Treharne 2021
Treharne, Elaine. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Cut by the Knife: Libricide and the Modern Book Trade
I blogged about this manuscript and it was picked up by various online news-sites, including the New Yorker online. _e journalists spoke to Chidsanucha Walter’s representative, _omas Walter, in Leipzig. He declared their activity to be philanthropic and altruistic, commenting that, because of the activities of the book-breaker, ‘_ese works of art are now no longer reserved for only an élite group of people (dealers, museums and the rich)’._ _omas Walter also suggests there is an inevitability about this activity: ‘Looking back, I can say that maybe not every book that I split into individual parts should have been split, but it’s an ongoing process of understanding. I try to acquire and sell all of my works whole, but for some objects, it’s clear from the start that they must be split’.__ _is is an odd and deterministic rationale: an his- torical work of art, a textual object that when whole yields rich and cogent infor- mation about its origin, its users, its contexts of production, and its own genesis somehow already demands its own demise? Such inevitabilism is echoed by Sandra Hindman, a bookdealer and art historian, who says: ‘Ever since I’ve been doing this, there have been people who break books. It’s a battle that can’t be won’._…
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A significant issue here, too, is that the world of book traders and consumers has not addressed the emergence of new modes of selling through online auction houses.
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It appears that leaves are sold as a synecdochic stand-in for the ‘book’ and that the desiderata of value are (1) authenticity; (2) age; (3) scarcity (or perceived scar- city); and (4) aesthetic quality; that is, the presence of decoration, especially gold leaf in any amount.
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__ On the collection of individual leaves, see Roger S. Wieck’s hair-raising article, ‘Folia Fugitiva: _e Pursuit of the Illuminated Manuscript Leaf’, _e Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54: Essays in Honor of Lilian M. C. Randall (1996): 233–54.
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…from the Rhine Valley: Towards a Typology of Ashkenazi Pentateuch Manuscripts’, in Judith Olszowy-Schlanger and Andreas Lehnardt, eds, Books within Books: New Discoveries in Old Book Bindings, European Genizah Texts and Studies 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp.
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Over the middle decades of the sixteenth century, those wealthy enough to buy up monastic lands and properties destroyed books and documents, using them as toilet paper, or as cleaning cloths, or sold them to be melted down—the mem- brane forming a useful gluey substance; other libraries were acquired wholesale and the books taken abroad to be cut up and used by binders of printed volumes, in which fragments are o_en still to be found as spine strengtheners and quire guards.
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…_ose who saved hundreds of manuscripts—antiquarian collectors, like Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504–75)—transformed manuscripts in their collections, moving folios around, ‘tidying up’ beginnings of books by removing folios, and amalgamating unrelated manuscripts to create new composites.
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…t late Caroline Minuscule from about 1150.__ Also in the eighteenth century, fragments from a thirteenth-century medieval cartulary produced at the priory of St Mary Overy, Southwark, were recovered a_er being used as the drumskins for children’s toy drums…
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Bradshaw was a nineteenth-century British scholar, liturgist, and Cambridge University Librarian, whose life and work are revealed in George Prothero’s Memoir. Prothero discusses Bradshaw’s joyful dismemberment of manuscripts:
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_is was a more respectful response to ancient books than many other scholars and manuscript owners provided: John Ruskin is recorded as eras- ing marginalia, and cutting out illuminated initials from medieval manuscripts; one of the volumes he damaged is t…
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… of collections of fragments is provided by Nancy Turner, ‘Cases in Reconstructing the Fragment: _e Conservation Treatment of Single Leaves and Cuttings’, in Matthew James Driscoll and Ragnheiður Mósesdóttir, eds, Care and Conservation of Manuscripts, vol.
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Scott Gwara, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts: A Study of Ege’s Manuscript Collections, Portfolios, and Retail Trade, with a Comprehensive Handlist of Manuscripts Collected or Sold (Cayce, SC: De Brailes, 2013). On Walter B. Beals (1876–1960), see his papers at the University of Washington Libraries Special Collection…
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Alison N. Altstatt, ‘Re-membering the Wilton Processional’, Notes: _e Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 72 (2016): 690–732. I owe this reference to Andrew Prescott. See, too, M. J. Rickert and P. A. Hanrott, _e Reconstructed Carmelite Missal: An English Manuscript of the Late XIV Century in the British Museum (Additional 29704–5, 44892) (London: Faber & Faber, 1952) for a thorough discussion of the decorated and historiated initials that are now the only remaining bits of a late fourteenth-century missal belonging to the Whitefriars, London.
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Initiatives such as these include the publications of the ironically entitled Society of Foliophiles, compiled by G.
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…_ese series, of which there were a number between 1925 and 1968, were printed in short runs of two hundred. Every slipcase contains twenty or so folios taken from more complete books or manuscripts. _e justification for the dismemberment of ‘rare and notable’ books and manuscripts is aesthetic and pragmatic…
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_e Society’s cultural and utilitarian impulse is to provide convenient samples of typography for its audiences.
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…the information provided here is vague, general, and disingenu- ous. _e leaf is fi_eenth century, and not earlier, but the description tempts the reader to believe they might have something even more antique and rare; the reader is reassured that the fragment, though plain, is yet beautiful; and that despite its ubiquitous presence in the Middle Ages, it is now scarce. _is suggests antithetically that the fragment (made to stand in metonymically here for the whole book) is common enough that cutting up its host manuscript is not hein- ous, but also that it is rare enough in current times to be valuable. Authenticity, age, scarcity, and aesthetic quality (especially illumination): these are the categor- ies of appeal in the 1920s just as they are one hundred years later for eBay manu- script browse…
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Despite the destruction of context and com- pleteness in the assembly of these Foliophile sets, the adept use of language reassures buyers that they are now the owners of something special, but not too special; something unusual but not too exceptional. _is little breviary (and all the leaves from early printed books that accompany it—including one sixteenth- century folio, replete with scholastic annotations) is attainable; book history is democratized; early evidence of cultural and intellectual effort is domesticated.
