This blog post was originally conceived as a contribution to Now You See It Now You Don’t: Sustainable Access in a Digital Age, an event organized by the Bodleian Library and held on Zoom on February 7, 2024. Although my name appears in the list of contributors, I caught the flu that week and wasn’t able to attend. But I was prepared, and even though I’ve no doubt other people there said similar things, I wanted to post this for FOMO if for no other reason. This post consists of screenshots of my slides, and accompanying notes that explain my points further.
Welcome to my talk, “Collections Sharing as a form of Digital Collections Security.” Thank you to Laura Morreale and Stewart Brookes for inviting me. I come to the group as a curator whose responsibilities include premodern manuscripts and digital collections, so the effects of the shutdown at the British Library, particularly the inaccessibility of their manuscripts for the duration, was of particular interest to me and was felt strongly in my circles.
One of the benefits of digital collections over physical collections is that digital collections can be copied, and these copies can exist in many places at once. By Collection Sharing I mean digital collections from one institution (in the medieval manuscript world, this usually means: digital copies of manuscripts owned by that institution) being shared and available in systems at other institutions, in a way not dependent on the systems of the original institution. For reasons of sustainability, that last point is important (and it means that IIIF systems don’t count). In order to enable Collection Sharing, institutions need to rethink their licensing, reconsider what “our collections” are (i.e., expanding “our collection” from only those things that we physically own) and cultivate a willingness to share their own digital materials.
Collection Sharing is pretty popular. The Internet Archive includes copies of many institution’s digital collections, including the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, which includes over 450 digitized manuscripts from institutions around Philadelphia.
While the British Library collections aren’t in the Internet Archive, they have been known to practice Collection Sharing. The Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts, for example, are not only available through the BL’s website, but they’re also able to be downloaded through the BL’s data repository.
Vitally, these collections are all in the public domain. This means there are no licensing restrictions on them, and anyone is free to use them however they wish.
This means that both individuals and other institutions, such as the National Library of Israel, can download the images and metadata for those manuscripts and make them available in their own systems. If the BL library systems go down, these manuscripts are still available through the National Library of Israel.
The University of Pennsylvania hosts OPenn, which is a website containing raw digital data (images and metadata) for manuscripts that Penn owns and also collections owned by other institutions. All materials on OPenn are in the public domain or released under Creative Commons licenses as Free Cultural Works.
As it happens, Penn also has a pretty great collection of Judaica manuscripts; as of the date of posting, 245 manuscripts in OPenn are from the Library of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn, and there are more Judaica holdings in other collections at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts (which is the umbrella unit for both the Katz Center Library and SIMS). (Search for cajs in this page.)
OPenn contains the Katz Center collection, the Kislak collections, and collections for other institutions as well. For example, OPenn includes items from the archives of Congregation Mikveh Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in Philadelphia dating from the 1740s. This collection and others contribute to the collection development priorities of the Kislak Center–the holding institutions keeps the original materials and gains digital copies, and we get digital copies, too.
Since the Hebrew collections at the BL are in the Public Domain, and since they also serve the Judaica collection development interests of the Kislak Center, in 2019 we decided to include them in OPenn, too. We downloaded the metadata and images from the BL data repository, converted their TEI into spreadsheets which we imported into our system and then converted back into OPenn TEI, and loaded everything into OPenn. This is a video scrolling through the record for BL Add MS 11668.
Now the BL’s Hebrew manuscripts are part of OPenn’s collections. They fit in with the Kislak Judaica collections, and they are licensed in a way that suits OPenn’s requirement that included materials be Free Cultural Works.
Collection Sharing as described in this post isn’t exactly new. Some of you may be familiar with LOCKSS, Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Unlike Collection Sharing, which relies on the host library’s collection development interests and using existing infrastructure to serve shared materials in the same way the host shares their own materials, LOCKSS is primarily a set of shared technologies that distribute files for digital preservation.
I hope more institutions consider sharing and hosting their digital collections. If your institution’s systems crash, it’s good to know that your collections will be available elsewhere.
Tumblr was borking so I am posting the show notes over here this week. Hopefully eventually I will be able to move this over to the IMFM Tumblr, but for now, welcome to my blog!
In Episode 15 of Inside My Favorite Manuscript, Dot chats with Jo Koster about women’s literacy in the later middle ages, focusing on women as writers and consumers of prayer. We focus on Bodleian Holkham Misc. 41, a prayerbook written by a woman for her religious community, but our conversation ranges into issues of manuscript digitization and the pressures of scholarship (and we have a brief visit with Lindsey, who wasn’t able to make it to the recording but lurks in the background).
Oxford University, Bodleian Library, Holkham Misc. 41 (no online record). Unless otherwise indicated, all images of this manuscript are digital copies of a black and white microfilm copy made in 1983.
Penn’s “Chaucer Poems manuscript” (does not actually contain Chaucer) is Ms. Codex 902
The first leaf from Holkham Misc. 41, scan from a microfilm (L), with colors inverted in order to make the text more legible (R)
Two more leaves from Holkham Misc. 41 (it’s a little hard to tell in the microfilm, but the pages have been cropped, removing part of the decoration from the top and the bottom of the pages)
The dark areas in the following four photos are due to mildew damage.
Pages from Bodleian Library MS. Lat. liturg. e. 17. Original text from the manuscript, written in the early 15th century, on the top, additions which were added later in the century – and in which the name “Iohanna” appears – on the bottom. (You can see a few letters from the earlier text on the edge of the photo of the later text, from the facing page.)
A note in Manuscript 24 at Holkham Hall stating that this book was loaned to an anchoress at Polesworth Abbey at the request of Dame Jane Knyghtley.
Leaf with the mentions of Catholic leaders blotted out with ink, done after Henry VIII, followed by an attempt to uncover the text (using Photoshop)
Front flyleaf includes Thomas William Coke’s bookplate and the handwritten shelfmark for the Bodleian Library.
The tomb of the Knyghtleys (including Dame Jane, or perhaps her mother)
De Brailes Hours, the earliest surviving book of hours from England.
Image of a manuscript, generated in MidJourney by Suzette van Haaren
I’ve been trying all morning to figure out what bothers me about these Mid journey-generated manuscripts without simply sounding like a Luddite, and I think I finally have it.
It’s because my interest in manuscripts is almost entirely about the humanity behind them. Who made them? Who used them and why? What happened to them after they were made? Where are they now? What did they mean in the past and what do they mean now?
A computer generated book doesn’t have any of that context. I’ve talked about the uncanny valley with regard to digitized manuscripts, and this is that, one step further. It’s one thing to digitize a manuscript in a way that elides its materiality, and a whole other thing to create manuscripts that don’t exist materially at all.
I think there are potentially interesting ways to use AI in my work. I’m interested in structure, and have been part of a project, VisColl, to develop models and software to build models of manuscripts. Could AI be used to combine structural models and digital images to create photorealistic imagery of existing manuscripts? Imagine an AI reconstruction of manuscripts cut apart and distributed by Otto Ege. Could it even generate pages that are lost as semi-realistic placeholders?
Just a few thoughts. I’m less interested in generating realistic looking manuscripts than in the potential to leverage the technology to help us understand the use and history of manuscripts that exist in the real world.
Added: If you’d like to hear me talk more about manuscripts and humanity, check out Coffee With A Codex, a weekly 30-minute program both live and posted to YouTube where I present a show-and-tell with books from the University of Pennsylvania’s premodern manuscript collections, and Inside My Favorite Manuscript, a weekly podcast I do in my own time where I talk to people who love manuscripts about manuscripts they love the most.
Presented in the session Materiality of Manuscripts III: The Codex at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK July 5, 2022
Good morning, good afternoon. Thank you to Katarzyna and Kıvılcım for organizing these sessions on Materiality of Manuscripts for IMC 2022. I’m Dot Porter and I’m going to talk about modeling the historical manuscript theory and practice.
As a curator, I’m interested in making all of our manuscripts available at the same level. Oftentimes, descriptive information about manuscripts, particularly diagrams and charts, are in books that are focused on individual manuscripts. Manuscript catalogs don’t tend to include structural visualizations except perhaps when something highly unusual needs to be described. I’ve long found that detailed visualizations the structure of manuscripts are helpful to me, and as a curator, I’m interested in seeing if we can provide them not only for high status items, but for whole collections.
Catalogs – documents that describe many manuscripts at about the same level – have not always treated structural description in a serious way. This is a description of a manuscript from the 1802 catalog of the manuscripts in the Cottonian library in the British Museum. The manuscript is Cotton Claudius b. iv, which is a very beautiful and complex 11th century illustrated manuscript.
The description in the 1802 catalog is only three paragraphs, quite short, and the physical description is the first couple of lines. What this says is, it’s a codex – multiple quires – it’s made of parchment, it has 156 folios, and there’s a leaf that has been mutilated. This is the extent of the physical description of the manuscript in 1802.
Jumping ahead, to 1957 we have this same manuscript described in Ker’s catalog of manuscripts containing Anglo Saxon. The entire description is much longer. The physical description, likewise, and we see that a major part of the physical description is a collation formula. You all know what a collation formula is, it’s the standard way of describing then physical structure of books in a sort of systematic way. I say sort of systematic because there’s not actually a standard for manuscript collation formulas, unlike printed books where there is a well-accepted standard. Although there’s not a standard way of writing formulas they all work in basically the same way – a formula will describe how many quires there are, how many leaves each quire has, perhaps a little bit about how they relate to each other. Frequently, there will also be additional information about structure in a narrative, describing leaves that are missing or weird things that are happening.
Jumping now from 1957 to 2022. Here is Ms. Cotton Claudius b. iv again on the BL website, and you can see that even though we have moved from print catalogs to online catalogs, to digitized manuscripts we’re still relying on the collation formula for structural description. Even though we’re here in the website, and the digitized images are right here, the structural information is still is divorced from the rest of the description.
Just one more example to further illustrate the point. E-codices, which is a really fantastic website featuring manuscripts in Switzerland also has collation formulas.
The digital images are presented as flat openings, as well as the usual views you would expect to see in a digitized manuscript library – gallery view, or filmstrip or microfilm style. There is no connection between the information provided in the formula and the way the images are organized on the screen.
There are some efforts that have been made to present structural information in digitized manuscript libraries. Most will include photos of the spine and edges, and some have started to provide even more. For example in e-codices, which has recently started including photos taken of the whole book in a kind of natural open setting.
But what about including structural information in the interface itself? This is the digital manuscript library at the University of Heidelberg. They have an option to view the quire structure up here. Here I’ve selected 27 recto, and up here you can see where leaf 27 is within the quire structure. It’s in quire five, and it’s the latter half of the bifolia that is one in from the middle bifolio. I think this is a really good visualization that provides some visual guide to the structure. It doesn’t seem to be used for very many manuscripts on their site, but this is a way to sort of bring that structure in and make it part of the interface.
Now I want to talk about the work we’ve been doing at Penn. Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis or BiblioPhilly was a region-wide collaborative project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), that we undertook in Philadelphia, from 2016 to 2019. Through BiblioPhilly the collaborative team representing 15 institutions digitized and made available online 475 manuscripts from collections across Philadelphia.
As part of our part of our cataloging work we leveraged a project that I have been directing at Penn pretty much since I arrived in 2013 – VisColl, which stands for visualizing collation.
At the time that we were starting the work on BiblioPhilly, we had just launched our alpha version of software that we could use to build collation models, and visualize them. So as part of our catalog, we – we being me, our manuscripts cataloger Amey Hutchins, Schoenberg Curator of Manuscripts Nick Herman, and some other people created a collation model for each manuscript not really knowing what we’re going to be doing with them, but hoping we would be able to do something.
As we reached the end of the project, Penn made funding available to the project to hire a software developer, and we worked with them to make an interface to present the project in its own purpose-built environment, including a visualization of the collation models. Now if you go to https://bibliophilly.library.upenn.edu/, on some of the records you’ll see this icon on the left and if you click on that, you’ll get a drop down, that shows you all of our quires and how many, how many leaves and how the leaves are arranged.
Selecting quire 13 we can see the bifolia going across from the outside to the bifolio that forms the facing page in the center of the quire. This is the outer bifolio – that is, the side of the bifolio that faces the outside of the quire when it’s closed, and then the inner, which faces inside, and in this example is the facing page in the center of the quire.
This is very interesting, but most collections aren’t going to have the resources to build a new interface just to display structural data in a visual way. It has the potential to be a huge undertaking, and we need other options.
This is Franklin, it’s the online public access catalogue for Penn. All the library’s materials are in here, manuscripts and printed books and ebooks, special collections and general collections, it’s all here.
Here is the record in Franklin for LJS 236, a medical miscellany written in Italy in the last half of the 15th century. At the top we have links to some different digital versions, including three different facsimiles – all the same image files but in different interfaces, including one in our Colenda Repository that is IIIF compliant. Further down there’s more of the record, including the contents and then notes, which includes a collation note with a formula and some additional description.
So we have images, we have a collation formula in Franklin, and as of September of last year we have VCEditor, the most recent software for building VisColl models. VCEditor is built on a system called VisCodex, which was developed at the University of Toronto at the Old Books New Science Lab under the direction of Alexandra Gillespie.
This April I spent a month at the University of Glasgow as a Visiting Research Fellow, and while I was there I build collation models in VCEditor for most of the pre-1700 manuscripts from their Hunterian Collection. Before I went I spent a lot of time building initial models from collation formulas from the 1908 print catalogue. That is, I did use the collation models, not as an endpoint but as a starting point. When I build models from a formula it is clear when there are issues. For example, when my model says there are some number of leaves in the model, but the record says the manuscript has some other number of leaves – that would need to be checked. So that checking is what I did in Glasgow, and I ended up with 293 total models, including 119 manuscripts that I checked in the reading room (that is, I was able to build 174 models that agreed with the formulas and descriptions, without checking against the manuscript).
That was a really good experience.
After returning to Penn in May I started on a pilot project to build models for our manuscripts. I’ve been using the same process I used for Glasgow, starting with formulas from our records as a starting point and then looking at looking at the manuscripts when it’s clear there are issues. An advantage for the pilot project is that unlike the Hunterian Collection, which is only partially digitized and very few of those are publicly available, the manuscripts at Penn are all digitized. This means I can load them into the initial model, and map them to the model. It can be really helpful to have the images as a guide – for example, sometimes you can see thread in the gutter, so you can check to see if you’re really in the middle of a quire, or if you need to reevaluate.
