A Digital Codex

by Mary Kate Hurley

[illustration from the Lindisfarne Gospels -- thank you, BBC!]

Within a few hours of it being posted on the Valve last night, as a result of Scott Eric Kaufman's reading of a blog called "Readin" -- a number of my friends were emailing me about this. I haven't had the time to fully explore the website, but it would seem that UCLA has put together a page that allows for the easy browsing of all MSs that are digitally available online. Granted you may have already noted its existence through a post at ITM all the way back in December, but given that I noted it only in passing at the time, I thought it worth a second look.

From this article on the website:

Highlights of the virtual holdings include:

• The largest surviving collection of the works of Christine de Pizan, one of the first women in Europe to earn a living as a writer. The manuscript was commissioned by Queen Isabeau of France in 1414 and is now held by the British Library.
• An Irish copy of the Gospel of John, bound in ivory and presented to Charlemagne sometime around 800, now in the library of the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland.
• The Junius manuscript, one of only four major manuscripts preserving poetry in Old English. Dated to around 1000, the book is now among the holdings of Oxford's Bodleian Library.

As an Anglo-Saxonist, I got no further than the Junius Codex. Along with Exeter, Vercelli, and the Nowell Codex, it houses Old English poetry, including Genesis, Exodus and Daniel. It was also my first Anglo-Saxon codex, which I saw at In the Beginning at the Smithsonian back in 2006. I'd be curious: do other medievalists out there remember their first manuscript? I mean, I'd seen other MSs here at Columbia's RBML, and at various museums and such. But to see the Junius, in person, even if I didn't get to "read" it more closely than through the glass protecting it -- that was pretty amazing.

I also couldn't help but think about the materiality of the codex. Of course I've gone on about this before. After a full semester, however, of one class on paleography and another on medieval book culture (the latter with Chris Baswell, who is part of the team that worked on assembling the UCLA site), I can't help but think about the objects themselves. Perhaps it's the lingering questions raised by Jeffrey's Weight of the Past talk last week, but I do tend towards feeling rather strange about digitized manuscripts. As teaching resources, they make the kind of intense paleographical work I did with Professor Dutschke possible in a way that before it would not have been outside of a few select places ten years ago.

However it also raises the question that all digital technology raises: that is, access. In this case, it's a question of access to the past. I'm working on a cataloging project with Prof. Dutschke for a few hours a week (along with several colleagues) -- and what I've realized is that there is so much to a manuscript that perhaps no digital reproduction, however fine, can represent. For example, I've often felt too squeamish to be a medievalist -- the thought of reading books that are written on animal skin often makes me hesitate to touch a manuscript. This Monday, for example, I sat in the Rare Books reading room and looked through a Chronicle written on parchment. The material of the text was utterly beyond my comprehension -- in addition to being in what was one of the worst late medieval hands I'd ever seen, the text was in German, a language I am slow to read when it's legible. However, the materiality of the book, the object itself, was exceedingly clear. Vellum, like un-moisturized skin, wrinkles. Yes, wrinkles. Texts age, and do so visibly. It's oddly similar to human skin in that regard.

This all tied in quite nicely to my Intro to the Major class, which I also taught this past Monday. I was introducing some of the ways medieval poetry thought about language, and the authority of the speaking or writing voice. After I gave an "introduction to Old English culture" that made me cringe slightly with its brevity -- we worked with one of my favorite of the Old English Riddles, Number 47:

Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte
wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.


A moth ate words; a marvelous event
I thought it when I heard about that wonder,
a worm had swallowed some man’s lay, a thief
In darkness had consumed the mighty saying
With its foundation firm. The thief was not
One whit the wiser when he ate those words.

