Focusing on the work of Johanna Drucker in Graphesis, discussions of textual media in Hayle’s Comparing Textual Media, and ideas on embodiment of manuscripts and assemblage from Treharne and Bahr; I seek to explore the incarnation of medieval manuscript as Almanac. Towards this end I offer both a close reading of the scottish land grant UCR 007 as well as a comparative approach to UCR 007’s “siblings”, UCR 006- UCR 009, which will allow an informed and generative discussion of usage, and Almanac theory in Fife, Scotland during the fifteenth century. My work is both bulwarked by and beholden to the exemplary scholarship of Chelsea Silva, who offers up a groundbreaking approach to Almanac theory in her work “Opening the Medieval Folding Almanac” and Kathrin Bernath’s painstaking, letter for letter transcription of UCR 007. As my approach falls under the purview of the multi-modal, combining both traditional and digital methods of research and scholarship; the requisite labor exceeds the ability of the single researcher; thus it is with great deference to the splendid work of Silva and Bernath that I move through my discussion of UCR 007 and the medieval Almanac. I also weave in theories of adaptation and translation by Andre Bazin in “Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest” and Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of Translator” (as well as a nod to the “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in order to flesh (literally and figuratively) out the choices I make in both translation of Middle English to various modern languages as well as my adaptation of the manuscripts from Vellum to html code via Omeka.
I examine the leaf in terms of it’s physical characteristics and extrapolate from subtle shifts in ink, folds, the absence of tassel, pendant seal, the presence of small tears and holes in the Vellum in order to approach the idea of the traveling, utilitarian Almanac hung at the hip of an official or a figure such as the Summoner of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I offer mention here of Whearty’s “The Leper on The Road To Canterbury” with the caveat of my inability to engage with the work fully nor to offer the same faithful attention to the Summoner as Queer in the way that Whearty does. Rather I focus on Summoner and Parsoner as traveling civic figures; their presence in The Canterbury Tales as potentially queer or more complicated than a mere rebuke of lepers speaks to me more of the proliferation of such figures in society, often used in manuscripts towards potentially ambiguous ends. This is the Summoner mentioned “in a footnote, as ‘the Pardoner’s traveling companion’” (Whearty 233). Much in the way that the collection of land grants inspiring this study have been overlooked in lieu of the assumption of their supposed simplicity, anonymity and unimportance to the larger field of Medieval Manuscript studies; so too has the traveling civic body of the Summoner been erased. Both speak to a notion of restlessness, which I will return to later, brought forward by Silva’s discussion of Deleuze.
In the case of the Summoner however, one gets an embodied image of official atop mount moving amongst the lay people and nobility alike. They are a node from which the higher echelons of authority are exercised upon the lower echelons; yet again Summoner and Parsoner are also able to call the Elite to task in moments where the Elite have alienated or been slighted by the even higher authorities of Royalty and Religion. This aspect receives less treatment in Whearty’s piece; as I believe she assumes that scholars already know enough about the characters of Summoner and Parsoner as travelling government official to engage with her discussion of sexuality and representation (or lack thereof).
Regarding the Almanac style itself, even Carey, whose work seems deeply invested in the medical nature of the folding Almanac admits that there must be more to the style than we realize. “Almanacs of all sizes included medical elements and there is no reason to believe physicians owned them all” (Carey 491). While Carey allows for alternative uses to the folding style characteristic of the Almanac - she still offers no mention of it as a land grant or similar sort of decree. Perhaps the genre seems less engaging and therefore less of a matter of unfurling as the idea of handing out the ownership of land might seem rather static to the contemporary conception. Yet thinking of land and ownership thus (say nothing of usage) is precisely this flattening of genre that I wish to push back against; one that I see Silva as engaged in. Bahr states, “One important goal… is… to provoke debate about how to regard the interactions between medieval texts and the manuscripts that contain and shape them” (Bahr 5). At present, expectations based upon antiquated interactions limit the understanding we can have of the Almanac precisely because debate regarding interactions between text, manuscript, reader and knowledge production do not occur. Therefore if we are to rise to Bahr’s goal then we must address the land grant in news just as the medical and astrological Almanac have been examined and reinterpreted. This lack of discourse may be what turns Hayles towards the digital; “A major development in integrating a media framework into humanities discipline is the advent of the Humanities Lab” (Hayles xv). The Humanities lab works for Hayles as place for scholars to take existing works and either digitize them for new purposes, mine them using new technology or approach them in terms of new interface; something that both Hayles and Drucker seem to work towards.
