The following remarks appear as the afterword to S.
Nichols and S. Wenzel, edd., The Whole Book (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1996), the proceedings of a conference held at the
University of Pennsylvania on the taxonomy of medieval miscellaneous
manuscripts.
As Siegfried Wenzel's preface makes clear, this book is a
self-exemplifying artifact. It is a codex miscellany devoted to the study
of the codex miscellany. To a specialist in late antique texts like
myself, accustomed to dismissing the miscellaneity of manuscript contents
in order to get at the one or two items of ancient descent that are of
real and pressing interest, it is refreshing and intriguing to be held up
in my headlong rush and forced to problematize what I have been eager to
dismiss.
That eagerness to dismiss is endemic in the category. "Miscellaneity"
as a defining characteristic of manuscript collections is a palpably false
unity that covers what we perceive to be disorder. It is a Borgesian
category: that class of manuscripts which belongs to no class of
manuscript. The exercise of attending the remarkably collegial and
animated conference where these papers first had life breathed into them,
and now the rereading of the printed texts, has the effect of bringing
that definition into the foreground of our consciousness and so of
destroying, or at least sharply limiting, it. The failures to classify
that are brought together in these studies are implicit criticisms of our
ability to classify, and in seeking the principles of order that animate
these books, we find instructive revision to our instinctive habits of
classification.
It is also important to recognize that at least one fundamental change
has come over the making of books since these manuscript collections were
put together, and it needs to be borne in mind as a constituent element of
the incomprehension that separates us from medieval bookmakers. I do not
refer precisely to the introduction of print but to the ensuing
industrialization of book-making. Once books became a mass market
product, it was inevitable that adjustment of the contents to the new,
much larger market and its tastes would ensue. One important quality of
the machine-made book is transparency of purpose and lucidity of
organization. To sell a book, you must make clear to your buyer what the
book is. In Hollywood terms, this means that "high concept" is better
than "low concept". In the conditions of the early history of the printed
book, this meant a kind of distinguishing and packaging of the written
product in discreet units or in collections whose coherence would be
transparent to a broad public.
We inherit that expectation. When then we come to study medieval
manuscripts, which we easily imagine as books quite like ours only
lovingly hand-produced, it is precisely those aspects of these books that
take advantage of the comparative latitude they enjoyed by reason of not
being directed to a larger market that baffle us most readily. Each paper
in this collection (and in this is the collection's own miscellaneity)
addresses the individuality and idiosyncrasy of one or a few manuscripts,
ranging in date over seven centuries and most of the geographical spread
of western Europe. But in so doing, the gradual, cumulative impact is to
make us more sensitive to what the editors have called "the whole book",
that is, the totality of the book and its functions in its medieval
settings, redirected from our modern expectations to a broad range of
medieval contexts.
In the case of Ann Matter's essay, for example, we get to move behind
modern expectations of the edition of a famous theologian's writings (the
sort of text of Alcuin that Matter herself labors to produce, and whose
identity has been constructed at discrete times in the modern era) to the
book-making concerns of a period much closer to his own time.
"Schoolbook" turns out to be a rewarding piece of taxonomy to apply: it
gives us a context and a purpose quite different from that which we bring
to these texts, but one that suddenly dissolves the miscellaneity into a
quite satisfactory order. Similarly, Sylvia Huot's focused study of a
single manuscript reveals a principle of order (Marian devotion) otherwise
veiled from us by the rebarbativeness of that ideology to modern scholarly
preconceptions.
In other ways, the studies presented here dissolve the perceived
miscellaneity of their targets and in so doing eat away at our
presumptions about what makes books. Stephen G. Nichols' paper looks in a
way backwards rather than forwards and reminds us that the codex itself as
principle of organization is a contingent thing, implicitly comprehensive
and inclusive by contrast to other ways of organizing texts. Our
expectation that the exploitation of a medium of communication is
simultaneous with its introduction is a false one, and the medieval
trajectory of the codex book reminds us that the exploitation of the
medium was elaborated in stately stages over most of a millennium.
