Something USEFUL

When I approached Professor Galey about a week and a half ago at the end of class, I wanted to get some clarity. I knew that I wanted to write about something medieval, and the best I could come up with was that I wanted to write about medieval manuscripts, and I wanted it to be useful, along the lines of Sperberg-McQueen's "Text in the Electronic Age", which I thought was both true to the rules of medieval studies and to the rules of usefulness: we have all made reference to it several times already!

So, Professor Galey agreed with me that this was rather broad, and he suggested some reading:

His first suggestion was Peter Stallybrass, but he couldn't remember the article, so I just looked for the most recent Stallybrass article about medieval things. I did find a rather nice article in the book Explorations in Communication and History, which points out rather succinctly that "In fact, “manuscript” is a concept that was produced by printing. In the OED, there is not a single use of the word prior to 1597. Yet, paradoxically, the novel concept of “manuscript” emerges as always-already nostalgic." (Stallybrass, p. 115) Fabulous--the concept of medieval manuscripts is already grounded in their future; after all, in the period in which they were created, they were simply 'books'.

(On a side note, the latest Friends of Fisher lecture, given by the fabulous Erik Kwakkel, discussed the fact that manuscripts were simply books in detail while describing the delightfully complex world of pre-Gutenberg commercial bookmaking--you really missed out, dear reader!)

He then mentioned Dot Porter, also a Pennsylvanian book historian. She's the curator for digital research services at UPenn and she is interested in how medievalists use technology. So between these two authors (Stallybrass and Porter), we see a theory of the future-ness of manuscripts, and ways that medievalists find digital tools useful for understanding them.

Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, was another source. She's worked with Stallybrass on writing in the brave new world of print, and supports paleography training so that people can read the manuscripts that are inaccessible to so many people because of their bad hands.

This in turn made me think of the Digital Paleography Project that's just getting started at U of T. Medievalist Alex Gillespie has just been awarded a massive grant, and hopefully there might be some work for enterprising medievalists/digital scholars. So I'm hoping to maybe move my work into the direction of paleography, handwriting studies, or similar. But this field is still so broad, and a lot of my reading has just led me to think "hmmm, that's interesting". So we'll see--maybe by next week I'll have more than:

"Something useful to do with medieval manuscripts, maybe paleography."

Until next time, folks.