But in regards to the conception of a “Humanities Lab” I wonder if Hayles has in mind the archival experience that I invoke in "Obfuscations" or if she means instead the experience of my website itself, in other words all of "My Exhibit". That sense of embodiment in the digital environ which allows for flesh rendered inert in protective statis. While discussing Gibson’s Neuromancer, Hayles writes: “the posthuman body... ‘data made flesh.’ To the extent that the posthuman constructs embodiment” (Hayles 12). In “How We Became Posthuman” Hayles argues that the invocation the digital allows for us to reach new potentialities as selves and that we can apply the notion of flesh made data towards texts. Hayles also invokes Delueze towards our conceptions of ourselves as networked; “the liberatory potential of a dispersed subjectivity distributed among diverse desiring machines they call ‘body without organs’” (Hayles 4). Hayles her gestures towards Capitalism and Schizophrenia and I think more specifically “The Rhizome”; the significance of which engenders her discussion with a restlessness akin to Deleuze’s fold but more specifically delineated as the endless “milieu” (Deleuze & Guattari 1462). The middleness Deleuze describes prevents static presence and insists upon continual motion; however as MIddle English was not intended to be one authoritative language force, but rather an adaptive and playfully shifting format, I see the ideas of Deleuze as fully engaged in the sort of concept of Medieval Manuscript that I work with here. I offer very scant treatment of Deleuze here myself, relying instead upon the work that Hayles and Silva have done with Deleuzian thought as applied towards manuscripts.
I understand this rhizomatic conception of digital spaces as essential to full comprehension of manuscript studies in our time as we deal in issues not just of hybridity, facsimilation, copying or reproduction in general but also of connectivity and the moments of connection. We then also deal in all that entails especially in regards to the conception of the manuscript, how it too was interconnective and subject to constant change both in terms of meaning and usage as well as interpretation. Regarding my Omeka sight, “The point was less to show that man was a machine than to demonstrate that a machine could function like a man” (Hayles 14). Towards this end I too offer media frameworks and multi-modalities in order to better provoke debate about texts and manuscripts and utilize Omeka as a digital embodiment of the Humanities lab in the Hayles discussion.
Once I have offered a treatment of the manuscript’s mobility and physical characteristics I next move into a discussion of archival limitations. I refer to this under the admittedly ablest monicere of “archives of blindness” for though I understand that this flies in the face of the excellent work that has come out of disability studies and reifies ablest tropes favoring the person of site over the person of blindness and further dehumanizing people of disability, I do so in the hopes that I can offer an opportunity, through Interface Theory, to push back against these very tropes. By engaging in what I call “archives of blindness”, I seek to further use UCR 007 as a mirror to hold up against the archives, a moment for recursiveness on the part of the researcher as well as their audience. I next offer an exploration of my digital exhibit via Omeka.net which works to flatten/mitigate the distance between archive and the layperson (for lack of a better word). I then make use of filmic approaches to the leaf, which offer both clarity and obfuscation, translations into English (translations into German, Spanish and Tagalog with the added possibility of Singlish shall be forthcoming), and audio content which I hope can recover the lost aura of linguistic access. As Drucker writes of the map metaphor as replacing the linearity of the tree metaphor, so too do I hope to use the nonlinear space of the digital in order to replace the flattened, linear approach to the seemingly inert manuscript. “The intellectual implications of a map metaphor replacing a tree image in tables of contents have yet to be played out” (Drucker 100). I will use Drucker’s metaphor of map throughout, utilizing it as equivalent to or involved in digital strategies. After all, Drucker is concerned with visual data’s place in knowledge creation and posits her notion of the “Future Book” as the answer to question of archival research in a digital age.