This is what the finished model of LJS 236 looks like in VCEditor. There are missing leaves, for example, and the contents have been mapped to the diagram.
The images have been mapped as well. There are a few different ways one can look at them. There’s the front and the back of the selected leaf, but one can also look at the inner side of the bifolo, and the outer side of it. You can see there’s the catch word at the end. That’s pretty cool.
There’s also a view only version so these can be made public and anybody can see them and click through and look at the images, but not edit it. VCEditor also makes many different outputs of the model data, including individual image files, one for each quire, in both PNG and SVG – these are just two different file formats that could be useful for different purposes, and these are designed for people to take and reuse. There is also a PDF file, which is a screenshot of the full model as viewed in VCEditor, and there is a PNG version of that as well.
Finally there is an XML file and a JSON file. These are data format files that represent the collation model in two different computer-readable languages. The json file is particularly important because that file can be loaded into the VCEditor. So if you have a JSON file for a manuscript, then you can upload it into VCEditor and then you can edit it, which could be useful if you’re doing research on a manuscript there is an error, or if you want to add information.
Right, so let’s bring this together. We have a collation model built in VCEditor and we have all of these files exported from VCEditor. We have the Colenda Repository, which serves manuscript images using IIIF. And then we have Franklin.
Along with links to facsimiles in Franklin, there is a link to a video orientation. This link takes us to a record in our institutional repository, ScholarlyCommons. From here one can download the video or watch the video embedded from YouTube. There is a Video Orientation playlist on YouTube, so one could also watch them there. But the important thing is that if YouTube goes away, the video would still be here, in the repository, and someone could still watch it.
For the pilot project we decided to take a similar approach – to store the data in ScholarlyCommons and then link from Franklin to the repository, instead of modifying the interface. We have set up a new collection in ScholarlyCommons, although we don’t have links yet to the records. This is part of the pilot project that is yet to come.
Here yet again we have a record for LJS 236. “Download Full Text” will download a PDF of the screenshot of VCEditor. Below that is a zip file that has everything in it. We scroll down, there’s a description of the manuscript and keywords, but then there is a comment section that lists all the files contained in the zip file along with brief instructions for how to load the JSON file and the IIIF manifest into VCEditor. There is also a link to the view only version in VCEditor. That may not always be there so we can’t depend on it to persist, but it’s a good thing to include for now.
Here is what the PDF looks like coming out of the repository – it has the opening page added by the system that includes a bit of information from the record, and then it just has the diagram.
Realistically I think most people will simply want to look at the diagram model presented in the PDF or the PNG file, but some people might want to make changes or build their own work on what we provide. I hope that this will be a way to make the data available to people who are really going to use that. This approach – using systems already available to us, and my own curatorial labor for building the models – is our way of making visual information easily available that I think is much more helpful and much more useful than a formula, and making it available at scale for a collection instead of just focusing it on a handful of manuscripts.
I want to normalize the inclusion of structural information as a basic part of the catalog, not only as collation formulas but in ways that include structural details and that bring together other information about the book, such as contents and illustrations – an acknowledgement through data that a manuscript is not just a bunch of pages, it’s a complex object with pieces linked to each other. You’re not going to see this when you’re looking at digitized copies in most digital libraries, and sometimes not even when you’re looking at the book unless you’re really paying attention.
My hope is, with the availability of VCEditor and examples of incorporating structural data into catalogs and interfaces such as Bibliophilly, Heidelberg, and this project at Penn, that more institutions will consider how they might include visual data in addition to formulas in their existing systems.
Good afternoon, and thank you everyone for coming today. Thanks especially to Heather and John for inviting me today, and for organizing the workshop. I was only able to sit in on parts of it but I learned a lot and I especially appreciated the obvious joy and pleasure that everyone took in the lectures and the hands-on exercises.
I am a librarian and curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS), which is a research and development group in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve been at Penn, at SIMS, for eight years, since SIMS was founded in 2013. The work we do at SIMS is focused broadly on medieval manuscripts and on digital medieval manuscripts – we have databases we host, we work with the physical collections in the library, we collaborate on a number of projects hosted at other institutions. Anything manuscript related, we’re interested in. My personal research interests revolve around what happens when we digitize manuscripts and then view them virtually, and how different theories and frames can help us design better interfaces.
So it may not be a surprise that I want to start my talk today with a brief discussion of what the digitization of a manuscript does, and how it affects our perceptions of manuscripts.
Demo of manuscript photography in the upper right corner, digitized images in a page-turning interface in the middle.
Essentially, manuscript digitization involves taking photographs of each physical element of the book – each page, the covers, flyleaves, and – preferably – spine, top, bottom and foredges, metadata describing both the analog manuscript and various aspects of the digitization (including information about the camera, the time and circumstances the photos were taken in, and structural metadata that describes the order of the various pieces in reference to the original) and then storing that somewhere for future use. What kind of use? Well, usually – for institutional digitization – there is software provided for what we in the business call “end users” which interprets the data and metadata and arranges everything into some kind of interface. The interface is the thing that mediates your interaction with a digitized manuscript.
The Hamilton Book of Hours (Library Company of Philadelphia Ms. 24), in the BiblioPhilly interface
Most interfaces are fairly basic. This screenshot is Library Company Ms. 24 presented through the BiblioPhilly interface, which was built two years ago after the completion of a three-year project, the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, which was funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources to digitize and make available as Free Cultural Works the medieval and early modern manuscript holdings of the institutions in Philadelphia. We ended up digitizing over 475 codices and many more individual leaves, and we partnered with Byte Studios in Milwaukee to build this interface. These screenshots show a Gallery View (where thumbnails are displayed in a grid) and the Collation View, which includes structural diagrams of each quire and allows users to arrange digital images by conjoined leaves instead of by openings.
I’m showing all this to start to get us thinking about the concept of transformation. Manuscript digitization is one example of how we transform manuscripts: through digitization we deconstruct manuscripts, breaking them virtually into individual pages and providing metadata about the object they represent and then combining that with structural metadata, which enables us to then reconstruct some kind of digital version of the physical object. As the example of the collation view implies, it’s possible to have multiple digital versions of an object, focused on different aspects of the physical object (in this case we provide both a page-turning view that mimics the experience of paging through the manuscript, and a collation view that shows us how the manuscript would appear if we were to take it apart, as well as providing diagrams that would not be available to us if we were just using the manuscript in the reading room.
Nick Herman, SIMS Curator of Manuscripts, with Ms. Codex 1566, a Book of Hours, Use of Metz
For the rest of my talk I want to think about another kind of transformation: the textual and physical transformation inherent in a group of manuscripts that dominated the manuscript trade for 250 years during the middle ages and into the Renaissance – Books of Hours. What are books of hours? I will say much more about their history later in my talk, but to start (and to give us an excuse to look at a beautiful little book for a few minutes, courtesy of my colleague Nick Herman),
Christian devotional book popular in the middle ages (particularly in the 15-16th centuries
Personal devotion
Most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript
Designed to bring monastic practice into the private home
Representation of personal wealth
Books of hours were personal, frequently personalized books, and they were prized and, dare I say, loved by their owners. And that’s how we come to the concept of the transformative work.
I am not ashamed to admit that I love things, some things quite deeply. I love my family, obviously, but there are other things that bring me joy. One of them is medieval manuscripts. The other one is Star Wars. I’m what is referred to as a fan. A fanatic. I watch the movies and TV shows, I read and write fan fiction, I participate in fandom activities on and offline, and I encourage other fans to create transformative works.
I’ve been able to combine my loves together in various ways too, including, in 2019, collaborating on a series of videos with another medievalist and Star Wars fan, Dr. Brandon Hawk at Rhode Island College, in which we compared manuscripts from Penn’s collections with the “Ancient Jedi texts” shown in The Last Jedi. We have continued that work to include the manuscripts from The Rise of Skywalker and from other Star Wars properties, and we’ll be presenting this Fall at the Books on Screen Symposium organized by the Association of Adaptation Studies.
So this project is another opportunity for me to combine my great loves – my love of manuscripts and my love of Star Wars, specifically my love of the fandom. And I don’t use that word lightly: Love. I don’t think we talk enough about how emotions drive us, positive and negative emotions, individually and in groups, and how they influence what we study. So when I was looking for frames through which to examine digital manuscripts – which is the genesis of the project I’m telling you about today – the frame of “Transformative Work” was a particularly attractive one. I wasn’t satisfied with my first attempts to apply this frame to digitized manuscripts, but after a few tries I found that it had potential for thinking about analog manuscripts.
The Transformative work is a concept that comes out of fandom: that is, the fans of a particular person, team, fictional series, etc. regarded collectively as a community or subculture. We typically talk about fandom in relation to sports, movies, or TV shows, but people can be fans of many things (including manuscripts). As defined on the Fanlore wiki:
Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.
In some fandom communities, transformative works play a major role in how the members of that fandom communicate with each other and how they interact with the canon material (“canon” being the term fans use to refer the original work). Transformative works start with canon but then transform it in various ways to create new work – new stories, new art, new ideas, possible directions for canon to take in the future, directions canon would never take but which are fun or interesting to consider.
For example, a story where characters from the Star Wars movies are lectured by C3-PO on the dangers of wearing white cotton gloves while working with manuscripts, or artwork where Darth Vader is reimagined as a medieval Dark Knight
There is a small but growing academic movement to apply the concept of transformative work to historical texts. Some of this work is happening through the Organization for Transformative Works, which among other things hosts Archive of Our Own, a major site for fans to publish their fanworks, and provides legal advocacy for creators of fanworks.
The Organization for Transformative Works also publishes a journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, and in 2016 they published an issue “The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work,” which focused on relating ancient historical and literary texts to the concept of fan fiction (that is, stories that fans write that feature characters and situations from canon) and in 2019 they published a special issue on “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Culture,” which “explored the potential of fan fiction as an interpretative model to study ancient religious texts.” This special issue was edited by a group of scholars who lead the “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures” working group in the European Association of Biblical Studies, which organized a conference on the topic in 2016.
You will note that the academic work on transformative works I’ve mentioned focus specifically on fan fiction’s relationship with classical and medieval texts, which makes a fair amount of sense given the role of textual reuse in the classical and medieval world. In her article “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction ,” published in the Transformative Works and Cultures special issue of 2016, Dr. Anna Wilson places fan fiction within the category of textual reception, wherein texts from previous times are received by and reworked by future authors. In particular, Dr. Wilson points to the epic poetry of classical literature, medieval romance poetry, and Biblical exegesis, but she notes that comparisons between modern transformative works – that is, fan fiction – and these past examples of textual reception are undertheorized, and leave out a major aspect of fan fiction that is typically not found, or even looked for, in the past examples.
She says, “To define fan fiction only by its transformative relationship to other texts runs the risk of missing the fan in fan fiction—the loving reader to whom fan fiction seeks to give pleasure. Fan fiction is an example of affective reception. While classical reception designates the content being received, affective reception designates the kind of reading and transformation that is taking place. It is a form of reception that is organized around feeling.” (Wilson, 1.2)
My first attempt at applying the concept of the transformative work to medieval manuscripts was a paper presented at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in 2018, but although it was an interesting exercise it left something to be desired.
Dot Porter’s video orientation to LJS 101
UPenn LJS 101 is the oldest codex we have in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries by at least 150 years and is one of only two codices in our collection which is written in Caroline minuscule (the other one being UPenn Ms. Codex 1058, dated to ca. 1100 and located to Laon).
The bulk of the manuscript, folios five through 44 (Quires two through six), are dated to the mid-9th century, but in the early 12th century replacement leaves were added for the first four leaves and for the last 20 leaves. The contents of LJS 101 reflects the educational program set up in the Carolingian court by Alcuin, and includes thorough glossing and editing of the 9th century section by the hand of the 12th century scribe.
Over the course of the presentation I did a slow walk-through of the manuscript, examining it from cover to cover and noting every instance of a signs of care from the people who created and, for the most part, have used the manuscript since it was created. There were two things I paid particular attention to as I was working on that paper, with regard to trying to fit the manuscript into the frame of a transformative work. The first was what exactly was it that was being transformed.
The thing that is being transformed is something canon – usually a book, movie, or tv show, but it could be something else; an artwork, or a sports game, for example – and then there is the transformation, the transformative work. In the case of LJS 101, one could argue that the canon is the various texts in the manuscript, but by the time they were written in that parchment, they had already been transformed – they’d been copied and recopied, edited, a scribe had decided to use this copy of the text for their manuscript and not that one (if they even had a choice, which we can’t know), someone decided which other texts to include. If one argues instead that the canon was the 9th century version of the manuscript – as it existed when it was created – and the version we have now is the transformative work, I find that a bit more satisfying, although there’s still another problem.
I’m not comfortable applying Dr. Wilson’s concept of affective reception to the people who created and worked with LJS 101 – I don’t want to suggest that these people loved the manuscript– but I do want to explore the idea that this person or people cared about it, and that other people have cared about this manuscript over time enough that it survives to live now in our library at the University of Pennsylvania. Their interests may have been scholarly, or based on pride of ownership, or even based on curiosity, but whatever their reasons for caring for the manuscript, they did care, and we know they cared because of the physical marks that they have left on these books. Manuscripts that survive also often show examples of lack of care, damage and so forth, so those elements need to be included in this framework as well. So coming out of that paper I suggested a language of care around their use, rather than the frame of Transformative Work.
After Leeds, I spent some time wondering if there were actually a way to make the frame of Transformative Work fit any medieval manuscript, or if it was just another one of my zany ideas. But in the fall of 2018, when I was teaching an undergraduate course on medieval manuscripts with Dr. Will Noel, then director of the Schoenberg Institute and the Kislak Center, I had a bit of an epiphany as he was lecturing on Books of Hours. He made the very important point that people saw Books of Hours at least in part as a ticket to salvation. As I will describe in a moment, Books of Hours are organized around the veneration of the Virgin Mary, who acts as an intercessor between Christ and people on earth. By using Books of Hours to ask Mary to intercede with us for Christ, the people who owned them hoped to spend less time in purgatory and to make to heaven, to be with Christ, sooner than they might otherwise.
I still thought this idea was a bit weird, so I sat down with my colleague Nick Herman, whose hands you saw in the video earlier, and talked about the potential of manuscripts as transformative works, and he reminded me that, unlike LJS 101, which really only works as a transformative work in a physical sense, Books of hours can work both textually and physically. What do I mean by this?
