Bahr 2013

Bahr, Arthur. Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilatiosn of Medieval London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Introduction: Compilation, Assemblage, Fragment

"The hybridity of the surviving forms of medieval literature, that is, calls for a comparably hybrid methodology." (1)

"medieval manuscripts expose as false the long-implied opposition between form and history."

compilatio

"Even those skeptical of so neat a separation of the literary-imaginative from the historical-physical are often reluctant to see artistic significance in the arrangement of texts within medieval manuscripts, since their construction was frequently guided more by practical than by aesthetic considerations." (2)

"As this book will show, aligning codicological with literary evidence often reveals more extensive traces of intentionality than we would otherwise have." (3)

compilation: "not as an objective quality of either texts or objects, but rather as a mode of perceiving such forms so as to disclose an interpretably meaningful arrangement, thereby bringing into being a text/work that is more than the sum of its parts." (3)

"When, along with its originating intentions, the original physical shape of an object has likewise been lost, can we meaningfully interpret its surviving forms? How can we make fragments speak with a voice that is intelligible, if not unified? Such questions get at the very heart of medieval studies since the period's literary record is dominated by fragmentary manuscripts, incomplete texts, and anonymous authors." (4-5)

"what is at stake is a method, necessarily both speculative (i.e., theorectical) and historical, that mediates between the occluded or lost original medieval intention and the subjective, contemporary apprehension of text and manuscript that informs their meaning, bringing intention into being as if for the first time. This meaning is contingent, I claim, on what Benjamin calls an 'experience with the past' as opposed to a reconstruction of it, a past that is not mere masses of data but perceived in and across time." (5)

"Compilations shake up such limited narratives. They compel texts to change their meanings in ways that a purely linear historicity cannot fully recover or anticipate, as a particular text's relation to its broader codicological forms makes us rethink or resee something that by itself might seem straightforward, uninteresting, or overfamiliar. Ultimately, then Fragments and Assemblages shows that the individual texts and authors that it studies can be transformed, not just by the medieval compilational structures in which they are preserved, but also by the modern one -- this book -- that sets them in newly resonant juxtaposition." (5-6)