In the end, like Silva, I hope to problematize the current conception of the medieval Almanac. I thereby appropriate her Deleuzian approach in order to flush out the extent to which these expectations should continue or, if Medievalists ought to shift their conceptions of this manuscript form. Moreover I explore the positionality of Scottish land - it’s spatial aspect, through Drucker’s map metaphors as well as the spatial dislocation or reorientation that come with the linguistic access I hope to recover through translation and multimodality.
The first thing one notices about UCR 007, it’s most extravagant physicality, is it’s splendid stylized lettering and scribal signature. “No facsimile can ever give the tactile experience of handling and running one’s fingers across soft leaves of medieval parchment” (Hamel 13). Though the archive allowed me to come up to and hold the leaf, the actual Vellum remained out of my reach, one wonders if in a way, the process of archival protection doesn’t have a certain “facsimilating” aspect that becomes imbued into the manuscript. A facsimile however could not have shown me the hair side of the manuscript nor would it have captured the visual smoothness of the manuscript in question. And even though it would never be the focus of a facsimile, the hair side is important, analysing it’s panels give us insight into storage and usage. Please refer to the section of my Omeka Exhibit entitled “UCR 007” Characteristics”. I do however enjoy and prosper from the use of facsimile, I refer to one I provide a link to both on omeka as well as wordpress, meanwhile a majority of the exhibit has been constructed from stills taken on my phone and even these poor reproductions become useful in the digital context. Although, perhaps approach through facsimile alone is to blame for the scarcity of research into Almanacs. “Despite their attraction for bibliophiles and scholars, folded Almanacs have not been well understood either as a class of manuscript, or as a tool” (Carey 483). As the field remains traditionally dominated by preferential treatment of exemplar copies of illuminated manuscripts, bridging into other kinds of manuscript can prove useful. The folded Almanac, especially in Carey’s example of the medical Almanac, at least holds fetish value in it’s folding and unfolding which serves to complicate ideas of reading and usage. While I do not agree with Carey’s sweeping opinions regarding the primarily medical or astrological uses of the folded Almanac; she is right in the attraction and misunderstanding of Almanacs.
Now, as I will mention later during my more detailed engagement with Silva’s Deleuzian reading and my discussion of obfuscation, Carey works towards arguing for the Almanac as a tool of medieval medicine while my study of land grants favors the Almanac as a tool of land capital and spatial recovery. Even so, Carey’s point is quite well put and remains important even for Silva’s discussion; after all it is the case that the Almanac remains woefully misunderstood, tragically disembodied. It is the case that a folded Almanac is a specific and unique tool that allows for potentiality for beyond that which has been argued for by the likes of Carey and Talbot before her. “The result is an object in continuous, restless, and provocative motion” (Silva 2). The flowing Secretary script does indeed flow restlessly across the page in UCR 007 as well as it’s sibling land grants; the hand is steady and clear, however the ink begins to fade. At one point, about halfway through the deed, there is evidence of John Arnott pausing to switch ink. Please refer to the "Inkblot Blues" section of my Omeka site. The point being that even in the mere creation of the land grants, multiple scribes were made to stop and begin again as they ran out of ink. The process of stopping and preparing new ink affords time for recursion for the scribe- a moment to reflect on their process while also working on that same process. “Recursion can be understood as folding a work’s logic back on itself” (Hayles 199). For Hayles, this concept is entirely useful in the idea of comparative and digital media as applied to the humanities, and she hopes to prepare her readers for an in depth discussion of recursion. Her view of recursion takes on specific mirror like qualities I openly employ during discussions of archives of blindness “Recursions hint at a lack of absolute foundations, and they gesture toward the infinity created when two facing mirrors reflect each other endlessly” (Hayles 199). Speaking through Deleuze and Drucker, this lack absolute foundation becomes a boon; it becomes a powerful tenet of Medieval Manuscript studies as well, for as we know from the poems of Hoccleve, Chaucer, Lydgate and the work that Scholars have done on the vast corpi of each scribe; much of what was written in the medieval period was intended to be highly flexible. As Watt argues for a new understanding of Medieval intentionality, a shift from working to completion towards understanding that scribes such as Chaucer worked against the completion of their manuscripts in his discussion of the booklet so too do I see new research into the folds as bringing new understanding of folded Almanacs. “The fundamental importance of the booklet is that it uses the book’s physical flexibility to adapt it to changing circumstances” (Watt 75) Thus what we see in “ink blot blues” are aspects of scribal flexibility, as one can see from the website, not all of the leaf’s required a change of ink, specifically in the example of UCR 009.
