On Medieval Manuscripts, or, the love for the long forgotten
Sexy Codicology Turns one. Time to stop and look back at the reason why this project started.
Why does someone like manuscripts so much? Well, it depends. In my case it’s the feeling I get when I sit in front of a manuscript that is hundreds (or even a thousand!) years old. Every time i sit in front of one, I can’t help myself from thinking: “Damn! Some eight-hundred, nine-hundred years ago, there was someone who was sitting in my place; pen in one hand, knife in the other; writing this book!”.
Every letter written down is to me not just a testimony of the need to transmit a text in the medieval age; it’s a sign left behind by an actual person that lived centuries ago. Every single letter is unique, unrepeatable and irreplaceable. Every single page is a complete piece of art work to itself; no matter how “scruffy” the script written down is! Hell, I wrote my MA thesis about a quite ugly manuscript, but all the small details I came across, all the mistakes done by the scribes, the following corrections in the margins plus the annotations spacing through 500 years of history made me think that I was looking at something more than a very old medical manuscript. What I was really felt i was admiring was a message left behind by scribes 1000 years ago: “This is our work. You better write a decent Thesis out of this”.
From time to time I would have the feeling that the ghost of those scribes were behind me, whispering to me where the fascinating details were. After months of work, I was still finding small details that meant nothing to anyone, but to me, they were everything. Even today, while i look at my very personal “digitized edition” of that manuscript, I come across a detail I had not noticed at the time (which ultimately lead to the fact that my thesis is full of gaps, makes no sense and proposes the extreme idea that my manuscript wondered around half Europe while it was being written. Howe proposed the theory of “wondering scribes”. I propose the wondering manuscripts…lol).
The scribes who wrote my manuscript are probably rolling in their tombs laughing their a** off (RITTLTAO? ROFLMAO?) reading what I think they did. But, deep inside, I like to believe that they are pleased that someone, 1000 years after their ordeal, was looking at their work and spending time trying to understand what they did and thought that it was important.
See? Once you have a taste of this “looking back into the barely known”, you don’t want to let it go any more. It spreads like in the disease into your brain. From that moment on, every manuscript you will come across will get your mind going with the same questions over and over again: “Who wrote this? Why? When? Why did he write it like that? What did the illuminator draw it like that?”. It’s pure curiosity.
This is a feeling I would like to share and the reason why Sexy Codicology was born. I believe it’s important that these treasures that are hundreds or thousands of years old get out of their boxes, hidden in libraries’ bunkers, and go out there in front of the eyes of those for whom these books were written and decorated: the readers’ eyes. No matter if these eyes are looking at them 600/700/1000 years after the facts on computer screens. Scribes and illuminators will still be proud.
Post scriptus est.
