See here
until 2 January for an entertaining programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Boxing Day with Ben Schott, Irving Finkel, Moira Goff, and Adam Smyth about the history of almanacs, one of the most popular kinds of material text in the 16th and 17th centuries and at their height, the bestselling books on the market after bibles.
Last month the Centre for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) announced the shortlist for its photo competition, ‘Areas of Outstanding Urban Beauty’. Andy Graham, photographer of the shortlisted ‘Leeds’ (pictured), writes: “There are no people at Clarence Dock in Leeds they say, nobody wants to go there. This image on a snowy february morning shows just how many people actually do live here. The hidden folk have for once left their footprints behind.”
CABE’s competition invites an appreciation of the urban environment as beautiful in its own right, in contrast to the more conventional ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’. As Graham’s photo so strikingly reveals, foregrounding human activity makes the city differently legible. Snow in Clarence Dock elegantly materialises the multiple, unmarked journeys crisscrossing space, allowing us to see the city as the dynamic and evolving product of multiple agencies: not only the municipal authorities responsible for trees and tarmac, but the “hidden” trajectories “they say” do not exist.
Graham’s commentary articulates a division between the ‘panoptic’ space of the urban planner and the ‘practised’ space of the urban pedestrian that might remind us of Michel de Certeau. ‘Leeds’ vividly illustrates de Certeau’s definition of “walking as a space of enunciation”, in which the traces of individual journeys, when transcribed on a map, can “only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by… They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984: pp. 97-8). Graham’s photo encourages us to see the city as a text articulated by journeys, in which the “hidden” life made visible by the camera can only be read briefly and in absentia, as traces in the snow before it melts.
The rest of the shortlist is available at http://www.cabe.org.uk/news/aoub-shortlist
‘We are exercising an office of sacred piety when we treat books carefully’, argued Richard de Bury, in his famous treatise on the love of books, Philobiblon (1345). A rather different exercise of sacred piety was in evidence at an intriguing paper on ‘Dirty Books’, given last term to the Medieval History of Art Seminar. The fifteenth-century missals and books of hours studied by Kathryn Rudy had clearly been on the receiving end of a very physical form of devotion: corners and edges of pages were blackened by thumb-prints; illuminations had been smudged and smeared by the touch of fingers and lips; the words of prayers and of the liturgy, and the faces and bodies of Mary, Christ and the saints worn almost into oblivion by a skin-to-skin contact that reflects an urgent, insistent and intense desire for spiritual reassurance.
De Bury would not have been impressed. Tormented by the cleanliness of his contemporaries hands – a fourteenth-century sufferer of OCD? – Bishop Richard spoke with horror of the ‘foetid filth as black as jet’ stuck up students’ nails; their ‘wet and perspiring hands’; the ‘grease-stained finger’. That ‘gloves covered with all kinds of dust’ or the ‘finger clad in long-used leather’ pushed him to similar levels of nervous excitement suggests that only the complete excommunication of readers from the precious pages of the book would have quietened his mood. Perhaps a career in librarianship would have suited him; he would surely have approved of digitisation.
Kathryn Rudy’s paper demonstrated that even dirt, grease and grime – intruders upon the material surface of the manuscript page – could be worthy subjects for academic attention. Using a densitometer to measure the comparative surface reflectivity of clean and soiled parchment, she has been able to quantify the intensity with which each page was used. By cross-referencing the page-by-page results with the contents of each book, Dr. Rudy was further able to reveal the varied patterns of fifteenth-century reading and worship. Some of her readers gave particular attention to the indulgence texts, suffrages, hours of the virgin, or penitential psalms – and almost completely ignored the vigil for the dead. By contrast, an Augustinian canoness paid for her celebratory duties, or a lay family concerned to memorialise their deceased relatives, subjected those same pages in another manuscript to more intense wear than any other part of the book.
In applying modern science to the medieval book, Kathryn Rudy has made a valiant and worthwhile attempt to give an identity to the ‘invisible readers’ – those tormentors of the student of manuscript reception – who hover at the edge of the page. Some clearly did rather more than just hover. The blackened margins in these books of hours and missals are not just the work of grease and grime or acidic perspiration, the regrettable damage of careless readers. They are a person’s thumbprints, imprinted over and over again, an immediate material reminder of the way they held their most precious book, how their fingers cradled its spine and their thumbs pressed down its pages, and of the many hours they spent at their devotions.
A few months ago I blogged about a book supposedly bound in human skin; recent news reports have reminded us about a book written in human blood. The blood in question (27 pints of it, donated over a two-year period) belonged to Saddam Hussein, who in a gruesome display of religiosity commanded that a copy of the Qu’ran should be penned with it. Now the problem is what to do with this highly sensitive document, which is currently held in a vault beneath a Baghdad mosque. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/19/saddam-legacy-quran-iraqi-government for more.