However even the fascinating features of the scribal hand seem rivaled by the hole in the Vellum which immediately commands attention. Drawing from Kay’s ideas on holes in Vellum stemming from Derrida's discussion of vagination I argue that the hole in UCR 007 is actually a very arresting feature of the manuscript and instance of it’s restlessness, it’s unfolding nature. “The holes and the first half of the word voluptatibus (pleasures of the flesh) are roughly on a line with the genital area of the hyenas” (Kay 71). The argument Kay makes here is that there is much more going on in these manuscripts, physically and sexually than our previous frameworks and expectations have allowed for. While Kay’s example stands as rather stark proof towards her reading of hole’s in manuscripts; as exhibiting a certain scribal intentionality and playful treatment of eroticism; my example is rather less phenomenal. That said, one must admit that the hole is both memorable and arresting at least in so far as visual disruption and also in terms of the manuscripts production. Insofar as the hole’s origin, they came about as a result of the pages having been scraped by moon like blades. “The crescent shaped knife was called a lunellum and occurs in medieval pictures of parchment makers as their most recognizable tool, and is used to give both surfaces a really thorough scraping, especially the flesh side of the skin” (Hamel 6).
By my reading, the hole in the Vellum grants as much unique physicality to the leaf as the scribal hand or the lack of tassel/seal/pendant, especially since these aspects are all missing from UCR 007. There is something to this hole; something that Bernath also must contend with in her letter by letter transcription. As one can see from “Obfuscation and Textual Resistance” section of my omeka site, the hole is ambiguous and may have come either before or after John Arnott’s procurement and use of the Velum for this manuscript, although I will hear offer the assertion that this hole almost certainly came about from the production stage and likely as a result of the use of the Lunellumtool Hamel discusses in Scribes and Illuminators. Hamel points out that “if pushed too hard it can cut through the skin by mistake,and this energetic fast scraping requires a surprising delicacy of touch and experience” (Hamel 11). Scribes would then write around such imperfections, as I believe must have been the case for John Arnott in UCR 007. As one can see in "Obfuscations and Tetual Resistance" the hole in the Vellum here is carefully incorporated into the experience of the manuscript as it unfurls across in the skin side in Arnott’s elaborately decorative court hand. Paper production was labor intensive and involved costly materials, those holes which we discover do not connote a lack of value to the manuscript but rather teach the true value of each tiny facet of the manuscript itself.
I take special care to draw attention to the fact that there are the vague shapes of letter strokes either ending or beginning near the hole’ edges and also provide Bernath’s work. Bernath’s empty brackets hearken back to this urge to employ visualization techniques in knowledge production during work with medieval manuscripts. The empty brackets in many senses truly embody the absence left by a hole in a manuscript, offering not even interpretation of absence but rather the presence of abscence. Kay often points towards this urge or tactic of embodiment through visualization in her explorations of the German manuscript Morgan Ms.182 where gaps in Vellum are described as “<HOLE>” (Kay 77) in their transcriptions. Kay finds this desire to express what mere omission might not convey as a faithfulness to the complex visual presence of Bestiaries in her discussion. To omit the hole’s reduces the experience of the authentic in successive adaptations that might come from this transcription, drawing attention to absence on the other hand provides reproductions with the potential offer new ways of interpreting. “Not only is nature sex and sex nature but the appearance of each natura is magnified for the reader's enjoyment” (Kay 11). Thus the point of the pages were that their visuality could teach, express, emote or at least share something which text alone could not, and care was given to that fact even as the original format was lost during the process of transcribing.