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Moreover, since by the 1920s palaeographical and book historical volumes with excellent photography were printed accessibly, is it hard to ameliorate the act of providing real folios?
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_is review by Ryan of a catalogue by Christopher de Hamel and colleagues that accompanied an exhibition by a private club, the Caxton Club, demonstrates the split loyalties of librarians, collectors, and connoisseurs.__ _e Caxton Club’s 2005 exhibition of …
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De Hamel compares the provision of individual folios excised from dismembered books as akin to ‘the practice of cutting up one book so that its pieces might be used to ornament or improve another book’, and similar to ‘relic collecting’—‘both practices [that] go back to the Middle Ages’.
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In his o_en-cited lecture on book-breaking, de Hamel discussed those who, historically, collected, cut up, and customized medieval manuscripts for prac- tical reasons (to earn enough money to keep a Bugatti on the road), new manu- script contexts, curios, and trinkets.
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From a scholarly perspective, whether ‘ordinary’ or excep- tional, medieval manuscripts should be protected; and the activities of book- breakers should be illegal, regulated by professional Antiquarian Book-Dealers Associations with the participation of institutions, serious collectors, and auction ho…
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Eric Drigsdahl made a valiant effort for a few years to capture and label images.__ Peter Kidd traces leaves that are dispersed in collections through- out the world in his blog Medieval Manuscripts Provenance.
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Johnson, ‘Breaking and Remaking Scripture: _e Life, Death, and A_erlife of the Hornby- Cockerell Bible’, Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 4 (2019): 270–333.
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One of the most successful inter- national collaborations in recent years has been the Codex Sinaiticus research project, which brought together the previously disparate parts of the manu- script—the earliest instantiation of the complete New Testament.__ Split between four major repositories in Britain, Germany, Russia, and Egypt, the team thor- oughly investigated the manuscript for conservation purposes before digitization went ahead, made significant discoveries about the materials and text, and demonstrated the potential of the digital realm for the virtual reconstitution of fragmented books. _is is online, though, and a great deal of damage and dismemberment can never be repaired, the manuscript never reconstituted.
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8.5), and only one full-page illustra- tion remains.__ Wieks explains that initials were particularly appealing to nineteenth-century aesthetes, and that this was, in part, due to an obsession with the alphabet and with elaborate lettering.
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_ese very small fragments of manuscripts have probably been lost forever, unless they turn up as part of the collages that were popular in the nineteenth century.
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Similar in practice, but not in performance, are the enormous initials excised from medieval choir-books and sold as entirely independent art objects to col- lectors.
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_at which makes these manuscripts desired—the phenomenal and noumenal qualities of these traces of the past—are that which, ironically, makes them vulnerable to a leaf-by-leaf disintegration.
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It is multimedia, multilingual, multimodal, transchronological: constructed as a single composite booklet, a small vellum-bound book comprised of vellum, parch- ment, and handmade paper was created by a ‘Gualterus’ in May 1932 (Figure 8.6). ‘Gualterus’ is Judge Walter Beals, and this is one of his many booklets.
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_is book of hours folio is the main item in the booklet, declared as such by the printed title page that precedes it. _e title is similar to the introductory title pages of leaf books, and the booklet itself is hybrid technologically, with print title and hand-drawn red initial. _is ‘Gualterus’ was Judge Walter Burges Beals, a bibliophile from the Pacific Northwest (1876–1960), and a leading judicial fig- ure at the World War II Nuremberg Trials.
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_is compilation of fragments elicits some critical questions that highlight par- ticular problems with early medieval manuscripts. From the interpretative per- spective, it forces us to look again at issues of artefactual autonomy, composite textual objects, components of the book, and editorial cogency. _e little medieval booklet forms the centre of a complex network of relationships that are, at a mac- rolevel, generic: it belongs to the scrapbook, or perhaps commonplace, tradition of collection, assembling, and reconceiving. At a more specific level, it belongs to all of the similar books thus manufactured by Walter Beals, who himself repre- sents a class of manuscript collector and bibliophile, most famously exemplified by Henry Bradshaw, Edward Arnold, Walter Chester Beatty, or Otto Ege, or even Matthew Parker or Robert Cotton.
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_e fragments’ presence in the booklet reminds us of what is absent: each frag- ment is representative of its whole, its missing context; but in its damaged state, each fragment is also itself whole. Indeed, the fold and the gluey damage to the Venantius piece suggest it was a former pastedown or a binding strengthener for an early printed book existing autonomously for some considerable time. It was received in this precise condition by its 1930s owner. It is, in some sense, then, intact. It is synecdochically the missal which it might illustrate: evidence for the lost, perhaps the only extant evidence for its former manuscript.
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__ http://digital.lib.washington.edu/findingaids/view?docId=BealsWalterBPHColl782.xml; for more of Beals’s fragments, see http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/search/collection/mhm/ page/2. An e.e.cummings poem that was written for Beals, with B…
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It is critically important that scholars attend to the separated, the broken, and the damaged, because within these fragments lies evidence for a world of books that is otherwise lost.
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__ William Robins, ‘Composite Texts: Some Methodological Considerations’, in Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson, eds, Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, Texts and Transitions, vol.
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