Textually, Books of Hours are designed to be lay versions of the texts that priests, monks, and nuns used during their lives in the Church. Churches, cathedrals, and monasteries had antiphonaries – containing liturgical chants – and breviaries – books furnishing the regulations for the celebration of the canonical Office – for the use of their communities, usually very large books that the members of the community would share as they sang and recited prayers together.
Historians trace the growth of Books of Hours to the late 13th century, when social and economic changes led to both a growing secularization and an embryonic urban middle class, which emerged through the 14th and 15th centuries. Speaking generally these groups – although small – had money, and they were both literate and interested in books. They were also pious. In Time Sanctified, Roger Wieck explains that the laity at this time wished to imitate the clergy by adapting their prayers, adapting their books, and by adopting their direct relationship with God. The book of hours gave them all of these things: “a series of prayers like the clergy’s, but less complex, and a type of book like the breviary, but easier to use and more pleasing to the eye.”
The growth of the cult of the Virgin around this same time also contributed to the development and popularity of Books of Hours. Indeed, the thing that determines whether a prayer book is a Book of Hours or some other type of prayer book is the inclusion of the Hours of the Virgin. The Hours of the Virgin did not come into the common use before the 10th century although it may be older, and it was added to breviaries in various monastic orders throughout the 11th and 12th centuries. The Hours of the Virgin were extracted from the breviary and became the centerpiece of the Book of Hours: a set of prayers to Mary, designed to be recited daily and throughout the day – eight times, roughly following the canonical hours that would be practiced in a monastery – an ongoing reminder of the pious life of the user of any given Book of Hours.
In addition to the Hours of the Virgin, Books of Hours will typically include a Calendar, which will list festivals and saints’ days presumed relevant for the geographical location in which the owner of the book resides; The Gospels; the Hours of the Cross and Hours of the Holy Spirit; two prayers to the Virgin known as the Obsecro te and the O intemerata; the Penitential Psalms and Litany; the Office of the Dead; and various and perhaps numerous Sufferages.
The Hours of the Virgin were pulled from existing monastic or liturgical books, but so were other parts of a typical Book of Hours – the Calendar, the Office of the Dead, and of course the Penitential Psalms. Other elements, including the Hours of the Cross and Hours of the Holy Spirit, the Obsecro te and the O intemerata, and the Suffrages have uncertain sources although it’s unclear in my research whether they were original to Books of Hours.
Returning to the frame of Transformative Works, here we have Books of Hours, as a class or type of books, that represent a transformation of canonical liturgical texts originally developed for clerical and monastic users, into texts that are explicitly for lay use, and this transformation was explicitly made from a place of affection – based on religious piety – on the part of the people doing the transforming. In other words, Books of Hours are transformative works of the liturgical canon.
But that’s looking at Books of Hours as a class. What about transformation within the class? According to Lawrence R Poos, in his chapter on Social History and the Book of Hours in Time Sanctified, the most commonplace books of hours (as opposed to the lavish, illuminated, highly personalized ones which are prized by art museums and collectors today) were virtually mass-produced from standard exemplars. For the social historian this is notable because it means that one didn’t have to be incredibly wealthy to purchase and own a book of hours. But I think that “virtually” is doing a lot of work there. As I explained earlier Books of Hours usually contain a set group of texts, and they usually appear in a set order (perhaps pointing to these ‘standard exemplars’ that Poos mentions), my theory coming into this is that, in practice, the textual organization of individual Books of Hours is much more variant than this statement implies. So I did a bit of work to visualize the variance of contents across a collection of Books of Hours.
(and here is the color coding I used for the most common texts, as listed by Roger Wieck in Time Sanctified, and others)
I visualized the contents of three collections of Books of Hours, pulling the contents lists from the digitization metadata, which for all of these happens to be in the TEI format: those digitized through the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project (including Penn’s small collection of Books of hours), those of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore digitized through Digital Walters, and the e-codices digital library of Switzerland (which is new for this presentation). I was able to pull out the contents from the Walters and BiblioPhilly TEI automatically; the e-codices data was inconsistent enough that I entered it by hand into an online Google Form, and then transformed the resulting spreadsheet. Then I color coded each text.
Here are the first couple of books of hours, and you can see that the texts in both are in a slightly different order than the “usual” order.
To more easily view the variance I turned the color charts on their side, placing each manuscript in a row, and stacked them. Here is the data for the books of hours from the BiblioPhilly collection. The Hours of the Virgin is the gold bar down the center; I did it this way because the Hours of the Virgin is the central text of Books of Hours and it made sense to visualize the other texts around that one. The rest of the contents are arranged around that text. We can see that the area before the Hours of the Virgin tend to be warmer, and the area after the Hours of the Virgin tend to be cooler, there is an awful lot of variation there. Unfortunately this chart isn’t organized in a thoughtful way; There are a mix of uses represented here, including Paris, Rome, Sarum, Franciscan, Bourges, and Utrecht, among others, and they range from the 14th through the 16th centuries, mostly from France and the Netherlands, but they aren’t ordered, and that’s definitely something that would need to be addressed in future use. The chart also doesn’t take into account any physical modifications that might have been made to the individual manuscripts, modifications that could lead to texts being reordered at some point after the book was written.
This view also doesn’t take into account the actual or relative length of the books, so for this paper I focused on creating visualizations using a relative chart, using the same colors for the texts.
Books of hours from the Walters Art Museum
In this visualization, we have Books of Hours from the Walters Art Museum, each book has its texts distributed across a row, which is the same length for each book. Again the Hours of the Virgin are in gold, with the other texts colored appropriately, but because the gold bar of the Hours of the Virgin appear very long in some, and short in others – assuming that the Hours of the Virgin is approximately the same in each manuscript – you get a better sense of the size of the books in number of folios from this visualization.
Following is a series of visualizations, sorted by place created and organized by date (earlier-later from the top of the chart). Using these one might be able to start to make arguments about preferences for the contents and organization of books of hours based on location and date (I am not doing that in this talk – I am simply presenting data).
This is interesting, but the more work I do on this sort of textual variation the more I feel like I’m getting into textual analysis, which is interesting but doesn’t really fit the “Transformative Work” frame. So I want to step back into the frame and spend the last few minutes of my talk looking at the physical books, because I think that’s where we can really see affective reception.
Physical
Presentaion miniature from the Bible of Saint Louis, Paris, c. 1220-1230, New York, The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M 240
To begin it might be helpful to clarify who was making the decisions about what was included in books of hours at the time that they were made. Notwithstanding the earlier quote about the virtual mass production of books of hours from standard exemplars, even in those cases there were decisions to be made about the creation of individual books. This illustration – thanks to Nick Herman, SIMS Curator of Manuscripts, for bringing it to my attention – shows a woman, thought to be Blanche of Castille, dedicating the book to her son, Louis IX, with a cleric and a scribe below working on the book. This is an effective visual of the top-down nature of the planning and manufacture of books of hours. While there was a general structure within which a book of hours would fit (and, as we can see from the previous visualizations, that general structure may vary depending on where and when the book was created) specific decisions about what was included, in which order, and details about the illuminations which would accompany the texts, would be made by the people who were commissioning the book to be made, not by the scribes and artists. Books of hours were built to spec, and while they might be bought and sold after creation and also passed down through families, it would have been unusual for someone to purchase an already written book of hours without them making some kind of change to it. This is usually talked about as personalization but it is reasonable, given the purpose and use of Books of hours, that personalization can be considered as a kind of affective reception.
One of the most common ways for people to personalize their books of hours at the time of creation was through the inclusion of owner’s or patron’s portraits. These portraits, whether they resemble the physicality of the individual owner or they are a more general representation, allow the people to quite literally insert themselves into the Biblical story, most frequently alongside Jesus or the Virgin Mary, in a similar way that an author of modern fan fiction might insert themselves into canon stories as a self-insert, or fans might commission artists to draw them with their favorite characters.
As we look at the portraits please note the number of women included in the owner portraits. One thing that I wanted to look into more for this talk but I didn’t end up having time to include is the question of gender when it comes to who owned and used books of hours and who had them made. The reason for my interest in this specifically is that
transformative fandom tends to be a draw for women (and other people who are not cis men) while the other “type” of fandom, curatorial fandom, tends to be more attractive for cis men (although as with every division there are overlaps and exceptions), and that I have in the past heard books of hours described as a “feminine genre.” I haven’t looked into this as much as I would like, but it does certainly appear that although women did commission, own, and use books of hours, so did men – and in fact most of the most famous books of hours that survive were owned by men – so it’s clearly not just women here. Even so I think there is more to be parsed out; the “feminine genre” label may be due more to the misogyny of modern scholars than to anything that was happening in the middle ages.
Once a book of hours was made, whether a more standard one or a personalized one, there were other transformations still to be made. Books of hours have long afterlives.
For several years now Dr. Kathryn Rudy at the University of St Andrews has been doing important and cutting-edge work on how people in the medieval and early modern periods physically interacted with their books, particularly their prayer books, and two of her studies are particularly relevant to the concept of Books of Hours of transformative works.
In her book Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts, Dr Rudy classifies the many ways in which the owners of Netherlandish prayerbooks modified these books over time. (This book, by the way, is published under Open Access and is free to download, I highly recommend it) In the introduction, she points out that it’s often difficult if not impossible to understand exactly why some of these changes were made, but clearly some of the possible reasons lie within the realm of Wilson’s definition of affection. Rudy says:
In this study I explore the ways in which medieval book owners adjusted the contents of their books to reflect changed circumstances. Such circumstances were not usually so overtly political, but they nonetheless reveal other fears and motivations. Religious, social or economic reasons could also motivate such emendations. Augmentations to a book reveal strong emotional and social forces.
Dr Rudy divides the modifications into two groups, those that require rebinding and those that don’t, and comes up with a detailed variety of changes. The list includes many ways that people changed their prayer books, from changing the text in various ways to adding new leaves or removing old ones. Dr Rudy’s study also includes sections on modular design – where prayer books were built from modules that were designed to be modified on spec, either during the time the book was being made or after – and on modifications that led to complete overhauls of books; for example, building books out of quires that were originally part of other books.
Most relevant for the discussion of Books of Hours as transformative works and the accompanying concept of affective reception is Dr Rudy’s final chapter, in which she lists the reasons that changes might have been made – reasons that she refers to as patterns of desire.
I have asked in this study: how did later users register their opinions that a book considered perfectly acceptable by its previous owners was for them somehow incomplete, and by what means did they express their discontent? How can their acts of recycling and upcycling be interpreted? The kinds of augmentations owners made to books reveal certain patterns of desires, which I enumerate here.
Although these desires vary significantly from the kind of affection that I’ve discussed earlier in the paper – which focused on the love of the Virgin Mary and the desire to reach God (so, I suppose, aligns most clearly with “H. Fear of Hell”) – these other desires also reflect affection of various sorts.
One of Dr Rudy’s other studies focuses on densitometry, or the quantitative measurement of optical density in light-sensitive materials. It is a simple fact that medieval and later users of manuscripts leave traces of their use of manuscripts in the form of dirt around the edges of pages, and sometimes on decorations and illustrations as well. More use would deposit more dirt, more dirt would make an area darker, and that darkness vs. the lightness of the rest of the page can be picked up using a tool called a densitometer. Dr. Rudy used a densitometer to measure the distribution of dirt through a number of Netherlandish prayer books and first published her findings in “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer,” in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art in 2010. Her conclusion was that in applying densitometry to prayer books, one might be able to determine which pages – and thus which texts – users of those books turned to the most.
While my concern with the care of LJS 101 focused on how it was manipulated by later users – by how they bound it, notated it, cared for it in a physical sense – Dr. Rudy’s use of densitometry is designed to determine which prayers the people who actively used the prayer books recited most frequently. It’s a physical indication of religious practice – in other words, affective reception.
Here are two examples from Dr Rudy’s article. This first is from a Missal – a liturgical book, not a personal prayer book – That shows where a priest (or perhaps priests) kissed the illumination enough to damage it. This circle and cross at the bottom of the page is an osculation plaque, which was designed to be kissed and touched in place of the illumination, as artists knew that their work would be the object of veneration. So that plaque has been well-worn, but the priest wandered, at times reaching up as high as Christ’s feet.
In addition to measuring the wear of illuminations to see how people caressed their books, Dr Rudy used densitometry to measure dirt on the edge of pages. These pages show very heavy discoloration in the bottom margins, which implies that someone (or many someones) held the book open frequently to this page, which contains the incipit of a prayer to the “Seventy-two Names of the Virgin.”
Someone loved the Virgin Mary, so they returned to this page again and again to read this prayer, thereby physically changing the book with the addition of dirt from their fingers. Affective reception, completely accidental.
I want to close by saying that I am, honestly, skeptical of how well books of hours fit the frame of transformative work, but even if it turns out not to be a good fit doing this project over the past couple of years has definitely been worthwhile for me. It’s given me an appreciation for books of hours that I didn’t have before, and it’s also uncovered some possible options for ongoing study: the question of the gender of the people who commissioned, owned, and used books of hours and how modern research may have colored our thinking around that, and the variation of contents by geography and how that changed over time and varied by use. On this second point there is a major research project in Europe that is tackling this second question, HORAE, under the direction of Dominique Stutzmann at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, which is focused on the automated reading of books of hours in order to determine the contents (as I discovered when I was gathering data for my visualizations for this talk, many catalogues, particularly of art museums, don’t include completely lists of textual contents for their books of hours), and HORAE is set to both determine contents and then do analysis over geography and time; it will be exciting to see what they come up with.
Returning again to these pages: This book is one of many that contain approximately the same texts, in the same approximate order, but each of which was designed and written to be used by individuals for prayer and contemplation. And finally this type of book, the Book of Hours, was a transformation of liturgical texts into something that individuals could use for prayer in their own lives.
Presented by Dr Brandon Hawk and Dot Porter at Books on Screen: A Virtual Symposium, University of Leeds and Anglia Ruskin University, November 3, 2021
With the premier of Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, fans saw the first glimpses of books in the beloved galaxy far, far away. Although text technologies had been present in Star Wars media before, usually on screens in-universe, the Jedi library on Ahch-To was the first time that books had been represented as codices in the Star Wars saga. Since then, much more has emerged about the sacred Jedi texts, in art books, comics, interviews with the creators, and more. What is apparent, most of all, is that the sacred Jedi books are modeled on actual medieval manuscripts from around the world. In this presentation, we build upon our previously successful video series titled Sacred Texts: Codices Far, Far Away.
We will highlight some of the most significant medieval manuscript genres that parallel the Jedi codices and discuss how those books intersect with other recent Star Wars media, such as lore about the World Between Worlds as seen in the Star Wars Rebels TV show. We especially aim to highlight the intersection of spirituality (religion) and science (technology) as seen in both medieval manuscripts and the Jedi codices. Our aim is to use such connections from medieval sources to sci-fi medievalism as a way to discuss the relevance of the past for understanding storytelling in our own culture.
Our first glimpse of the Jedi texts appears in The Last Jedi, just as Rey, our heroine, first sees them. Rey has been sent to the island of Ahch-to to bring Luke Skywalker back to help the Resistance, led by Luke’s sister General Leia Organa, to defeat the First Order. Rey has been there for a day or so, following Luke around, making no headway, when she hears a voice calling her to the Uneti tree, a large, hollow, Force-sensitive tree that houses these manuscripts. It’s in the company of these books that Rey and Luke finally communicate with each other, when Rey admits that she has only recently come to the Force and that she needs Luke to train her to be a Jedi, and when Luke grudgingly agrees to give her some lessons, but also tells her that the Jedi must die. Exciting stuff, and the books are there to hear it.
According to Star Wars The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary, Luke Skywalker scoured the galaxy for these texts and collected them himself, storing them in the tree that we see in the film. So these texts weren’t originally all in one collection, they are from many different planets, potentially written in ten different places, ten different times, ten different languages and alphabets, although we only see the interior of one of them in the film.
Since the release of The Last Jedi, more knowledge about these books has been added in various Star Wars merchandise, including comics and art books. For example, in the Poe Dameron comic, issue #27, we learn that Rey has been working with C3PO to translate the texts.
The best summary of what we know about the Jedi texts (canonically, that is) is found on the Wookieepedia page. We learn that the books include works titled the Aionomica, Chronicles of Brus-bu, Rammahgon, and the Poetics of a Jedi. As the Wookieepedia page says, the Jedi books “describe the tenets and history of the Jedi, and give specific guidance to those studying the path of the Jedi. Future students were encouraged to add to the books over millennia.” As we can see, and as we’ll see in more detail later, some of the pages of these books contain what appear to be various pieces of astronomical knowledge.
The Jedi codices aren’t the only examples of written culture that is inscribed (as opposed to digital written culture, screens and holos, which are ubiquitous in the Star Wars universe). In the Star Wars: Rebels television show, there are several times when stone inscriptions can be seen in ancient Jedi temples, such as this scene in season 1, episode 10, when Ezra Bridger first enters the temple on Lothal. I’ve lightened the image quite a bit, but you can see two parallel rows of writing that appear to line the room.
We catch another glimpse of the Jedi codices in The Rise of Skywalker, when Rey consults one of them to track down a Sith wayfinder, which will lead her to the planet Exegol.
It’s unclear from the film and from the accompanying books and wikis whether this book is Luke Skywalker’s own journal, one of the original ancient texts, or something in between (that is, an ancient text with notes from him and perhaps from other people appended to them – a practice that would be familiar to many students and scholars in the middle ages).
The next couple of examples are manuscripts from Penn’s collections that were created and used by multiple people. The first, LJS 101, is a Carolingian manuscript, with portions written in the 9th century and other parts written in the 11th century. It’s clear that the 11th century portions were custom written to replace sections from the earlier book, and the same hand responsible for the 11th century sections also went through the older portion and made many changes and fixes to the text there – essentially building a new book out of remnants of an old one.
This example, LJS 385, is an early 16th century collection of school texts – Cicero, Terence, Boethius, Virgil, among others – written and with notes in a number of different hands, as you can see here. Rather than being written by different people over time, this one was written by many different people at the same time, like an early modern version of a shared Google Doc.
Swinging back to Star Wars canon, we know that Ben Solo, Luke Skywalker’s nephew who studied under him as a child, wrote with pens, since he had a calligraphy set in the flashbacks to his days as a Jedi student in The Last Jedi; in fact, he is the only character explicitly stated to have written on paper with pens. So it’s reasonable that his hand could be in the TROS codex, potentially along with Luke’s.
In summary, we have books on Jedi religion, history, poetics, astronomy, and other sciences, books which existed over a long period of time and which could potentially hold knowledge from multiple individuals, including characters from the most recent films. Textual culture was a major facet of the ancient Jedi religion, and the Jedi manuscripts demonstrate that the Jedi were also interested in synthesizing religion with scientific knowledge about their galaxy. As lovers of both Star Wars and medieval manuscripts, this intrigued us, since we find many of these same types of genres in premodern books.
What types of manuscript codices do we know that contain parallels? In our previous work, we have explored specific manuscripts in the Schoenberg Institute at the University of Pennsylvania that share certain similarities. Our next few slides will illustrate some of these aesthetic comparisons.
Science and Spirituality
It’s especially worth considering connections between scientific and more mystical approaches that we see combined in the manuscripts (medieval and Jedi). For example, medieval and Jedi manuscripts seem to evoke the idea that astronomy helps people to consider their place in a wider cosmos infused with spiritual existence, whether that’s Christianity, Islam, or the Force. It’s worth remembering that all of this knowledge–in Star Wars and our world–is composite, accumulative, synthetic, over centuries of time.
For example, we might consider astronomical works by someone like the thirteenth-century author John of Sacrobosco. This type of medieval astronomy is built on classical knowledge, and authors in both East and West pursued their own views variously through the lenses of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the later Middle Ages, as Europeans engaged more with Islamic texts, all of these became synthesized; so we find an accumulation of science, religion, philosophy, and other approaches being woven together. Similarly, the Jedi texts, like Luke’s notebook, are also composite, pulled from hundreds or thousands of years of scientific, religious, and philosophical views by different authors and in multiple languages across the galaxy.
They all use drawings – which are limiting – to describe something that’s really hard to describe at all. Medieval astronomers only had to think about the earth, and the moon, and the sun, and a few other planets. On the other hand, the Star Wars universe operates on a whole other level – a galaxy with countless star systems and planets that aren’t even charted. When I look at these diagrams I see a clever attempt to illustrate scale using the relatively primitive technology of ink and paper in place of the star charts and 3D maps that we see in the films.
In a related way, the wayfinder in the Jedi book from The Rise of Skywalker is similar to diagrams about astrolabes that we see in medieval manuscripts, like LJS 497, which is an illustrated treatise on the use of the astrolabe quadrant, pictured here. Both the wayfinder and the astrolabe quadrant are tools that act as technologies of astronomical knowledge: objects in the real world that are described, as well as possible, in books.
What’s intriguing about all of this is that medieval thinkers, and presumably the Jedi, were trying to account for both textual and visual explanations, in order to use multiple media to get at deeper, more sophisticated meanings. And a part of that is navigating between abstract knowledge in books and application in the material world around them.
World Between Worlds
We can draw parallels between the charts in the manuscripts in The Last Jedi to medieval astronomical manuscripts; but in The Rise of Skywalker and the Star Wars: Rebels television show we learn of a new concept, which complicates the simplicity of these parallels: the World Between Worlds. According to Wookieepedia, the World Between Worlds is “a mystical plane within the Force that served as a collection of doors and pathways existing between time and space, linking all moments in time together.” Some of the illustrations that we’ve pegged as astronomical (and which are clearly influenced by astronomical illustrations from our world) are, we think, more generally about various worlds interconnecting. The designing artists for the Jedi manuscripts, then, used medieval astronomy diagrams as the basis for showing the World Between Worlds.
In the Rebels TV show, we see this play out as Ezra visits the various Jedi temples and eventually enters the World Between Worlds. This screenshot is taken slightly later in the same episode we saw earlier, in the same room – not only do we have more writing, but we have our first glimpse of a representation of the pathways of the World Between Worlds.
In the World Between Worlds, we find a synthesis of space-time religion. In the episode titled “Wolves and a Door” (season 4, epsiode 12), the rebel protagonists visit a Jedi temple and find artifacts decorated with what they describe as “a language… not so much in words, but in pictures.” Later, a character named Hyden (the overseer of the imperial operation at the Temple) describes the decorations as “symbols and iconography… reminiscent of a report… discovered in the Jedi archives.” Sabine Wren says, “it’s art; everything has a meaning”; and “The painting on the temple is like a starmap.” She continues, the “lines are like paths and the rings are planets, or… or doorways.” What becomes clear is that these symbols are key to opening a gateway. In the following episode, titled “A World Between Worlds” (season 4, episode 13), Hyden calls the gateway in the temple a “pathway between all time and space” and goes on, “He who controls it controls the universe.”
The “World between Worlds” idea is about time & space being bound up: the portals are for traveling not only between planets but also between times. So we see that Jedi religion and science meet in a mystical representation of space-time not unlike the treatises that meditate upon religion and science from medieval culture.
We would be remiss if we didn’t show a comparison between the Jedi artist’s conception of the World Between Worlds and how the place appears in the show’s real life. Here is what is effectively the key to the doorway leading to the world between worlds, with the gold lines representing the paths and the circles representing doorways.
It’s much brighter and more artistic than the place that the characters find themselves in – in a similar way,
medieval diagrams of the celestial spheres and constellations present a standardized and at times artistic version of what they would see in their own sky at night.
Conclusion
There are obviously many other connections to textual culture in Star Wars; myriad Star Wars media feature other objects with text or wider associations with reading, writing, and communication. In addition, there are other examples of cultural heritage objects present, at times in very important ways, in the various Star Wars properties. For example in Star Wars Rebels, there’s Hera’s Kalikori, a family heirloom passed down from family generation to generation only to be stolen by Grand Admiral Thrawn, and we also see Drydan Vos’s personal museum in Solo: A Star Wars Story. The way these objects are contextualized reflect our own world in interesting ways; they’re reflections of the past, objects to be used, treasures to be kept safe, things to be owned. The issues of who owns them, and who benefits from them will be familiar to anyone who has kept up with recent news stories regarding repatriation of objects from the Green Collection and other institutions. This takes us far beyond manuscripts but, we hope that what we’ve presented here are just starting points for future work on these and related subjects.
Thank you for that kind and generous introduction and thanks to Lynn for inviting me to present this talk today. Thank you to all of you this afternoon, or this evening for those of you in Europe, for sticking around for my talk tonight on manuscript loss in digital contexts.
I want to do a couple of things with his paper and I’m not entirely sure that they go together so please bear with me. The first thing that I want to do is to look back over some specific things that have been said in the past about loss and manuscript digitization specifically. There’s quite a long history of both theorists and practitioners giving lectures and responding to the topic what we lose when we digitize a manuscript – how much digitized manuscripts lack in comparison with “the real thing” and all of the reasons why digitized manuscripts aren’t as good as the real thing because of these losses. I want to address those complaints and to respond to them with examples of work that that we’ve been doing at Penn that I think answers some of these issues. The second thing that I want to do is to showcase the Lightning Talks. Last month we put out a call for five minute presentations, for anybody who wanted to submit a paper on the issue of loss specifically in digital work and digitization – this was this was the ask that we put out:
“The theme of this year’s symposium is Loss and we are particularly interested in talks that focus on digital aspects of loss in manuscript studies.”
From the call for Lightning Talk proposals, Schoenberg Symposium 2021
I was pleasantly surprised by the submissions, which didn’t cover old ground and in some cases respond to some concerns that have been expressed about digitized manuscripts in the past.
In June 2013 ASG Edwards published a short essay called “Back to the real” in the Times literary supplement.[1] I cannot overstate the affect that this piece had on those of us who were creating digitized manuscripts. When this piece came out I’d been at Penn for about three months, having just started my position in April 2013, and although Penn had been digitizing its manuscripts for many years and there was an interface, Penn In Hand, which is still available, this was before OPenn, well before BiblioPhilly, before VisColl. The first version of Parker on the Web, which Edwards names in his piece, had been released on 1 October 2009, but it was behind a very high paywall, which was only lifted when Parker on the Web 2.0 was released in 2018. 2013 was also about a year after the Walters Art Museum had published The Digital Walters, and released that data under an open access license, and I came to Penn knowing that we wanted to recreate the Digital Walters here – the project that would become OPenn – so at that point in time we were thinking about logistics and technical details, how we could take the existing data Penn had and turn it into an open access collection explicitly for download and reuse as opposed to something that was accessed through an interface.
Mid 2013 was also when a lot of libraries were really starting to ramp up full-manuscript and full-collection digitization – digitization at scale, full books and full collections, as opposed to focusing only on the most precious books, or digitizing only sections of books. I also discovered that this was two years after the publication of “SharedCanvas: A Collaborative Model for Medieval Manuscript Layout Dissemination,” a little article published in the journal Digital Libraries in April 2011 by Robert Sanderson, Ben Albritton, and others, which is notable because it is what would eventually become the backbone of the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF, which I will mention again.
Edwards’s piece has been cited and quoted many times over the eight years since it was published and it for good reason. Edwards doesn’t pull any punches, he says exactly what he’s thinking about with regards to digitized manuscripts and honestly as somebody who was in the thick of things in summer 2013 this so this came as a little bit of a bomb in the middle of that. Since this is such a such primary piece I want to look at his concerns and see how they hold up eight years later.
“The convenience of ready accessibility is beyond dispute, and one can see that there may be circumstances in which scholars do have a need for some sort of surrogate, whether of a complete manuscript or of selected bits. But the downsides are in fact many. One of the obvious limits of the virtual world is the size of the computer screen; it is often difficult for viewers to take in the scale of the object being presented.”
A. S. G. Edwards, “Back to the real”
The issue of interpreting the physical size of manuscripts in digital images is an obvious one and it’s one that I talk about a lot when I talk to classes and school groups. Edwards is correct – it is difficult to tell the size of an object when it’s presented in an in an online interface and there are a few different reasons for that. So I’m going to take a look at two manuscripts in comparison with the thinking that comparative analysis might be helpful.
Both of these manuscripts are from the Free Library of Philadelphia, and they were digitized as part of the Biblioteca Philadelphiensis project and I’m showing them here in the BiblioPhilly interface, which was created for this project. They’re both 15th century manuscripts from England. FLP LC 14 19 is a copy of the old statutes, the statutes of England beginning with the Magna Carta, a document first issued in 1215 by King John (ruled 1199-1216), and FLP LC 14 10 is a copy of the new statutes, English legal statutes beginning with the reign of Edward III (ruled 1327-1377).