Faithfulness to visuality pays homage to original manuscript style and knowledge experiences; the process honors the initial rituals invoked by the art in question. To my reading either the implementation of empty brackets or the evocation of the loud <HOLE> both offer faithful treatment of the manuscript’s physicality in regards to these holes. Just as “Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest” by Andre Bazin does not argue for shot by shot recreations of novel but instead a certain authorial control on the part of the director themselves through drawing a distinction between form and style so too should a skillful reproduction of a manuscript incorporate not so much the original meaning of the words alone but of the entire experience in it’s completeness. So while Bazin would argue, “Form is at most a sign, a visible manifestation, of style” (Bazin 20) and thereby emphasizing the experience over the medium. It is important to understand that the style of thing is that which is transmitted in reproduction and then the form changing case to case. Therefore if the style in question becomes the medieval folding Almanac and the form becomes it’s manuscriptness as such (it’s literal existence on Vellum in an archive), a faithful adaptation of the Almanac must be able to incorporate it’s folding and unfurling nature into it’s reproduction as well as expressing the physicality through some new kind of embodiment; features which are lost in the archive and ignored in the facsimile. What is lost is the “difference of colour…[and the] scalloped curve which was the neck of the animal” (Hamel 15); we cannot put smell into html, we can not yet build three dimensional hairs at the microscopic level per se. And so these items of what Bazin would call forms must change to maintain the residue of historicity that they embody, the unique experience that the style is capable of. A website becomes the perfect site for this as it’s multiplicity of mediums can be used to create a pastiche of the medieval even as it presents novel mediums of interaction.
In later work on my project I had thought of employing hyperlink techniques in the transcription or text wrapped images, but at present these attempts were resulting in too far a departure for tacit comprehension. Instead I offer extensive metadata in addition to lengthy commentary in regards to each image or object in my exhibit. This can be found on both the pages of my exhibit as well as in the file pages for each image, video and file I’ve uploaded to Omeka... Thus even in transcription, the hole in the Vellum still arrests our gaze and sets us into contemplation, and later in code they will swim before our vision by appearing through the hyperlinks on the screen.
Then having witnessed tears, holes, dirt, grime, hair, differences in ink and the steps I take to account for them; one also notices the well worn folds which delineate squared sections into the otherwise unordered leaf. These are the residue of true usage which speak to the furling nature of the land grants. The folds are important to our conceptions of this form and they are a major piece of Silva’s argument regarding Deleuzian notions of “un/folding affordances as contiguous” (Silva 20). As Deleuze rejects the binary of open/closed, he allows for a nuanced interpretation of folds as a means of discussing the continual motion or lack of linearity to interactions with text. As Silva eloquently states, “The unfolding of knowledge is an ongoing, continuous, and contiguous practice” (Silva 21). In other words our relationality to the text as embodied object knowledge as perpetually unfolding rather than a linear process changes as a result of it’s structure as a folded thing. “Thinking of TEXT in this way – as the whole object in its complexity – does away with the confusing multivalency of how to talk about versions of texts evinced in scholarship in recent decades” (Treharne 5). We are called to engage with the Almanac as we might scroll or book roll, in it’s unfurling physicality, to remove oneself from this embodiment removes oneself from a specific kind of knowledge making. The form in question remains mired in traditional conceptions of simplicity which then affect it’s potentiality and diminish the language, land and history that such seemingly anonymous items have to offer “Folding Almanacs are satisfyingly straightforward to date” (Carey 352); while Carey works more specifically with lunar dates and not so much with land grants, I think the flippant assumptions she makes regarding the so-called obvious simplicity of the Almanac echo sentiments of traditional approaches and demonstrate the need for new scholarship like that of Silva’s which allow for new potential in the study of folded Almanac.
