Sonja Drimmer, Review [Elaine Treharne, Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)] Manuscript Studies 8 (2023): 147–51. (original) (raw)
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Digitized Manuscripts & Literary Hermeneutics: New Challenges
Digitizing medieval manuscripts has revolutionized how we see and ponder vernacular literature. This new episteme requires studying works in their self-determining, material form. It poses a hermeneutic challenge since, unlike a critical edition, the MS is less a mode of transmission, than the key to the endogenous nature of literary form. From the animal skin that presents the work, to its complex visual dimension, the MS matrix deploys vision, thinking, and understanding, the three dynamic aspects of form for Aristotle's energeia (actualization-of-potential) responsible for MS performance. " The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of understanding the uniquely human forms of cognitive activity. "
The Materiality of Medieval Manuscripts, in: Oxford German Studies 45 (2016), 121-141.
The article presents the Henrike Lähnemann's Inaugural Lecture for the Chair in German Medieval Literature and Linguistics, delivered on Thursday 21 January 2016. The subject of the lecture is a new acquisition by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a psalter written ca. 1500 by the nun Margaret Hopes in the Cistercian convent of Medingen near Lüneburg, MS. Don. e. 248. The hypothesis advanced is that the nuns use the materiality of their prayer-book as the embodiment of their devotion. The psalter is analysed in terms of its physical realization (material, layout, writing, corrections, music, illustrations, and additions) and its execution interpreted as a spiritual act. The journey of the manuscript beyond the Middle Ages is highlighted through the accommodation of the manuscript to the Lutheran Reformation and the addition of a bone plaque with a floral border in the nineteenth century, reflecting the contemporary concept of the medieval object. The purpose of the lecture is an enquiry into the changing history of manuscripts as objects of devotional, antiquarian and scholarly interest.
Bodies of Parchment: Representing the Passion and Reading Manuscripts in Late Medieval England
2010
In a diverse range of late-fourteenth-and fifteenth-century devotional literature, Christ's body is metaphorically related to a book or a document at the moment of his crucifixion. His skin transforms into parchment, whips and scourges become pens, and a steady flow of blood, of ink, covers his body and the written page. And each word written onto his parchment body welcomes sustained study, acting as a potential meditative focal point for the devout reader. Through this metaphor and the accompanying materiality of the texts that include it, medieval authors and audiences could imagine intimately interacting with Christ's body during the violence of his Passion. They could touch it, see it, hear it as it was read aloud, and, in the case of scribes, write it. This dissertation explores how the object of the text allowed audiences to participate actively in the events of Christ's Passion and considers how the affective engagement with Christ's suffering body that pervaded late-medieval devotional practice informed, in turn, the signifying power of a text's materiality.
Toward an Archaeology of Manuscripts
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2022
This review essay takes the historicist revisioning of the study of manuscripts as media archeology as an organizing principle for thinking about the complementarity of three new contributions to manuscript studies focusing on English and later British contexts from 1500-1800: the aforementioned After Print;