FLP LC 14 10 (New Statutes) is pictured on the left and FLP LC 14 19 (Old Statutes) is on the right. I present them to you like this to give you a sense of how these two manuscripts look on the surface, and I’m going to point out some things that I notice as we go back-and-forth that gives me clues to their relative sizes.
The old statutes and the new statutes, both of these manuscripts have clasps, in the case of the old statutes manuscript, or remnants of clasps in the case of the new statutes. I have a sense of how large the clasps are in comparison with the rest of the book so the clasps look bigger to me on the old statutes, they take up more space. The decoration also looks bigger on the old statutes cover. Both of these covers have decoration embossed on the front and the new statutes book has a lot more of them and they’re thin. Which implies to me that the new statute book is bigger than the old one.
Now let’s look inside – again, FLP LC 14 10 (New Statutes) is pictured on the left and FLP LC 14 19 (Old Statutes) is on the right. Immediately I notice that the new statutes manuscript has more lines and there appear to be more characters per line and the writing looks smaller than it does in the old statutes manuscript. So again, what this implies to me is that the new statutes manuscript is bigger because you can write more in it. Now I’ve seen enough manuscripts to know that this can be misleading. There are many very small manuscripts that contain tiny tiny writing – like Ms. Codex 1058 from Penn’s collection.
This is a glossed Psalter, and back in 2013 before I arrived at Penn I spent a lot of time looking at this manuscript online. The first time that I saw it in person I was absolutely floored because it is so much smaller than the writing implied to me – for reference, the codex is 40 mm, or 1.5 inches, shorter than the old statutes manuscript. It’s small, and by including it here I’m aware that I’m helping to prove Edward’s point – although comparing the two statutes manuscripts is helpful in coming up with size cues, it’s still really difficult to tell generally, at least in this interface.
“It is also difficult to discern distinctions between materials such as parchment and paper, and between different textures of ink.”
A. S. G. Edwards, “Back to the real”
Let’s turn back to the two statutes manuscripts again. We’ll look at the support – zoomed in to 100% so we’re very very close to the material.
If you know what parchment looks like and if you know what paper looks like I think that it’s clear that both of these manuscripts are written on parchment. One of these is darker than the other one, that could be because of the type of animal the parchment comes from, or variance between hair and flesh side, or it could be how it was produced. Also some of the things that you’ll look for in parchment like hair follicles are not immediately clear at least in these examples.
I haven’t yet mentioned training and the knowledge that you bring with you when you come to a digitized manuscript but I think that’s really important. If you are familiar with the statutes manuscripts, if you’ve seen several of them you know that the new statutes are much longer than the old statutes and so new statutes manuscripts are bigger and old statutes manuscripts are smaller, and that’s just something that you know. You probably didn’t know that but I knew that and that knowledge is reflected in what we’ve already looked at for those manuscripts.
It’s the same for parchment and paper. if you’ve been trained and you know what parchment looks like and you know what paper looks like then you’re going to be able, most of the time, to tell the difference between them in digital images.
This next example is from another manuscript, LJS 266 from the Schoenberg collection, and this is something that’s very typical in parchment manuscripts. That rounded area is an armpit of the animal, and you can also see some hair follicles around there. So this is very clearly a parchment manuscript and not a paper manuscript.
And then finally this last example, Bryn Mawr Ms. 4, is a paper manuscript. You should be able to tell, if you’ve studied paper, because there a chain lines there and also the way the paper is wearing around the edges. Parchment doesn’t flake like that, paper does that and being able to recognize that has nothing to do with whether you’re looking at it in person or in a digital image it looks the same either way. Whether or not you can tell the difference has more to do with your own training than with the fact that it’s an image. Now, we could talk about image quality, but most images that you access from an institution will be digitized to some set of best practices and guidelines. The images will also be presented alongside metadata – so if you’re not sure whether it’s paper or parchment, you can take a peek at the metadata and it will tell you.
One of the things I like to talk about when I discuss digitized manuscript is the concept of mediation, how one of the things that digitization does is it mediates our experience with the physical object. The people who play a part in that mediation – photographers, and software developers who build the systems and interfaces, and catalogers. Metadata is another example of that. We trust that the mediation is being done effectively; we trust that the cataloger knows the difference between parchment and paper and that this information is correct.
Ink can definitely be an issue in digitization, but I’m going to step sideways and talk instead for a moment about gold leaf. Gold leaf is notoriously difficult to photograph in the way that manuscripts are normally digitized – in a lab, on a cradle or a table, perhaps with a glass plate between the book and the camera holding the page flat. But gold leaf was made to move, was made to be seen in candlelight where it would gleam.
Here is an example of the difference between the same page digitized in a lab vs. an animated gif taken in a classroom – and yes, this is the same page (Ms. Codex 2032, f. 60r). While the gold in the gif shines when it is passed through the light, the gold in the still image looks almost black. Two things: again, because I’m trained, I know that’s gold in the still image even though it doesn’t look like gold, because I know what can happen to the appearance of gold when it’s photographed under normal lab conditions. And now you do, too. Just because it doesn’t shine like gold doesn’t mean it isn’t gold. Two, we don’t include images like the first one in our record, and that’s a choice. We make lots of choices about what we include and what we don’t, many of them made because of time issues or cost. We could make different decisions, we could choose to include images taken under different sorts of lighting and include them in the record, the technology is there.
“Often we can’t tell what the overall structure of the work is like, how many leaves it has, and whether it contains any cancelled leaves…”
A. S. G. Edwards, “Back to the real”
Now it’s really my time to shine because this concern about the loss of the structure of manuscripts in digitization is why I started the VisColl project with Alberto Campagnolo and Doug Emery back in 2013; it was one of the first things I did after I came to work at Penn.
Screenshot of a book of hours modeled in VCEditor, the current software implementation of the VisColl data model
The aim of the VisColl project has been to create a data model and a software system for modeling and visualizing the structure of codex manuscripts. You can use on your own to help you with the study of individual manuscripts but it was also designed for use by manuscript catalogers, and in fact has been used in the BiblioPhilly project to create models that are presented alongside or integrated with the usual sort of page turning digital interfaces for manuscript collections, to provide a different kind of view. This sort of view that Edwards was concerned about, something that enables us to see what the structure is and see how long the manuscripts are.
So we’ll go back again to the statutes manuscripts. I mentioned earlier that I know that old statutes manuscripts are smaller than new statutes manuscripts both in terms of physical size of the covers and also in the size of the text and that is reflected here. The old statutes manuscript on the left has 21 quires, mostly of eight leaves, and the new statutes manuscript has 52 quires, also of eight leaves. It is a very large manuscript, a thick manuscript, and VisColl provides a way for us to show this size in our interfaces in a way that isn’t normally done.
But making a model with VisColl is work, and it is not the only way to see the size of a manuscript. You can also tell the size of a manuscript by looking at its spine and edges, and this is coming around again to the issue of the choices that we – we, the institutions and libraries – make when we present these manuscripts.
This is a gallery view for LC 14 19 in the BiblioPhilly interface. If you scroll all the way to the end of the manuscript you can see that the presentation ends with the back cover, which makes sense, since when we close a book we see the back cover. But if we go look at the same manuscript in OPenn, which is the collection on our website where we make the data available, you’ll see that there are more images of the book there. BiblioPhilly takes this data and makes an interface that’s user-friendly, but OPenn is more like a bucket of stuff.
So we go to the bucket of stuff and we scroll down to the images and here are all the images, no page turning interface just image after image. We scroll all the way down and we’re going to find some images that don’t appear on the interface. There are images of the spine and the fore edges. These are available but we made a decision not to include those in the main BiblioPhilly interface, neither in the page-turning view or in the gallery view.
These are available in BiblioPhilly but you have to go to the “Binding Images” tab to find them. You have to know to go there; they are categorized as something different, something special, and not part of the main view. This is another choice that we made in designing the interface.
“… and we can rarely be confident that the colours have been reproduced accurately.”
A. S. G. Edwards, “Back to the real”
I can report that at this point in time there are standards and guidelines and best practices for ensuring that digital images have color correction checked against the manuscript. One of the ways that we ensure this is by including a color bar in either a reference image or occasionally in every single image. There are institutions, I believe that the British library is one of these, where you will see a color bar in every single frame.
At Penn we do include color bars and photographs but they are trimmed out as part of post processing. We do however maintain reference images that, as well as the photos of the spine and the fore edges, are available on OPenn and you can see them here. So here is a reference image for the old statutes manuscript that we’ve been looking at. In addition to being a color correction aid, the color bar also serves as a ruler. So here you can see that the color bar is longer than the manuscript.
Now if we look at the reference image for the new statutes manuscript you’ll see how much larger the book is in reference to the color bar. So this is getting back again to our starting issue of how big is the manuscript. It’s possible to see how big the manuscripts are because we have these reference images, but sometimes they are hard to find in the interface. And again this comes down to the decisions that we are making in terms of what is easy for you the user to see and find in our collections and through our interfaces.
Size information also comes along in the metadata. We’ve already looked at the metadata before when we were looking at the paper versus parchment question, and you can see here we also have information about the physical size of the manuscript. So even if you can’t tell by the cues in the image, if you don’t know anything about the genre which might help you know the size the physical size, if you don’t have access to a reference image with some kind of ruler or color bar that might give you an indication of the size, you might still have information in the metadata that should be easily accessible in whatever interface you’re using.
And now I want to start the pivot to the Schoenberg Symposium lightning talks (click here for the complete playlist) because one of our lightning talk speakers talks quite a bit about metadata and image coming along together. Lisa Fagin Davis in her talk “IIIF, Fragmentology, and the Digital Remediation of 20th-c. Biblioclasm” talks about IIIF, which I’ve already mentioned, the international image interoperability framework, and it’s use particularly with fragments in the study of what we’re now calling fragmentology. In her lightning talk, Dr Davis talks about how you can add images to a shared interface and it brings the metadata along with it. All of this current contextual information that Edwards was very worried about actually becomes an integral part of image sharing. So in IIIF you’re not just sharing an image file you’re sharing a lot of information along with it.
The last word that I want to give to Dr. Edwards is his final comments in this section of his piece. He says a lot more after this but I really love this question: “Are digital surrogates not really just a new, more expensive form of microfilm?” To which I say yes, and…
There’s just so much that you can do with digitized images and our lightning talks speak to this so I want to go through the lightning talks and talk about how their concerns answer or reflect Edwards’s own concerns.
Including Lisa’s talk, three other talks focus on interacting with digital images in platforms to work towards a scholarly aim. Chris Nighman from Wilfrid Laurier University in his talk “Loss and recovery in Manuscripts for the CLIMO Project” gives an overview of his project to edit Burgundio of Pisa’s translation of John Chrysostom’s homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, which he rendered at the request of Pope Eugenius III in 1151. The apparent presentation copy Burgundio prepared for the pope survives as MS Vat. lat. 383, which is provided online by the BAV, but unfortunately the manuscript is lacking two pages. However Nighman is able to restore the text from another copy of the same text, MS Vat. lat. 384, which is also available online.
In her talk “A Lost and Found Ending of the Gospel of Mark,” Claire Clivaz presents the Mark 16 project, which is seeking to create a new edition – the first edition – of the alternative ending of the Gospel of Mark, which although well attested in many languages, is usually ignored by scholars as being marginal or unimportant. And in their talk “Lost in Transcription: EMROC, Recipe Books, and Knowledge in the Making,” Margaret Simon, Hillary Nunn, and Jennifer Munroe illustrate how they are using a shared transcription platform, From the Page, to create the first complete transcription of the Lady Sedley’s 1686 manuscript recipe book, which has only been partially transcribed in the past, the sections of the text relating to women’s concerns in particular having been ignored.
In all four of these talks, rather than expressing discontent on the loss that happens when materials are digitized, (or, in Chris Nighman’s talk, complaining about the watermarks added by the Vatican digital library), the presenters are using digital technology to help fill in losses that are wholly unrelated to digitization.
In her talk “Loss and Gain in Indo-Persian Manuscripts,” Hallie Nell Swanson provides a fascinating overview of the various ways that Indo-Persian manuscripts have been used and misused, cut apart and put back together, over time. For her, digitization is primarily useful as an access point; until recently, Swanson has only been able to access these books virtually, and yet she’s able to make compelling arguments about them.
Kate Falardeau’s talk, “London, British Library, Add. MS 19725: Loss and Wholeness,” is particularly compelling for me, because I wonder if it’s the kind of presentation that would only be made in a digital context, although the paper itself is not “digital.” Digitization has normalized fragmentation in a way not seen before now; we’re used to seeing leaves floating around, disbound and disembodied, and Kate’s argument that an incomplete, fragmentary copy of Bede’s Martyrology might nevertheless be considered whole within its own context is an idea that works today but might not have been conceived at all back in 2013.
In another non-digital talk that uses digital technology in a completely different way, William Stoneman presents on “George Clifford Thomas (1839-1909) of Philadelphia: Lost in Transition,” a 19th century bibliophile who is often overlooked within the context of the history of Philadelphia book collecting, even though the books he owned later passed through more well-known hands and now reside in some of the world’s top libraries. Stoneman points to the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, directed by my colleague Lynn Ransom, which is a provenance database, that is it traces the ownership of manuscripts over time – including manuscripts owned by George Clifford Thomas.
In his entertaining and illuminating talk, “Extreme Loss and Subtle Discoveries: The Corpus of Sotades of Maronea,” Mark Saltveit presents on recently discovered lines of text by the ancient poet Sotades – discoveries that were made entirely by reconsidering quotes and identification of poets in earlier texts, and not at all through any kind of digital work (which is part of his point)
Finally, of all the Lightning Talks, Mary M. Alcaro takes a more critical approach in her talk “Closing the Book on Kanuti: Lost Authorship & Digital Archives.” This Kanuti, we discover, was attributed the authorship of “A litil boke for the Pestilence” In the 15th century, and this authorship followed the text until 2010, when Kari Anne Rand said in no uncertain terms that this Kanuti was not the author. But no matter – online catalogs still list him as the author. A problem for sure!
I want to close by pushing back a little on the accepted knowledge that digitization only causes loss. I think it does, but there are other ways that we can talk about digitization too, which may sit alongside the concept of loss and which might help us respond to it.