Carey’s flattening approach negates the most crucial aspect of the folded Almanac even as it acknowledges it; she speaks of the content quite splendidly but ignores the physicality of the form completely. To my mind this flippant assumption not only reveals much of what is missing from Almanac Studies but also echoes certain flattening assumptions made my multi-modal theorists such as Hayles. “Yet when writing was accomplished by a quill pen, ink pot, and paper, it was possible to fantasize that writing was simple straightforward” (Hayles ix). Though Hayles is certainly ahead of the game in her work in the collection Comparing Textual Media insofar as her approaches towards digital media, comparative approaches, multi-modality and interface theory, however she assumes too much about the Medieval period in her remark. As Treharne states, the tensions within digital approaches are sometimes as concerned with what the digital will erase as with what it shall afford. “But a new emphasis on materiality is not all there is to this simultaneous hope and anxiety, for in that sense, some of the capabilities of the digital enhance the material constituency of objects far beyond what has ever been possible previously” (Treharne 7). This is to say that the capabilities of the digital can exceed those of the original product in certain, but not all circumstances. This is why I bothered to include Bazin and Benjamin in a discussion that might otherwise have been more succinct without them; so far as I can tell these theorists offer excellent treatments adaptations, or shifts between mediums that maintain the crucial aspects of the original. And while Hayles statement speaks volumes about the assumption scholars make when working with Medieval manuscripts whose archived pages no longer demonstrate the unreadable sense of play and concern that went into the construction of manuscripts. I do not only mean this in regards to the mere physicality itself as in the way Hamel works with in his discussion of Scribes and paper makers, “Parchment, like leather responds well to movement and can lose suppleness if untouched for centuries” (Hamel 13), where his focus is upon the minutiae of the medium in regards to construction and maintenance. Hamel’s discussion allows for further exploration of manuscripts as embodied, the fact of the leaf’s requiring a certain amount of contact over time in order to maintain shape and form certainly speaks volumes on this note and even seems to invoke a sense of Animism. This would present a worthy and fruitful vein of research to be certain, and one not necessarily researched enough; however I speak instead to what the medium in question does to readership, to knowledge making and the ways in which this can problematize assumptions of the straightforwardness of the medieval Almanac. In other words the way in which both physicality and content come together to create a peculiar and unique knowledge making experience.
Clasping the word Delight to her breast, was a sign of temptation, delight in the flesh rather than the spirit.’ Instead, what seems clear is the visual emphasis on the connection between the user of the text and God, an interconnection dependent on the sense of touch and embodied perception (Treharne 472).
By holding delight close to the chest, the subject highlights this realm over the pleasures of the afterlife- but this is the flattened approach which denied the field of Medieval Manuscripts the thorough and embodied treatment that this style of text demands. What Treharne is able to point out here is that the Medieval conception of knowledge production was not one that could exist or occur without the complex interaction of physical presence Treharne also highlights exactly what Hayles ignores in her discussion of embodiment especially when considered in conjunction with Silva’s argument regarding Deleuzian unfurling restlessness; ideas of interconnection remain tied to embodiment and interface. As we have dealt in issues of embodiment throughout the course of my discussion it comes as no surprise that the embodied perception remained crucial to the use of medieval texts. Yet this is lost in our age as our manuscripts and folios remain locked away in stasis; archives of blindness bless us with preservation but damn us with multiplicities of alienation.
There remains thus such great need in the field for incorporating new forms of embodiment in order to return to more faithful interactions with texts we ourselves are both called to and condemned not to touch, taste, smell, feel or hear. Yet again, the idea of working through the issues of or facing textual embodiment are also the issues of adaptation and translation, of sharing and knowledge construction. While examining issues in “Piers Plowman” whose reproduction “tells the story of reproduction in all its senses, as duplication, as proliferation, as simulation, as replication” (Echard 2). With the image of the plow, the eventual use of facsimiles led to remarkable and drastic changes from the original towards what was experienced later and yet still referred to as medieval, as original.