The newspapers and other media are of course delighting in the unusually severe weather currently affecting the UK and Europe, with apocalyptic headlines and images dominating print and broadcasting. A casual search of EEBO reveals some of the kinds of God-fearing and similarly sensationalist texts produced in response to extreme snows four or five hundred years ago. On a broadsheet from 1571, for example, is printed ‘A prayer to be sayd in the end of the mornyng prayer daily (through the dioeces of Norwich) during the tyme of this hard and sharp wether of frost and snow to craue mercye for our synnes and release of this sore punishment at the mercifull handes of our good and gracious God’. About a century later, in the same year the above sermon was printed, another broadsheet told of ‘Sad news from Salisbury, and other parts of the west of England. Being an account of a most sad and dreadful frost and snow, which hapned on the 23d. of December 1684. in and about most parts of the west of England, which froze to death many poor passengers who travelled the rode, besides many beasts, incredible to believe, but that some who were in the same storm are alive to justify the truth thereof … To the tune of, Aim not too high’…
chained books, somewhere in Narnia
Michael Apted’s film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s third Narnia chronicle The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, on general release in the UK since last week, stars the kind of elaborate material texts that are becoming commonplace in new fantasy films. Those who remember the BBC’s version of the Chronicles of Narnia from the early 1990s probably recall the hand-drawn map in the opening sequence of each episode, over which, accompanied by haunting horn music, the viewer was drawn into the mysterious lands of Lewis’s imagination. Like others of its genre, this new film takes delight in the dramatic and cinematic possibilities of maps, diaries, and books that can be transformed through computer technology. When Lucy finds a book of incantations in a library in the invisible mansion, for example, the film indulges in a not strictly necessary scene of CGI magic emanating from this generically ‘old’ (probably folio) volume resting on a quasi-ecclesiastical lectern. Lucy and the others are then shown a map of the islands they must find, which when unrolled before them becomes distinctly ipad-like with its touchscreen Google Earth capabilities. It’s interesting how, as computer and film technologies become more sophisticated, they don’t move away from but seem to return increasingly to the iconic and dramatic potential of more traditional material texts, even as they transform them.
This small but very moving exhibition at the Foundling Museum, Bloomsbury, opened in October and continues until March 2011. The Foundling Museum tells the story of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, the first home for abandoned children and the first public art gallery in Britain, which Coram founded in the mid-eighteenth century with the philanthropic involvement of figures including William Hogarth and George Handel. Over the centuries that followed, the Hospital cared for thousands of babies found on the streets or brought to its doors by mothers who could not afford to look after them.
Threads of Feeling puts on public display for the first time an astonishing archive of texts and textiles from the 1740s to the 1760s, the early decades of the Foundling Hospital. When a baby was admitted, a record was created on a printed registration form. The admission process was usually anonymous – the name of the baby’s mother was not included, and the baby was given a new name. Attached to each registration form was a small token. This could be a little medal, toy, ornament, or ribbon, but most often these tokens were pieces of fabric cut from the infant’s clothing. These tokens were kept as a method of identification in case a mother ever returned to reclaim her child.
In their hundreds these admission forms were kept and bound into ledgers, creating not only a record of the children who were cared for by the Hospital, but also an important social history of clothing, fashion, and textiles in the mid-eighteenth century. Because they have been bound up inside these ledger books, these scraps of fabrics are very well preserved. The London poor were not dressed in the black and white of Hogarth’s moralising prints, but in vivid shades and designs that emulated sumptuous and expensive fashions, and the descriptive notes accompanying each scrap record a rich vocabulary of these textiles: camblet, fustian, susy, cherryderry, calamanco, linsey-woolsey…
The scraps are incredibly poignant, each telling the story of an individual child and his or her mother, bearing witness to an identity and a relationship that was replaced when the child was taken in by the Hospital and given a new name as well as the chance of a new life. They are often explicitly textual, with names, messages, prayers, or a date added in ink or embroidery, for example. The vibrancy of the fragments that make up this textual and material archive contrasts powerfully with the sadness of the poverty and desperation they record.
The CMT is of course, studiedly neutral on matters political–but on the day of the big Commons vote it’s perhaps appropriate to observe that the recent UK protests over tuition fees have led to the creation of some wonderful material texts. Here is one home-made placard which epitomizes the wit and anger that we’ve seen on the streets in the last few weeks…
Amanda Vickery, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, kicked off her TV series ‘At Home with the Georgians’ last week. She enters a crowded marketplace, dominated by men modelling themselves on Schama and Starkey, and frequently presenting a distinctly macho brand of history (what’s done is done, but all the same, Be Very Afraid). Vickery’s innovation was wonderfully simple: she travelled with an ipad. So, intercut with the familiar historical reconstructions and country-house shots, we were treated to numerous close-ups of documents and images being prodded and poked into life by the historian’s finger. They slid in and out, grew and shrank at the touch of a screen, in an display of pure archival prestadigitation.
All this sets me wondering about the ways in which our unparalleled ability to reproduce documents from the past might be changing our attitude to those documents–increasingly making them the subject rather than merely the source of history. And sharpening our sense of their material specificities–allowing us to see the weave of the paper, the shimmer of ink–even as it robs us of much crucial physical information, and obliterates the memory of the archive in which the original resides. But for now we should surely celebrate Professor Vickery’s coup in showing us that, like 18th-century gentlemen, 21st century historians can get ahead through their gizmos.
If you’re visiting the ‘Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead’ exhibition at the British Museum (mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago) you might want to extend your stay with a visit to the free, smaller exhibition, ‘Images and Sacred Texts: Buddhism Across Asia’, open until April 2011.
The Buddhist religion centres on the ‘three jewels’; the Buddha, his teachings, and the community of the faithful, and this exhibition explores how these are depicted across geographical and chronological distances. The exhibition brings together an astonishing range of images and artefacts from Asian lands over the last two thousand years, amongst which the exquisitely decorated Buddhist texts, on palm leaves and paper, promise a fascinating insight into the spread of this faith and its philosophy through and beyond Asia. Again, do leave comments below after your visit!