I’ve talked about mediation a bit during this talk – the idea that the digitized object is mediated through people and software, and this mediation provides a different way for users to have a relationship with the physical object. The decisions that the collection and interface creators make have a huge impact on how this mediation functions and how people “see” manuscripts out the other side, and we need to take that seriously when we choose what we show and what we hide.
Transformation: basically, digitization
transforms the physical object into something else. There is loss in comparison
with the original, but there is also gain. It’s much easier to take apart a
digital manuscript than a physical one. About that…
I’ve talked before about how digitization is essentially a deconstruction, breaking down a manuscript into individual leaves, and interfaces are ways to reconstruct the manuscript again. It’s typical to rebuild a manuscript as it exists, that’s what we do in most interfaces, but it also enables things like Fragmentarium, or VisColl, where we can pull together materials that have long been separated, or organize an object in a different order.
Finally, my colleague Whitney Trettien, Assistant professor of English at Penn, claims the term creative destruction (currently used primarily in an economic context) and applies it to the work of the late seventeenth century shoemaker and bibliophile John Bagford, who took fragments of parchment and paper and created great scrapbooks from them – as she says in this context, “creative destruction with text technologies is not the oppositional bête noire of inquiry but rather is its generative force.”[2] Why must we insist that digitized copies of manuscripts reflect the physical object? Why not claim the pieces as our own and do completely new things with them?
Digitization is lossy, yes. But it can also generate something new.
I must say that to see a manuscript will never be replaced by a digital tool or feature. A scholar knows that a face to face meeting with a manuscript is something that can be replaced by nothing else.
Claire Clivaz, “A Lost and Found Ending of the Gospel of Mark”
Claire Clivaz is correct – a digital thing will never replace the physical object. But I think that’s okay; it doesn’t have to. It can be its own thing.
[1] Edwards, A. S. G. “Back to the real?” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 5749, 7 June 2013, p. 15. The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive.
[2] Trettien, Whitney. “Creative Destruction and the Digital Humanities,” The Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature and Culture, Ed. Jen Boyle and Helen Burgess, 2018, pp. 47-60.
I recorded this brief presentation in September 2021, as part of “the digital medieval manuscript: an expert meeting,” organized by Kathryn Rudy at the University of Saint Andrews and held virtually on October 8, 2021.
Abstract:
In March of 2020, an exhibition of medieval manuscripts I curated was installed at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Because of the quick rise of Covid-19 the exhibition never opened, and was finally deinstalled in October. The FLP staff worked with me to do what we could to virtualize the experience, including building a small online exhibit and presenting a series of virtual lectures and workshops. But it wasn’t the same; something was lost. We talk a lot about what is lost and gained when manuscripts are digitized, but what about the larger experience of digital exhibits vs physical exhibits? In this presentation I will address this question: What is the substantive difference between a physical exhibit and a digital one? And what do these differences mean for both the general and the scholarly audience?
Transcription (slightly edited):
Hi there, my name is Dot Porter and I am the Curator for Digital Research Services in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. And what I want to talk about today is a little bit different from anything I’ve ever talked about before, and I hope that you’ll humor me on this. This isn’t really a scholarly talk so much, it’s a little bit theoretical.
But mostly, I want to talk about an experience that I had recently. It has to do with COVID. And it has to do with my labor. And it’s a little emotional for me. But I hope that there will be some interesting conversation to come after this, because this experience made me think about things a little bit differently than I was before.
I want to talk about exhibitions, which is not really something that I’ve that I’ve done a whole lot. This one that I’m going to talk about is Medieval Life: European Manuscripts in Philadelphia Collections. This exhibition was originally conceived to celebrate the completion of a major digitization project, the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project. From 2016, to 2019, we had a major project funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources here in Philadelphia, to digitize manuscripts from 14 different institutions. What we wanted to do was exhibit manuscripts from all of these different institutions. And the the organizing factor was thinking about medieval life.
The exhibition had five different sections, and each section included several manuscripts and also some modern things as well, because the point, one of one of the things I wanted to do with the exhibition was to bring medieval life closer to us to say, here’s how medieval people were similar to us.
The exhibition was in collaboration with the Free Library of Philadelphia, which is the public library here in Philadelphia. They invited me to curate the exhibition in their space. I worked closely with their exhibition staff, including designers, and there was a person that they hired to hold my hand through the whole process. The curators helped me with my with the text of my cards, which were, you know, much too advanced at first. And so they helped me rewrite them. And it was just a really, it was a really wonderful experience.
The exhibition was scheduled to open on March 30 of 2020. It was installed in February, and on the 16th of March, the Free Library shut, Penn shut, everything shut, and the exhibition didn’t open. And the exhibition never opened.
It actually stayed installed much longer than it was planned to. It was supposed to be open from March through July, it stayed up through the summer into the fall. Closed, right because the library was closed. And nobody was actually seeing it was just sitting in this in this empty, dark gallery. There was a time in October when we thought that it might open and it did not. And then in in January, it was deinstalled. So now it’s down. But it was up for almost a year, right? In this empty space.
I did go get to see it. I got to take my family, which was which was really nice. And I know staff in the library got to see it. I think there were probably some patrons who got to see it. But for the most part, it was a fully conceived exhibition with no with no audience.
I have some some more photos because it was so so beautiful. So here’s, here’s the gallery space. And you can see on the wall we have there were some rolls because you know medieval manuscript rolls are pretty neat. And so I had some rolls. And you can see on the wall that I worked with this exhibition designer on these rolls that that you could actually pull them and you could see the whole roll which is not something you can usually see in exhibition unless you have you know, unless you’re able to put it on a very long, very long table which we didn’t get the space for.
It is also something that you can do digitally, interestingly enough, right. You can see the whole roll digitally, but it’s a very different experience from being in a room with it. And this is sort of where I want to go with this.
The exhibition was designed as a physical experience.
In fact, one of the things that I had in the space was a movie playing in the back of the gallery, and you can’t see it when you come in, because it’s not it was on a big screen that’s behind a wall. But you can hear it. It’s a film called The Luttrell Psalter Film. And it mostly has music and a little bit of a little bit of talking, but it’s mostly music, and nature sounds. And so when you come in the gallery have music and nature sounds of the like, of the Middle Ages, but also familiar to us, because it’s just music and nature sounds. And that’s, you know, that hasn’t changed, a little medieval music.
So you’re walking through this space, and you’re looking at these objects set up in a very particular way, in an order by me. So here is, this was the section on labor. And so part of the section on labor was images from for laborers of the month from books of hours. So you can see there on the right, there are these four leaves that have four different labors. These are leaves that were excised from one manuscript that was taken apart, I don’t know, in the 18th century and so I was able to talk a little bit about, you know, this process, sort of common process of like manuscripts being taken apart.
And then there’s some more books of hours there in the, in the case, open to specific pages. And then what you see on the left, this was one of my attempts of bringing the modern and the medieval sort of closer together. So I had a modern bakery menu from a Philadelphia bakery. And next to that is a is a chart from England, showing the prices of bread, sort of more like a legal document. So a very different kind of thing. But but for, you know, for this audience, I wanted them to think about this, oh, yeah, we still kind of do this. And then the chart in the middle is talking about the jobs that people in Philadelphia have.
So, so this was what I was trying to do in in the in the physical exhibition it had a very specific aim. So we have a prop, this is a prop from the Dark Crystal, we actually got this… I’m so mad that this exhibition didn’t happen, I can’t talk about it without getting kind of upset, because because, you know, it was just really neat. So here is this prop manuscript from the Dark Crystal.
Urine wheels, really cool, right? And, you know, we had a had a modern replica of a uroscopy flask, which is neat. And then of course, there’s a modern one, a modern cup, like you get when you go to the doctor’s office, and you’re going to have your urine tested. So it was this very again, you know, trying to get into this mindset of this, you know, specific thing.
At some point, we were like, well, this isn’t gonna happen. And so in the fall of 2020, you can see on there, the team at the Free Library, said, we’re gonna make a digital copy, just in case, you know, just so people can see what it is. And so here’s the link for that.
On one hand, this is great, because we get the same information from the gallery, makes it into the website. And so the, if you read the text, on this website, it’s the same text that you’re going to find when you’re walking through the exhibition. But the images that we’re showing here are not actually photos from the exhibition, there are photos from the digitization project, right. So if you click on the link that says view full artifact, you can view it. This is the opening that I had selected in the exhibition. But it looks really different because it’s not the book in the gallery. It’s the book in the lab, where we where we’ve photographed it, you know, very, very different experience, very physical experience. Even though in the gallery, you can’t touch them. It’s still, I mean, we all know this, right? It’s just really different, but I hadn’t thought about how different it was until the gallery wasn’t accessible at all. And when we had to rely on, on the on the website, the experience of seeing the physical book is not is not there.
So I was able to get in and take a video.
And one thing that the video has, that the website doesn’t have? Well, we’ve got the view, the impression of the view of how the gallery looks, which is something that was lacking from the website, because the website, like all you know, it’s like all digital. All our digital versions are really focused on, you know, presenting data. This is not data, this exhibition is not a presentation of data, it’s a presentation of things, in a very specific way. And so the video you get that sense. And you actually get to see the cards, the music that you’re hearing, I hope you can hear that the music is from the movie that was playing in the gallery.
Oh, and that’s totally lost in the exhibition site. I don’t think it even cites the movie, the movie is not there at all. And it would have been a major part of the experience of the exhibition.
I’m over time.
And I’m still trying to figure out what, because we all know that a digital manuscript is different from the manuscript in front of you. But what about this? What about this exhibition? This is a whole other I feel like this is a whole other thing. I’m trying to sort of figure out how it relates to my digitization work. Is it relevant at all? Should I be thinking in in these sort of exhibition terms? I don’t know.
Anyway, thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Kathryn and Suzette, for putting this event together. It’s really, it’s really great and I’m excited to see what other people are talking about.
Video walk-through of the Medieval Life exhibition
Thanks as always to the team at the Free Library of Philadelphia who made the exhibition possible, especially Allison Freyermuth, Caitlin Goodman, Nathanael Roesch, Clare Fentress, Alix Gerz, Christine Miller, Andrew Nurkin, Joseph Shemtov, Suzanna Urminska, with a special mention to exhibition designer Megan Grimm.
Good afternoon, and thank you everyone for coming today. Thanks especially to the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for inviting me, to Chris Highley and Leslie Lockett for organizing, and to Nick Spitulski for making all my travel arrangements.
The advertised topic of today’s talk is Books of Hours as Transformative Works, and I’m excited to be here to talk to you about this work that I’m really only beginning to work on. I’m hoping that we have time in Q&A to have a good discussion, and that I might be able to learn from you.
But first, a bit about me so you know where we’re starting.
I am a librarian and curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS), which is a research and development group in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve been at Penn, at SIMS, for six years, since SIMS was founded in 2013. The work we do at SIMS is focused broadly on medieval manuscripts and on digital medieval manuscripts – we have databases we host, we work with the physical collections in the library, we collaborate on a number of projects hosted at other institutions. Anything manuscript related, we’re interested in.
For the past three years I’ve been co-PI, along with Lois Black of Lehigh University and Janine Pollock of the Free Library of Philadelphia, of a major project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, to digitize and make available the western medieval manuscripts from 15 Philadelphia area institutions – about 475 mss codices total. We call this project Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, or the library of Philadelphia – BiblioPhilly for short. My work on the project is largely related to project management: making sure the manuscripts are being photographed on time, that the cataloging is going well (and at the start we had to set up cataloging protocols and practices). The grant, as a whole, has gone remarkably well and we’re in the process of writing the final report right now. The manuscripts went online as they were digitized, in the same manner that all our manuscripts do:
They go on OPenn: Primary Digital Resources Available for Everyone, which is a website where we make available raw data as Free Cultural Works (for BiblioPhilly, this means images, including high-resolution master TIFFs, in the Public Domain, and metadata in the form of TEI Manuscript Descriptions under CC:0 licenses – this means released into the public domain).
OPenn has a very specific purpose: it’s designed to make data available for reuse. It is not designed for searching and browsing.
There is a Google search box, which helps, but not the kind of robust keyword-based browsing you’d expect for a collection like this.
And the presentation of the data on the site is also simple – this is an HTML rendition of a TEI file, with the information presented very simply and image files linked at the bottom. There’s no page-turning facility or gallery or filmstrip-style presentation. And this is by design. We designed it this way, because we believe in separating out data from presentation. The data, once created, won’t change much. We’ll need to migrate to new hardware, and at some point we may need to convert the TEI to some other format. The technologies for presentation, on the other hand, are numerous and change frequently. So we made a conscious decision to keep our data raw, and create and use interfaces as they come along, and as we wish. Releasing the data as Free Cultural Works means that other people can create interfaces for our data as well, which we welcome.
We also have a user-friendly interface. We partnered with a development company called Byte Studios out of Milwaukee Wisconsin, which also worked with the Walters Art Museum on their site called Ex Libris (manuscripts.thewalters.org). It’s this site, which we also call BiblioPhilly, which we expect most people will use to interact with our collection. It has the browsing facility you’d expect,
here we’re selecting a Book of Hours,
So here’s Library Company MS 5,
we have a Contents and Decorations menu so we can browse directly to a specific text. Here’s the start of the Office of the Dead with a miniature and an illuminated initial.
We can also download individual images or the TEI for the whole manuscript directly from this site
And then further down the page is all the data from the record you’d expect to see on any good digitized manuscript site. This is pulled from the TEI Manuscript Descriptions and indexed in a backend database for the site, while the images are pulled directly from their URLs on OPenn.
I want to return back to the top and point out the icon in the middle, which is meant to resemble the edge of an uncovered manuscript spine.
This function of the website is, as far as I know, original to BiblioPhilly, and it contains an interactive view of the physical collation of the manuscript. Initially we have diagrams of each quire, but then we can select a quire and view the bifolia diagrams separated out, and if we select one
we can view the page images that form the bilofia.
I’m showing you this both to give you a sense of the kind of work I focus on in my day to day work, but also to start to get us thinking about the concept of transformation as it applies to medieval manuscripts. Manuscript digitization and the BiblioPhilly project specifically is one example of how we transform manuscripts: through digitization we deconstruct manuscripts, breaking them virtually into individual pages and providing metadata about the object they represent (that is, the physical manuscript) as well as what we in the business call structural metadata, which is what enables us to then reconstruct some kind of digital version of the physical object. As the example of the collation view implies, it’s possible to have multiple digital versions of an object, focused on different aspects of the physical object (in this case we provide both a page-turning view that mimics the experience of paging through the manuscript, and a collation view that shows us how the manuscript would appear if we were to take it apart, as well as providing diagrams that would not be available to us if we were just using the manuscript in the reading room.