With Ralph Hanna's discussion of the conditions of production we come
to a pragmatic consideration of the alternatives to genre as organizing
principles in a setting in which even the language of the manuscript is a
variable consideration. The studies by Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards
form a triptych with Hanna's piece in a way, Boffey using a modern
editorial kind of question (tracing the "minor poems", a phrase already
embodying a generic judgment of great importance, of John Lydgate) to show
how the boundaries between the physical and the intellectual conditions of
production are important but difficult to trace, with precisely the
intellectual conditions the hardest to reconstruct. Edwards, on the other
hand, shows a late stage in manuscription collection, when the future is
beginning to be discernible. The figure "Chaucer" begins to be an
organizing feature in manuscripts, and his aggrandizement means emphasis
on the large and important work, with then a deliberate attempt to
orchestrate a place for the lesser works on a charted landscape. We are
not quite yet at the stage I spoke of earlier, where we create the author
by collecting and organizing the works, but one can just begin to see here
the first intimations of such an inclinationn.
Two of the most tantalizing pieces in this collection offer a different
reminder: that even our idea that a physical book should be a closed,
fixed artifact is an artificial one derived from the economic and physical
pragmatics of print culture. Siegfried Wenzel's study of sermon
collections shows that the boundary between "collection" and "notebook" is
far more fluid in these MSS than in modern books; by "notebook" I take him
to mean something like an open-ended collection created and arranged for
its usefulness to the owner/author, making sense purely in terms of the
owner/author's needs (which change from time to time), and frozen in time
as a definable, catalogueable "book" only when the life goes out of it,
when the owner/author ceases to use it. Such a book is like a house
abandoned by its owner: we may enter it and find much of interest for our
purposes, even take away a few treasures for ourselves, but often we will
shake our head at the disarray, the odd arrangement of possessions, the
curious gaps in collections -- when indeed, the house was perfectly
liveable only a short time before. To extend that metaphor, a sermon
"collection" begins to be a bit more like a bed and breakfast
establishment, inhabited by the owner and used in obvious ways, but still
made open to a public clientele as well. The modern printed book, to
extend the metaphor past the breaking point, is a discount chain motel,
deliberately made lifeless in the interests of universal utility.
So then the fascinating Munich manuscript that G.N. Knauer displays is
just such a disorderly house of extraordinary interest. The translation
of the Batrachomyomachia that he extracts from it is a pearl of great
price, and Knauer's study has the merit of painstaking "archaeological"
reconstruction of the site in which it is found, with profit for both our
knowledge of the poem's translation history and our knowledge of Reuchlin
and his rich intellectual milieu.
We return then at the end of the collection here to miscellaneity in
its most diverse form. Barbara Shailor, a distinguished cataloguer of
medieval manuscripts, reports, like a 19th-century explorer back from a
remote continent, on specific challenges to taxonomy and interpretation
that individual manuscripts and fragments pose. Read in the context of
the other pieces in this volume, her essay shows clearly the power and the
limits of the notion of miscellaneity, and the value to be found
repeatedly in breaking through the crust of that notion, in using it as a
marker that puzzles of particular interest and difficult lie beneath the
surface.
It is here also that I will suggest that the value of the approach
taken in this conference and this volume becomes clear. "Miscellaneity"
arises as a class of the unclassed, a scandal to our attempts to wrestle
the past into an order and shape comfortable to ourselves. The value of
these studies taken together will have been that they allow no settled
pursuit of a single trajectory of interpretation or ideology, but that
they repeatedly derail the reader's expectations -- just as the
manuscripts studied here have done -- and represent by implication
elements of diversity in medieval Latin and vernacular culture that are
otherwise likely to be subdued into silence and order. If this volume
leaves those gabbling their multiple messages at us excitedly and reminds
us that this is the natural condition of mankind and human culture, then
precisely in the disorderliness of this volume will its excellence be
perceived. The reader who cherishes that cheerful raffishness in this
volume will find that it is a book that has not yet had the life sucked
out of it by the process of publication, but one that lives robustly in
the way its derailed expectations startle the reader into fresh
perceptions of order.