Another way to consider the need for this is in Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” wherein similar to Bazin’s discussion of Adaptation, Benjamin seeks to isolate what aspects of language ought to be preserved or even can be preserved when text undergoes translation. For my purposes I want to highlight the idea of liviness or non-inert language embodied in translations; in this case first transcribing from Secretary Script to contemporary English and then that English into as many languages as possible. The task of translating brings life and energy to languages that are not spoken or understood by many scholars let alone lay persons, as such I hope that by offering numerous recursive translations can itself be seen as giving my digital project the unfurling restlessness attributed to the Almanac form. “Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own” (Benjamin 256) This is to say that translation gives life to, resuscitates the dead insofar as it brings the life of the present into a discussion with the world of the past. Translation becomes a force which reifies and whose potentiality must be explored in terms of it’s success in regards to the original. “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (Benjamin 5). The original manuscript maintains the residue of this history in the manner of it’s patterns of use. For my purposes the originality of the folding Almanac is important because it allows for the spatial dimensions of Scotland, a land that faced erasure of language and identity. In many ways the land becoming “lost” to one conquerer or another.
St. Andrews itself as a spatial element adds to this conversation as I now know that the scribe John Arnott had been working as court registrar there at the time of UCR 007’s creation. As Ian Campbell points out in his exploration of the space of St. Andrews, the place is meant to rival Rome and therefore England as well. “The Scottish Church and crown resisted such claims vigorously and one bishop of St Andrews around 1100 was already styling himself archbishop without papal sanction” (Campbell 39). That the Bishop of St. Andrews should try to usurp such power without papal authority to back him up indeed illustrates a propensity among scots for self governance and independence. This in turn connects back to land and therefore the manuscripts in my case study as each is a land grant and land was a primary means of expressing control over Scotland especially through Sheriffs collecting additional taxes from their domains. “Small ferms’ were anual renders paid by the estate or piece of land to the king” (Taylor 368). While Alice Taylor is mainly discussing issues of authority in the governance of medieval Scotland, her discussion in “Accounting and Revenue” a chapter from The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124-1290 helps set the stage for my exploration of land grants that occur much later in the history of Scotland. Taylor presents a well informed and thoroughly researched discussion of the precise structure and mechanisms of state as it existed at the time, outlining even the amount of cows the king might receive as a result of the revenue raised by a specific Sheriff in a specific Sheriffdom. See her “Table 6.1 Revenue received in kind in account of the sheriff of Forfar, 1264… Cows - 24 (Forfar) 13 & ½ (Glamis)...” (Taylor 370). As we can see, a vast amount of Scottish wealth and labor is made to flow directly out of Scottish lands, for the benefit of the crown and then taxed yet again for the further benefit of the crown. From this display of taxes and land usage stems a complexity I did not receive when viewing the manuscript in the archive. Only through research and digital reproduction have I been able to return to these social and spatial aspects. As Jessica Brantley states in the Hayles collection Comparing Textual Media,
The multiplicity of medieval media and their complex intermedial interactions offer a reminder that media forms are always shifting fundamentally in horizontal ways, based on spatial and social landscapes. (Hayles 203)
This issue of multiplicity has been at stake throughout the course of my discussion as this is what I fight against when I discuss archives of blindness and facsimilation as resulting in a flattening of comprehension in the field of medieval folded Almanacs. Multiplicity is as important to comprehension as the experience of the manuscripts spatial aspects and also serves as an extension of that physicality once we understand the Almanac's position as both traveling (See Whearty’s Summoner as carrying my manuscript at their belt) and unfurling (Deleuze). But Brantley is onto so much more than just these ideas of multiplicity in her discussion as she ultimately speak to landscapes of space and of social spheres which cannot be recovered without recursive techniques. Since I am operating within the framework that Hayle’s collection brings about I also engage with Rita Raley’s sentiments on materialism. “The digital has given rise to a series of discourses that struggle to articulate its paradoxical distance and disconnect with the ultimately unavoidable truth that nothing in this world is ever truly immaterial” (Hayles 58). Raley does more hear than merely tell us that what was old is now new again; not only does Raley hint towards the fact that techniques specific to Medieval Manuscripts come to new use in the digital, she also argues that the digital’s presence presents a paradigm whose shift is too inexorable to deny. Echoing Raley, I find new embodiment in the digital through my Omeka site. Understanding that the distances we face in research can be breached by digital techniques employing recursive strategies I supply the multiplicity of medieval media in a combination of forms and techniques. In my translation of the Bernath letter for letter study, I bring the text to the reader by making the archaic intelligible to the contemporary. However I understand that this does not recover lost spatial and social dimensions and for this reason I offer comprehensive and painstaking accounts of variations in feature across the four leaf’s in my case study.