For the rest of my talk I want to think about another kind of transformation: the textual and physical transformation inherent in a group of manuscripts that dominated the manuscript trade for 250 years – Books of Hours.
Transformative Works / Language of Care
Before I do, however, I think it’s only fair to come clean. Besides my family, there are two things in the world that I love more than anything. One of them are medieval manuscripts. The other one is Star Wars. I’m a fan. I read and write fan fiction, I participate in fandom activities on and offline, I encourage other fans to create transformative works.
I’ve been able to combine my loves together in various ways too, from collaborating on a Star Wars fan story set in the middle ages and focusing on a group of medieval scribes,
to collaborating on a series of videos with another medievalist and Star Wars fan, Dr. Brandon Hawk at Rhode Island College, where we compare manuscripts from Penn’s collections with the “Ancient Jedi texts” shown in The Last Jedi. (Sacred Texts: Codices Far, Far Away)
So this project is another opportunity for me to combine my great loves. However, it’s also probably important to note that although I am in some sense a codicologist and manuscript scholar I am neither technically a scholar of Books of Hours – I don’t have a PhD in Art History, for example – nor am I a scholar of fandom. Which, honestly, is one of the reasons I am excited to be here with you all today, because I’m hoping that you’ll be able to help me through some of the questions I have, that I don’t yet have answers for.
Back to Transformative Works.
Transformative work is a concept that comes out of fandom: that is, the fans of a particular person, team, fictional series, etc. regarded collectively as a community or subculture. We typically talk about fandom in relation to sports, movies, or TV shows, but people can be fans of many things (including manuscripts). As defined on the Fanlore wiki:
Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.
In some fandom communities, transformative works play a major role in how the members of that fandom communicate with each other and how they interact with the canon material (“canon” being the term fans use to refer the original work). Transformative works start with canon but then transform it in various ways to create new work – new stories, new art, new ideas, possible directions for canon to take in the future, directions canon would never take but which are fun or interesting to consider.
For example, Darth Vader reimagined as a medieval Dark Knight
There is a small but growing academic movement to apply the concept of transformative work to historical texts. Some of this work is happening through the Organization for Transformative Works, which among other things hosts Archive of Our Own, a major site for fans to publish their fanworks, and provides legal advocacy for creators of fanworks.
The Organization for Transformative Works also publishes a journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, and in 2016 they published an issue “The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work,” which focused on relating ancient historical and literary texts to the concept of fan fiction (that is, stories that fans write that feature characters and situations from canon). An upcoming special journal issue on “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Culture,” which will “explore the potential of fan fiction as an interpretative model to study ancient religious texts.” This special issue is being edited by a group of scholars who lead the “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures” working group in the European Association of Biblical Studies, which organized a conference on the topic in 2016.
You will note that the academic work on transformative works I’ve cited focus specifically on fan fiction’s relationship with classical and medieval texts, which makes a fair amount of sense given the role of textual reuse in the classical and medieval world. In her article “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction ,” published in the Transformative Works and Cultures special issue of 2016, Dr. Anna Wilson places fan fiction within the category of textual reception, wherein texts from previous times are received by and reworked by future authors. In particular, Dr. Wilson points to the epic poetry of classical literature, medieval romance poetry, and Biblical exegesis, but she notes that comparisons between modern transformative works – that is, fan fiction – and these past examples of textual reception are undertheorized, and leave out a major aspect of fan fiction that is typically not found, or even looked for, in the past examples. She says,
“To define fan fiction only by its transformative relationship to other texts runs the risk of missing the fan in fan fiction—the loving reader to whom fan fiction seeks to give pleasure. Fan fiction is an example of affective reception. While classical reception designates the content being received, affective reception designates the kind of reading and transformation that is taking place. It is a form of reception that is organized around feeling.”
Wilson, 1.2
For my paper at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in 2018 I described the manuscript University of Pennsylvania LJS 101 as an example of “medieval manuscript as transformative work,” not as a piece of data to be mined for its texts, but as a transformative work in itself.
Here is the manuscript in question. UPenn LJS 101 is the oldest codex we have in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries by at least 150 years and which is one of only two codices in our collection which is written in Caroline minuscule (the other one being UPenn Ms. Codex 1058, dated to ca. 1100 and localized to Laon).
The bulk of the manuscript, folios five through 44 (Quires two through six), are dated to the mid-9th century, but in the early 12th century replacement leaves were added for the first four leaves and for the last 20 leaves. LJS 101 reflects the educational program set up in the Carolingian court by Alcuin, featuring a copy of Boethius’s translation of Aristotle’s De Institutiatione (which was commonly called Periermenias, the name also used in this text) and a short commentary on that text (also called Periermenias), along with a few other shorter texts.
Over the course of the talk I did a slow walk-through of the manuscript, examining it from cover to cover and noting every instance of a signs of care from the people who created and, for the most part, have used the manuscript since it was created.
I talked about the 19th century binding with several 20th century owner’s marks,
the 12th century replacement leaves at the front and the back of the manuscript (which notably contain all but one of the texts extant in the manuscript)
The 12th century corrections that run throughout the 9th century section
The colorful highlighting that was added to diagrams and some of the headwords
There are also many quires’ worth of text missing from the main text, and the first and last quires have been misbound in a way that makes me think someone dropped the quires, scattering the bifolia across the floor, and picked them up without paying attention to the order.
There were two things I discovered as I was working on that paper, with regard to trying to fit the manuscript into the frame of a transformative work. The first issue was what exactly is it that is being transformed. Looking again at the definition of the transformative work
Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.
The thing that is being transformed is something canon – usually a text (and in text I’m including TV shows or movies), but it could be something else; an artwork, or a sports game, for example – and then there is another thing that is the transformation, the transformative work. In the case of LJS 101, one could argue that the canon is the various texts in the manuscript, but by the time they are there, they have already been transformed – they’ve been copied and recopied, edited, a scribe has decided to use this copy for their manuscript and not that one (if they even had a choice, which we can’t know), someone decided which other texts to include. If I argue instead that the canon was the 9th century version of the manuscript – as it existed when it was created – and the version we have now is the transformative work, I find that a bit more satisfying, although there’s still another problem.
I’m not comfortable applying Dr. Wilson’s concept of affective reception to the people who created and worked with LJS 101 – I didn’t want to suggest that these people loved the manuscript the same way that I do – but I did want to explore the idea that this person or people cared about it, and that other people have cared about this manuscript over time enough that it survives to live now in our library at the University of Pennsylvania. Their interests may have been scholarly, or based on pride of ownership, or even based on curiosity, but whatever their reasons for caring for the manuscript, they did care, and we know they cared because of the physical marks that they have left on these books. Manuscripts that survive also often show examples of lack of care, damage and so forth, so those elements need to be included in this framework as well. So coming out of that paper I suggested a language of care around their use, rather than the frame of Transformative Work.
After Leeds, I spent some time wondering if there were actually a way to make the frame of Transformative Work fit any medieval manuscript, or if it was just another one of my zany ideas. But in the fall, when I was teaching an undergraduate course on medieval manuscripts with Dr. Will Noel, the director of the Schoenberg Institute and the Kislak Center, I had a bit of an epiphany as he was lecturing on Books of Hours. He made the very important point that people saw Books of Hours as at least part of a ticket to salvation. As I will describe in a moment, Books of Hours are organized around the veneration of the Virgin Mary, who acts as an intercessor between us and Christ. By using Books of Hours to ask Mary to intercede with us for Christ, we hope to spend less time in purgatory and to make to heaven, to be with Christ, sooner than we would otherwise.
I still thought this idea was a bit weird, so I sat down with my colleague Dr. Nicholas Herman, the SIMS Curator of Manuscripts, and talked about the potential of manuscripts as transformative works, and he reminded me that, unlike LJS 101, which really only works as a transformative work in a physical sense, Books of Hours can work both textually and physically. What do I mean by this?
Textually, Books of Hours are designed to be lay versions of the texts that priests, monks, and nuns used during their lives in the Church. Churches, cathedrals, and monasteries had antiphonaries – containing liturgical chants – and breviaries – books furnishing the regulations for the celebration of the canonical Office – for the use of their communities, usually very large books that the members of the community would share as they sang and recited prayers together.
Historians trace the growth of Books of Hours to the late 13th century, when social and economic changes led to both a growing secularization and an embryonic urban middle class, which emerged through the 14th and 15th centuries. Speaking generally these groups – although small – had money, and they were both literate and interested in books. They were also pious. In Time Sanctified, Roger Wieck explains that the laity at this time wished to imitate the clergy by adapting their prayers, adapting their books, and by adopting their direct relationship with God. The book of hours gave them all of these things: “a series of prayers like the clergy’s, but less complex, and a type of book like the breviary, but easier to use and more pleasing to the eye.”
The growth of the cult of the Virgin around this same time also contributed to the development and popularity of Books of Hours. Indeed, the thing that determines whether a prayer book is a Book of Hours or some other type of prayer book is the inclusion of the Hours of the Virgin. The Hours of the Virgin did not come into the common use before the 10th century although it may be older, and it was added to breviaries in various monastic orders throughout the 11th and 12th centuries. The Hours of the Virgin were extracted from the breviary and became the centerpiece of the Book of Hours: a set of prayers to Mary, designed to be recited daily and throughout the day – eight times, roughly following the canonical hours that would be practiced in a monastery – an ongoing reminder of the pious life of the user of any given Book of Hours.
In addition to the Hours of the Virgin, Books of Hours will typically include a Calendar, which will list festivals and saints’ days presumed relevant for the geographical location in which the owner of the book resides; The Gospels; the Hours of the Cross and Hours of the Holy Spirit; two prayers to the Virgin known as the Obsecro te and the O intemerata; the Penitential Psalms and Litany; the Office of the Dead; and various and perhaps numerous Sufferages.
The Hours of the Virgin were pulled from existing monastic or liturgical books, but so were other parts of a typical Book of Hours – the Calendar, the Office of the Dead, and of course the Penitential Psalms. Other elements, including the Hours of the Cross and Hours of the Holy Spirit, the Obsecro te and the O intemerata, and the Suffrages have uncertain sources although it’s unclear in my research whether they were original to Books of Hours.
Returning to the frame of Transformative Works, here we have Books of Hours, as a class or type of books, that represent a transformation of canonical liturgical texts originally developed for clerical and monastic users, into texts that are explicitly for lay use, and this transformation was explicitly made from a place of affection on the part of the people doing the transforming. One could thus argue that Books of Hours are transformative works of liturgical works.
But that’s looking at Books of Hours as a class. What about transformation within the class? Although as I explained earlier Books of Hours usually contain a set group of texts, and they usually appear in a set order, my theory coming into this is that, in practice the textual organization of individual Books of Hours is much more variant. So I did a bit of work, using data from OPenn, to visualize the variance across a collection of Books of Hours.
Through OPenn, I have access to three collections of digitized Books of Hours: those digitized through the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, those digitized through The Digital Walters, which is the ongoing digitization project at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore – the data for which is hosted on OPenn – and the collections of Penn Libraries itself. As part of the data publication, OPenn hosts spreadsheets that list all the manuscripts in a given repository or collection, so it was simple enough for me to filter for only those titles that include the word “Hours”, check for stray odd things, and then use some scripts I wrote to generate a new spreadsheet that pulls out the contents of each of these manuscripts. Then I color coded each text to align with the list of texts in the “usual” order prescribed by Roger Wieck in Time Sanctified.
Here are the first couple of books of hours, and you can see that the texts in both are in a slightly different order than the “usual” order.
To more easily view the variance I turned the color charts on their side, placing each manuscript in a row, and stacked them. The Hours of the Virgin are the gold bar down the center; I did it this way because the Hours of the Virgin are the central text of Books of Hours and it made sense to visualize the other texts around that one. The rest of the contents are arranged around that text. We can see that the area before the Hours of the Virgin tend to be warmer, and the area after the Hours of the Virgin tend to be cooler, there is an awful lot of variation there. Unfortunately this chart isn’t organized in a thoughtful way; There are a mix of uses represented here, including Paris, Rome, Sarum, Franciscan, Bourges, and Utrecht, among others, and they range from the 14th through the 16th centuries, mostly from France and the Netherlands, but they aren’t ordered, and that’s definitely something that would need to be addressed in future use. The chart also doesn’t take into account any physical modifications that might have been made to the individual manuscripts, modifications that could lead to texts being reordered at some point after the book was written.
This view also doesn’t take into account the actual or relative length of the books, so I tried another way to visualize the texts.
In this example, Books of Hours from the Walters Art Museum, each book has its texts distributed across a row, which is the same length for each book. Again the Hours of the Virgin are in gold, with the other texts colored appropriately, but because the gold bar of the Hours of the Virgin appear very long in some, and short in others – assuming that the Hours of the Virgin is approximately the same in each manuscript – you get a better sense of the size of the books in number of folios from this visualization.
So we’ve looked at Books of Hours as transforming from monastic liturgical texts to texts used by laypeople, and then at the transformation of those texts in terms of which are included and which left out, across a collection of Books of Hours. I want to close by talking very briefly about a third way in which Books of Hours might be considered transformative works: physical modifications made to them, both on purpose and accidentally, after their creation and as a result of their use.
Physical
For several years now Dr. Kathryn Rudy at the University of St Andrews has been doing important and cutting-edge work on how people in the medieval and early modern periods physically interacted with their books, particularly their prayer books. In this section I’ll talk about two of her studies that are particularly relevant to the concept of Books of Hours of transformative works.
In her book Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts, Dr Rudy classifies the many ways in which the owners of Netherlandish prayerbooks modified these books over time. In the introduction, she points out that it’s often difficult if not impossible to understand exactly why some of these changes were made, but clearly some of the possible reasons lie within the realm of Wilson’s definition of affection. Rudy says:
“In this study I explore the ways in which medieval book owners adjusted the contents of their books to reflect changed circumstances. Such circumstances were not usually so overtly political, but they nonetheless reveal other fears and motivations. Religious, social or economic reasons could also motivate such emendations. Augmentations to a book reveal strong emotional and social forces.”
Dr Rudy divides the modifications into two groups, those that require rebinding and those that don’t, and comes up with a detailed variety of changes, which I list here. This list includes many ways that people changed their prayer books, from changing the text in various ways
(in this example, an owner found an error and had a professional scribe fix it) to adding new leaves or removing old ones. This list isn’t even exhaustive – Dr Rudy’s study also includes sections on modular design – where prayer books were built from modules that were designed to be modified on spec, either during the time the book was being made or after – and on modifications that led to complete overhauls of books; for example, building books out of quires that were originally part of other books.
Most relevant for the discussion of Books of Hours as transformative works and the accompanying concept of affective reception is Dr Rudy’s final chapter, in which she lists the reasons that changes might have been made – reasons that she refers to as patterns of desire.
“I have asked in this study: how did later users register their opinions that a book considered perfectly acceptable by its previous owners was for them somehow incomplete, and by what means did they express their discontent? How can their acts of recycling and upcycling be interpreted? The kinds of augmentations owners made to books reveal certain patterns of desires, which I enumerate here.”
Although these desires vary significantly from the kind of affection that I’ve discussed earlier in the paper – which focused on the love of the Virgin Mary and the desire to reach God (so, I suppose, aligns most clearly with “H. Fear of Hell”) – these other desires also reflect affection of various sorts.
One of Dr Rudy’s other studies focuses on densitometry, or the quantitative measurement of optical density in light-sensitive materials. It is a simple fact that medieval and later users of manuscripts leave traces of their use of manuscripts in the form of dirt around the edges of pages, and sometimes on decorations and illustrations as well. More use would deposit more dirt, more dirt would make an area darker, and that darkness vs. the lightness of the rest of the page can be picked up using a tool called a densitometer. Dr. Rudy used a densitometer to measure the distribution of dirt through a number of Netherlandish prayer books and first published her findings in “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer,” in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art in 2010. Her conclusion was that in applying densitometry to prayer books, one might be able to determine which pages – and thus which texts – users of those books turned to the most.
While my concern with the care of LJS 101 focused on how it was manipulated by later users – by how they bound it, notated it, cared for it in a physical sense – Dr. Rudy’s use of densitometry is designed to determine which prayers the people who actively used the prayer books recited most frequently. It’s a physical indication of religious practice – Dr Wilson’s affective reception.
Here are just two examples from Dr Rudy’s article. This first is from a Missal – a liturgical book, not a personal prayer book – That shows where a priest (or perhaps priests) kissed the illumination enough to damage it. This circle and cross at the bottom of the page is an osculation plaque, which was designed to be kissed and touched in place of the illumination, as artists knew that their work would be the object of veneration. So that plaque has been well-worn, but the priest wandered, at times reaching up as high as Christ’s feet.
In addition to measuring the wear of illuminations to see how people caressed their books, Dr Rudy used densitometry to measure dirt on the edge of pages. These pages show very heavy discoloration in the bottom margins, which implies that someone (or many someones) held the book open frequently to this page, which contains the incipit of a prayer to the “Seventy-two Names of the Virgin.”
Someone loved the Virgin Mary, so they returned to this page again and again to read this prayer, thereby physically changing the book with the addition of dirt from their fingers. This book is one of many that contain approximately the same texts, in the same approximate order, but each of which was designed and written to be used by individuals for prayer and contemplation. And finally this type of book, the Book of Hours, was a transformation of liturgical texts into something that individuals could use for prayer in their own lives.
This is the text of a talk originally presented at the conference Fan Cultures and the Premodern World at Oxford University in July, 2019, organized by Dr. Juliana Dresvina of the Oxford History Faculty. This presentation represents a collaboration between myself and Dr Brandon Hawke of Rhode Island College, and is essentially a summation of our video project Sacred Texts: Codices Far, Far Away
Hi, My name is Dot Porter, and I want to start by thanking Juliana for the wonderful organization of this conference, and also for including me in the program. This is very different from the kind of conference I normally present at – in my day job I’m a special collections curator at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in medieval manuscripts, their digitization, and their post-digital lives. Basically I get paid to digitize medieval manuscripts and then play with them. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which is just finished, and through which we digitized and made available for reuse more than 465 codices from institutions in Philadelphia)
The search interface for the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project
Aside from my family there are two things in life I adore: medieval manuscripts, and Star Wars. I must admit that while I am a scholar of manuscripts, of a sort, I am also a fan. I love manuscripts – the way they look, feel, smell; I love to hold a manuscript and think about all the other people who have touched it, and consider the signs of use that imply their long histories. This interest has led to current work on conceiving of medieval manuscripts as transformative works themselves, first presented at Leeds 2018 and work I’m continuing looking specifically as Books of Hours. (My original draft of this presentation featured some of this work, but it threatened to take over, so I axed it all; a blog post of my Leeds paper is on my blog, if you’re curious).
While I am arguably a manuscript scholar, I am most definitely not a scholar of fandom studies – you will, I’m sure, find my theory wanting – nor am I a scholar of Star Wars, but I am a fan. I do the things that fans do. I’m on Tumblr, although that platform is pretty dead now, and I have a fandom Twitter account, which is much more active. I write and consume fan fiction, and I regularly commission artwork to illustrate my stories and stories I would like to write. I have written exactly one notable meta, which was even picked up by the AV Club – they actually cited me, unlike many of the other websites, which only cited the person who stole my work and posted it on Reddit!
My claim to fame in the Star Wars fandom
In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, released in December 2017, we were introduced, for the first time, to manuscripts in the Star Wars universe. I had avoided trailers and spoilers, so the first time I saw this was in the theater, and I was, as the kids say, shooketh. Not only one manuscript, but a whole shelf-full of them! And they’re important. Rey, our heroine, has been sent to the island of Ahch-to to bring Luke Skywalker back to help the Resistance, led by Luke’s sister General Leia Organa, defeat the First Order. Rey has been there for a day or so, following Luke around, making no headway, when she is called to the Uneti tree, a large, hollow, Force-sensitive tree that houses these manuscripts. It’s in the company of these books that Rey and Luke finally communicate with each other, when Rey admits that she has only recently come to the Force and that she needs Luke to train her to be a Jedi, and when Luke grudgingly agrees to give her some lessons, but also tells her that the Jedi must die. Exciting stuff, and the books are there to hear it.
Rey in the Uneti treeThe manuscripts in the treeLuke with a bookLuke’s hand on the sacred text
According to Star Wars The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary, Luke Skywalker scoured the galaxy for these texts and collected them himself, storing them in the tree that we see in the film. So these texts weren’t originally all in one collection, they are from many different planets, potentially written in ten different places, ten different times, ten different languages and alphabets, although there’s only one we ever see in the film. The starwars.com blog post “Inside the Lucasfilm Archives: The Jedi Texts” gives us an up-close look at the prop book that was shown in the film; as you can see it’s a real book, written and bound, and even damaged. There are manuscripts in our collection at Penn that look not very unlike this book. It is a real manuscript.
This is one manuscript in the universe. What else do we know about manuscripts in star wars in general? To be honest: not much. But we do know that it is rare to write by hand (as opposed to writing with digital technology like data pads). In Claudia Gray’s novel Bloodlines, which takes place six years before The Last Jedi, Leia Organa is preparing for a fancy party when she finds a handwritten note at her seat, and she’s shocked: “Virtually nobody wrote any longer; it had been years since Leia had seen actual words handwritten in ink on anything but historical documents.” So it appears that, by the time the current films take place, there are no longer manuscripts being actively written in the galaxy, or at least it’s very rare.
Interestingly there is one character in the Sequel Trilogy who it is suggested knows how to write by hand: Kylo Ren, formerly Ben Solo. There is a scene – the same scene is actually shown three times, from three different points of view – where a young padawan Ben is sleeping and his Uncle, Luke Skywalker, comes to him and looks into his head, sensing great darkness in his dreams. Ben calls his lightsaber to either attack his uncle or defend himself against him, depending on the version of the scene, and in one of these shots we can see that he has a calligraphy set in his bedroom. We can see the set here, in a screenshot of his desk just before he calls his lightsaber over – which knocks over the pen and inkwell and jar of parchment scrolls in the process – and in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
What else do we know about these specific books? There is concept art in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi; including six internal pages and six shots of the bindings.
I remember looking at the concept art and thinking how alike and different they were from the manuscripts I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Penn, and I discovered that my Twitter mutual Brandon Hawke, an Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College, was having many of the same thoughts that I was. So in October of 2018, Brandon came down to Penn and we sat for hours in front of a green screen and talked about manuscripts and Star Wars, comparing books in the Penn collections to what we see of the manuscripts in the concept art. We’ve been posting snippets of our discussions on the Schoenberg Institute YouTube channel, and there’s a link at the top there if you want to check them out. So for most of the rest of this paper I’ll be walking through some of the possible comparisons between real manuscripts and the Star Wars manuscripts. I want to stress that we did this for fun, and not for science, and that we’re limited by the collections at Penn and by our own knowledge.
Consider yourself warned: The remainder of this presentation is essentially an educated fan, raving.
As far as Brandon and I have been able to determine, this is a previously unknown script in the Star Wars universe. When I saw it my mind immediately went to Ge’ez, shown here in an early 20th century book of Hymns from Ethiopia. There’s something about the blockiness that is just slightly curved, and a few of the letter forms are slightly similar although I don’t think that’s necessarily meaningful.
We also made a comparison with Coptic, which is thinner, more curved, and perhaps a closer match.
For the third example we looked not at the text, but at its layout on the page. We found a similarity with this 16th century collection of Persian poetry, both its illuminated header (similar in aspect to the illuminated blue line of text in the center of the ancient Jedi text) and the framing of the text.
Aside from text, it is clear that the concept art of pages supplied to us here represent astronomical texts. This is really not surprising, considering that in the Star Wars universe we have a galaxy that seems to have been very closely connected, between planets and cultures, for a very long time, and so it makes sense that even the most ancient texts would be concerned with objects in the system – stars and planets and moons – and how they related to and interact with one another. And this is a major concern in medieval astronomical texts, too: these texts illustrate people trying to make sense of the system they live in, in the best way they know.
One of the pages in the jedi texts is the symbol of the Galactic Republic, but placed on some kind of chart, with characters dispersed through the chart and text – perhaps labels – along the outside. We found a similarity with this chart in LJS 57, a 14th century astronomical anthology from Spain. I don’t know exactly what this chart represents but I can tell you that astronomical texts are full of similar charts; it was one of the ways that medieval people made sense of the data they had available to them.
Something similar is happening here, in LJS 449, a 15th century German medical and astronomical miscellany. These charts are perhaps a bit simpler than the Spanish chart, but they have that attractive blue coloring. Both the coloring and the arrangement of data around the circle reminded Brandon and me of the diagrams on this page of the Jedi texts.
The next three slides show diagrams from a mid-13th century copy of Johannes de Sacro Bosco’s, Algorismus and Tractatum de sphaera, an immensely popular text that was copied and translated and commented upon from the time it was written in the early 13th century (it is possible that our copy was written during Sacrobosco’s lifetime) through the 16th century. It is full of diagrams illustrating the movement of the planets, and the sun, and the moon in relation to the earth. I personally find these diagrams most reminiscent of the two pages on the bottom left, although I feel like their organization suggests a sense of scale that is lacking in the medieval diagrams.
Medieval astronomers only had to think about the earth, and the moon, and the sun, and a few other planets. On the other hand, the Star Wars universe operates on a whole other level – a galaxy with countless star systems and planets that aren’t even charted. When I look at these diagrams I see a clever attempt to illustrate scale using the relatively primitive technology of ink and paper in place of the star charts and 3D maps that we see in the films.
On the other hand, there are some really simple 1:1 comparisons to be made, such as this diagram, which pretty clearly illustrated the phases of a moon.
I want to take a quick look at the bindings of these manuscripts, particularly this piece of concept art, which is quite similar to the prop that we see in the film.
This has a fairly standard binding structure, quite similar to LJS 102, the Ethiopic manuscript we looked at earlier, except for the front cover, which is built of three separate pieces that are obviously connected together. In western bindings, if a wooden cover were a composite of multiple pieces, we would expect that to be obscured, as in this late 13th century Catalonian manuscripts (It’s hard to tell, which is the point, but this cover is made of three pieces of wood).
The only example of a cover like this I’ve seen is from the Walters Art Museum, this 14th century Ethiopian Gospel book. The cover was broken and then sewn back together, but this was the result of an accident, not done on purpose.
My colleague Alberto Campagnolo also suggested that it is similar to the Chinese practice of writing on bamboo strips and binding them together, as in this 18th century example.
This is one instance where the artists who created these concepts have done an excellent job with suggesting a manuscript culture – in fact, several manuscript cultures, cultures that use what is available to them. There are two manuscripts here that appear to be bound in decorated tusks, one that has what appear to be shells embedded in a leather binding, and another that might be bound in hairy skin or – I like to think – had the binding grown on it underground. In any case these all suggest books written in different places, perhaps at different times, and as a manuscript scholar I find that fascinating.
Following up on this I wanted to see how the concept of the manuscripts was received by writers of fan fiction. As a fan author myself I have written a few stories featuring the ancient Jedi texts, but given my interests that made sense; I was curious to see what other authors have done with them. I think there’s more extensive work to be done here, but in reading through the 40 or so stories I was able to find (by searching AO3 for ancient jedi texts, and the “jedi text” tag) I discovered not surprisingly that the stories focused on the text of the books, not on their physical appearance (which is at least partially due to fan fiction being a written medium, vs. film being a visual medium) and that there are three main themes that can appear by themselves or be combined:
Rey can read the texts on her own, or she needs help (Kylo Ren, C3PO, Obi Wan Kenobi’s force ghost)
The translation is used to further the story (whether or not it happens)
The texts do something (e.g., magic spells)
What will happen next? Will there be manuscripts in the Rise of Skywalker, the final film in this last trilogy? Of course I hope so, and it seems likely. The Uneti tree was struck by lightning and burned, but Rey took the manuscripts with her (here is a screenshot of a drawer in the Millennium Falcon, at the very end of the film, showing the books clearly safe and tucked away)
and in the Poe Dameron comic #27 we learn that Rey has been working with C3PO to translate the texts.
And there’s also the spectre of Kylo Ren with a calligraphy set; if he had access to these manuscripts when he was studying with Luke Skywalker, it’s possible that he has read and perhaps even annotated some of the books. Only time will tell, and I for one can’t wait for December.
Thank you!
fan art based on the Lewis Psalter by https://persimart.tumblr.com