Trans. Richard Hamer

When a poet in the Middle Ages looked at a book s/he didn't see something pristine, like my copy of Klaeber's Beowulf, which is still too new to be dog-eared and worn. Rather, books had long histories already, even when new -- it was not, as it were, their first life. And books were not safe from the ravages of time or even of the worms that also rend human flesh after death. Perhaps its worth remembering that even digital materials have worms which feed on data. Transience, it would seem, was and is part and parcel of textual experience. Rightly so, given that humans create them.

In part, and as always, it seems I've come back around to where I began when I started my musings: materiality and the medieval. We're always dealing, in some fashion, with what's left -- never an established whole, never a static object-of-knowledge. The medieval, it would seem, is always contextual, and therefore always contingent on the kinds of contexts we can find for it. It seems obvious, I suppose -- but every time I open my web browser and look at my first Anglo-Saxon codex, I don't know that I'll always acutely feel the absence of the codex Junius (given that it's not at my beck and call -- or even on this side of the Atlantic). But I do sense another kind of absence -- albeit one that is paradoxically full of lives and ideas and cultures that are always just beyond our ability to recall fully. I'm sure someone else has already said this -- but maybe we're always missing the Middle Ages?

Thanks to Scott Kaufman of The Valve for bringing this back to my attention, and to all the friends who forwarded it to me.

Cross posted at OENY.

More on something Beowulfian -- the conference for which it is intended -- on the morrow.

Au Revoir Nos Vie Privé?, or, Keepin' It Unreal in the TwitBin?

being sick. still being sick., 01:00 PM June 14, 2007 from twitterrific

sick. i'm sick. i hate being sick. 03:09 PM June 08, 2007 from web

Client review pushed up to 9am. I find out at 8am... Large Redbull, donut, let's roll 08:58 AM June 14, 2007 from web

my eyeballs are sore 05:31 PM June 11, 2007 from TwitBin

round the corner from tiger tiger.. must.. resist.. coffee, cake and wifi.. cravings.... 09:28 AM June 07, 2007 from mobile web

To sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep....... 12:34 AM June 08, 2007 from web

This past Thursday [Jun 17] the NPR program On Point, hosted by Tom Ashbrook [maybe one of the worst radio talk show moderators ever, in my opinion] was devoted to the subject of "The End of the Private Life," with a major focus on the ways in which the Internet--especially in the form of blogs, live journals, sites like Twitter, MySecret.tv [this one can be addictive--be warned!], YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and the like--is apparently making the so-called "private life" antique, passe, retro, and pointless. The primary guests on the show were Irina Kendall, a chef and popular "life-logger" [blog: Spectacularly Normal], who unfortunately was being counted on as the one defender of blogging--she was great, it's just that she was mainly run over by the two other "big gun" guests: the very famous Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist [trained at Harvard] and a professor of sociology at M.I.T. [who, despite all of her very well-known embracing of technology is now apparently decrying the Internet, especially blogging and live journaling and private online cams, as the bane of the "subjective" human self] and Carlin Flora, an associate editor at Psychology Today, whose recent article there, "The Decline and Fall of the Private Self," argues that "the Internet has democratized and amplified personal gut spilling," and further,

Such waves of revelation are fast eroding our notions of private identity. People have always been inclined to share their secrets, to unburden their consciences, and to show off, but in times past these admissions were aimed at confidants—priests, soul mates, diaries. Telling secrets can be therapeutic, but when confession targets the masses, what's really being processed, and who benefits from the disclosure?

Ironically, humans now enjoy more privacy than ever, says Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, president of the University of Haifa and author of Love Online: Emotions on the Internet. "Two hundred years ago, when people lived in villages or very dense cities, everyone's behavior was evident to many and it was extremely hard to hide it," he says. Today, e-mail and "chatting" online allow for completely anonymous interactions. We can talk and make plans without the whole household or office knowing. But if we're so able to keep things to ourselves, then why are we doing exactly the opposite?

. . . .

