House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts
- Author/Editor
- Echard, Siân
- Title
- House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts
- Published
- Echard, Siân. "House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), pp. 185-210. ISSN 1082-9636
- Review
- Echard's essay is not concerned with Gower directly nor even with the scribes who produced the manuscripts of his works, but instead with our own engagement with and response to Gower and how these are mediated by the conditions in which his manuscripts are now housed and preserved. Drawing upon her own experiences with a wide range of libraries but focusing in particular on two copies of "Confessio Amantis" (Columbia University, MS Plimpton 265 and Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M690), she offers a number of loosely connected observations on "how archival practices and archival encounters structure and control our reading of medieval books and the texts that they contain” (p. 186). Gower is an ideal object for exploring the paradoxes of preservation, for as Echard points out, his manuscripts are often valued either for their ornate production or for the author’s association with Chaucer by those who have little interest in reading his text. She places the present conditions of preservation of medieval books in contrast both to the use to which these manuscripts were put by their original owners and also to the habits and interests of the antiquarians and collectors who acquired many of the most important of the manuscripts that are now found on the west side of the Atlantic. Were it not for the collectors and their archivist descendants, she acknowledges, many fewer copies would be available to us now, yet the conditions imposed by the necessity of preservation make our modern encounter with medieval books entirely different in nature from that of their owners, who both used them in the best sense of the word and also often abused them. Nowadays “one worships at the altar of the manuscript; one does not doodle on it” (p. 189). In a historical aside, Echard traces the mixed motives of the antiquarians who replaced the owner-readers, including “nostalgia, competition, and the commodification of culture” (p. 194) as well as, in some instances, a genuine interest in history and in preserving the past. Even the efforts of the collectors are now effaced, however, as manuscripts are kept apart from the rooms in which they are read and are offered to readers individually, in isolation from the collection of which they were made a part. Each of us who has experienced a frisson in the presence of one of these ancient books will understand Echard’s remarks on how our reverence amounts to a kind of fetishization, complete with the creation of a priesthood (ourselves) with unique rights of access to the sacred objects. She gives some consideration to the ways in which librarians can impose their own assumptions about the value of a book: in foliation, for instance, privileging either the text itself, the original material form, or the present material form (the prevalent modern practice); or giving greater attention to the illustration than to the text. And in looking to the future, she contemplates a final paradox: that the digitization of an increasing number of manuscripts may make them more widely available in one sense while perhaps also resulting in greater restriction of access to the actual physical book. Echard has no single conclusion to offer but instead simply requires us to think about our own assumptions and practices in a way that we might not have before. Her essay is provocative and often entertaining. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 20.1.]
- Date
- 2000
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies