject on which he expresses strong opinions. He would also, no doubt, be pleased that since his time local record offices have acquired back vast numbers of records that were in private hands, another area that he laments. Not much to be done about the glue or the rats though.
  Perhaps the main point is that modern writings tend to be laden with jargon and complex conceptual baggage, and nobody want to be caught out having an emotionally charged opinion about such matters. After all, Hubert doesn't give the impression that archivists were the dull sort of people of their (probably unfairly ascribed) reputation. We can never convince governments about the importance of educational matters if we just jabber in tongues among ourselves, and never let rip with our angst and passion.

Ancestors, Archives and Medieval Writing

I have become aware lately of the amazing growth in the services to the public provided by the National Archives in London through their various digital copying projects. Between my husband's historical research and my website, we have discovered that digital copies of all manner of archival material can be downloaded, meaning that work can be done from the other side of the world without the necessity for a visit to the archives themselves. Family historians are able to look up names and places to find ancient documents that may relate to their family affairs. The amount of sheer work that has been expended on providing these resources is mindboggling. More and more archives and libraries are providing digital resources, but this particular one is noteworthy in its range, search facilities and ability to be targetted to the needs of individual users.
One consequence of this is that people are ordering documents, only to discover that they may be very difficult to read and understand. Suddenly there is a new market for learning medieval paleography. There is also a market for teaching about the legal processes behind the documents, as even with accurate transcripts, it can be hard to make sense of these things without such knowledge. In fact, it might be fair to say that there is a new market for medieval history, just when the idiots who run our countries and education systems are winding courses down in favour of what they perceive to be relevant.
Of course, the process of providing the digital imagery and the online catalogues must generate a whole range of other work, as 700 years or so of archiving must inevitably generate a few anomalies in the cataloguing. As users, I fear that as soon as we get something that works brilliantly, we are making demands for it to be improved, expanded and corrected. I guess we see the potential but not the drudgery and dogwork that goes into producing these amazing resources.
There is also the potential for historical archival material to be opened up to new forms of inquiry. In the past, users of archives tended to have particular types of education and training, which led them into asking particular kinds of questions of the historical evidence. More general access could lead to folks with a diversity of interests asking questions that haven't been thought of yet. I recently received a download of a document which was not the one I thought I had ordered, because of cataloguing changes. The document was quite fascinating for two reasons, neither of which were things I had ever thought about. I have a wicked urge to order some documents by random catalogue number, just to see what turns up and whether they pose any more questions I had never considered. Who knows, it might result in the development of a whole new historical methodology.