"There's a way in which our lives seem valid only if they obtain some veneer of media recognition," says Jefferson Singer, a psychologist at Connecticut College. A blog makes your mundane life into an electronic saga that turns you into something more than an anonymous drone in a technological and impersonal world. "You now have a story and perhaps you've even become the focus of other watchers and listeners," says Singer. "You become a character, a speaking part, in the larger theater of society." Even if you're playing the role of the loser—blogging about being unhappy and unattractive—at least you're part of the show.

While both Turkle and Flora were willing to hear Kendall's arguments that blogging has actually helped her to self-actualize in positive ways, and that--maybe, just maybe--the Internet has actually provided productive avenues toward sociality that have brought some persons out of their sometimes-painful isolation into meaningful community with others [a view I share], the ultimate consensus of the show's [one-sided] "conversation" and its "last word" seemed to be best summed up by Turkle, who repeatedly expressed the concern, as she once put it in an interview with New Scientist [20 Sep. 2006],

what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to manage and contain one's emotions. When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place.

What is being bemoaned [or perhaps lamented] here is the loss of what might be called "authenticity" or the "authentic self" [a self who knows "who she is" when no one else is around]. Turkle has a unique position here because, while on the one hand it may appear as if she is worried [anxiously worried, even] over a possible future in which an "authentic human self" will no longer exist [and therefore, what will it mean in this future to talk about the singular person, human rights, free will, or even love?], her own work at MIT is deeply concerned with exploring the [often positive] connections between technology, technological artifacts [such as robots], and human beings: go here for more information on that.

For myself, I was a little disappointed that the program did not focus at all on the type of blogging, such as the kind we do here at In The Middle, that combines serious academic discussion and debate [of an immediate sort that is not usually available outside of the space of a medieval studies conference, and which allows us to extend and deepen our intellectual work, even in virtual "congress" with non-medievalists who can help us to sharpen our thought] with more personal reflections that aid us in coming closer together as a human and not just a medievalist community--and here I can't help but nominate Stephanie Trigg's humanities researcher as exemplary in this regard. To think that Stephanie would blog about her cancer just because she would not know how to "feel" about it otherwise is preposterous to me [she is no Tila Tequila!]--indeed, her commitment to catalogue and narrate her ordeal with breast cancer is both brave and inspiring and reminds us that, for all the powerful scholarship some of us accomplish and for all the passion and commitment many of us bring to our work, we are all frail and mortal and need to remember how, in the midst of all of our professional anxieties and in the often-hostile climate and snobbery of medieval studies, we need to "keep it real." I'm as interested in Stephanie's reflections upon her cancer as I am in her sadness over the loss of her favorite milk bar ["I Still Miss Isella"--great post] as I am in her chronicling of her research activities and her academic travels. The narrative she provides on her blog is of a three-dimensional person who has enough to keep her busy without blogging about all of it, but the fact that she does so is an act of generosity not narcissism, and it enriches all of us who read it.

Just after listening to the On Point program I arrived home to find my new issue of Vanity Fair in my mailbox [the special Africa issue guest edited by Bono], in which issue there were excerpts from Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason, where, interestingly, he descries television as the main culprit in the so-called "death" or "decline" of authentic and reflective life and heralds the Internet as perhaps the last place where democracy might still be possible.

So, all of this got me thinking and wondering: does too much blogging, life-logging, live-caming, and live-journaling really threaten the cultivation of the authentic and private self? Is "being alone" a necessary precondition for authentic self-actualization? Was it really more difficult in the premodern era to "hide" one's behavior, thoughts, and emotions? Why does a "private self" matter so much to what we think of as "being human"? Could the Internet really be the last safe haven of rational thought, strong critique, and freedom?

UPDATE: As a side-letter to my post here and also to partially respond to Karl's comment below, see also Tim Spence's Kalamazoo paper [which he presented on BABEL's "premodern to modern humanisms" panel], "The Book of Hours and iPods, Passionate Lyrics and Prayers: Technologies of the Devotional Self." It's awesome.