The site is structured such that one examines each leaf, one leaf at a time but in a multiplicity of medias simultaneously. When viewing UCR 006 one first encounters a close up video clip of pricking which then gives way into a quote from special collections detailing their summary information on the manuscript. From here the viewer finds images of close ups on the seal which complicate their viewing. Even the first wide shot of the manuscript is obfuscated by the placement of a magnifying glass in the center of the frame. A caption reads “A quick shot to place you in the archive with the magnifying glass over the leaf. Note the size of the seal in relation to the rest of the manuscript” but then we do not receive access to a clean wide shot until after the viewer has scrolled to the bottom of the web page.
These repeated in each leaf’s section and then applied anew in the “Obfuscations and Textual Resistance” and “Ink Blot Blues” sections. I take these steps out of deference to the ideas expressed in Graphesis which warns, “Demographics with complex human factors become starkly simplified and reduced graphic statements that conceal as much as they reveal” (Drucker 89). In her visualizations Drucker remains able to tell a story or communicate information/ participate in knowledge creation regardless of the presence of text and cautions her readers against employing visuals which fail to accomplish this and therefore risk reducing comprehension rather than taking it to new levels.
If we understand bodily and sensory boundaries to be sites of extension, as Deleuze believes they are––composed of endless unfurling folds, a restless aggregation of the countless microperceptions that connect ourselves to the world around us––then our interaction with the digital manuscript becomes far more provocative (Silva 25).
If our bodies and senses are places of extension, then the digital becomes a means of affording placement to these countless folds or perceptions connection subject to world and world to subject. The digital gains the potential of increased provocativity as it allows a return to the kinds of physicality and embodiment evident in the original usage of manuscripts; website can offer multiple views of the same page from myriad angles all at the same time, mine also incorporates audio components to aid with the experience of translation and works to recover lost language in this manner as well. The actual musical quality of Middle English -especially in poetry - is born again alongside the clear and easy access provided by a modern translation of the Middle English. When the manuscript is read out loud in the original language of the document, countless ages of history are brought back to life in the act of translating page to speech creating the sense of life the Benjamin speaks to in “The Task of the Translator”. Wherein the dead language of the manuscript is both literally and metaphorically reconstructed,first through the Bernath work, then through my translation to english, then again in Grant palmer’s performance of the Middle English, then again in my subsequent translation to contemporary German and Spanish and my subsequent performance of these.
In each case new life is brought to the manuscript through a change of state between its original form and it’s newly translated or adapted digital form. I take the Bazin notion of form and style and apply that to my website, positing the folded nature of the Almanac as its style and its position on Vellum, in an archive as it’s form. My goals are accomplished as I remove the style of the document from the form that restrains its potential by protecting it’s aura of authenticity. Thanks to Silva’s work with Deleuze I may engage with the digital and the Almanac as if they are each sites of unfurling which then engage with each other generativity, promoting new ways of interacting with Medieval Manuscripts as living items, newly embodied in the digital.
Works Cited
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