by A new exhibit of medieval manuscripts, entitled Recollected Forms, is now on display in the Vatican Film Library of the Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections. Curated by Ashley Nolan, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and CMRS Graduate Student Research Assistant in the Vatican Film Library, this exhibit focuses on a variety of manuscript forms and histories that recollect, she observes, “the dual nature of manuscript collection and preservation — to gather up again or reassemble, and to recall or remember.”
Nolan takes her inspiration from a passage in Ovid’s Tristia (I.i.107–8) in which, she points out, the author “speaks to his finished manuscript, telling it to go and find refuge in the bookcases with its brothers, ‘all of whom the same craftsmanship produced with sleepless toil’ (quos studium cuntos evigilavit idem). This instruction for the manuscript to seek refuge suggests the complex, often turbulent, history of textual transmission. Like Ovid’s manuscripts, so too have the objects in this exhibition — indenture, roll, leaf, and printed book — been passed on, copied, lost, and recovered over the centuries, bearing traces of their long journeys; every smudge, stain, tear, and nibble by insect or rodent reveals something about their reception, transmission, deconstruction, and reappropriation.”
Several items in the exhibit illustrate the reuse (reappropriation) of medieval manuscript books by breaking them up (deconstruction) for new purposes once they were deemed no longer useful in the years following the introduction of printing. The durable parchment of which they were made was often recycled as binding material for printed books and can be found as spine liners, flyleaves, or even whole covers. Many fragments of medieval manuscripts are recovered in this way.
From the Rare Book collections, figure 1 shows a twelfth-century manuscript reused as a pastedown for a book printed in 1499, and figure 2 shows another as the entire cover for a book printed in 1553. The discovery of these once-discarded, then-recycled, now-re-collected manuscripts gives them renewed purpose as part of SLU Libraries’ teaching and research collections.
The act of recollection or remembering is vividly embodied in a single-sheet legal document (fig. 3). Here, Edward III, king of England (1327–77), bestows upon George Feldbrigg property once belonging to a priory, consisting of “silver spoons, price 6s. 8d. In the cellar, one cup with a foot and cover of silver, price 13s. 4d.” The form of this document is an indenture — a sheet of parchment on which the agreement was written in duplicate and then cut through the middle in a wavy or indented line so the two parts could be matched up with one another to prove the validity of the transaction.
Recollected Forms is on display (free and open to the public) Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm, from 1 February 2013 to 1 August 2013 in the Vatican Film Library, Pius XII Memorial Library, Rm 105. A curator’s talk will be given by Ashley Nolan on Wednesday, 10 April 2013, at 4pm. For more information, contact Susan L’Engle, Ph.D., Assistant Director of the Vatican Film Library, at 977-3084.
