#codicology

Medieval Manuscripts Reveal Hidden Animal DNA Archive

It is worth noting that, while the commissioners of the book are named, the laborer is not. In the image, he is indicated by the curious titulus over the left-hand figure’s head: ILLE, literally HE who made it. His name might not matter, but his activity does: this is the one “who suffered this for your name.” He is identified not by a name but by the pointed finger of a pronoun and the noun scriptor. The associated verb is patior, to suffer. It was not easy to make a book. “Ille” is only a pronoun and an occupation. His brothers and sisters studied in this book are freer with their names. They are the monastic book-makers of tenth-century northern Iberia, and they are generous with information. They tell us where they worked, for whom, and how they felt about it. They name themselves and date their activity. They know they will be read, too, and speak directly to those who will hold and use the books they made. They are insistent in their reminders that reading is not just an encounter with “text,” nor even with a book, but also and essentially a relationship with the work of someone’s hands. This is for you, they say; keep me and my labor in mind. This book wants to remember the labor of “Ille” and of many other book-workers like him. It began in response to an invitation extended from a monastery in what is now north-central Spain. At 6 A.M. on Friday, April 11 of the year 945 CE a monastic named Florentius wrote a colophon into what would be the last gathering of the book he was finishing. “If you want to know,” he wrote, “I will explain to you in detail how heavy is the burden of writing” [si uelis scire singulatim nuntio tibi quam grabe est scribturae pondus]. Without waiting for an answer, Florentius laid it out: writing “mists the eyes. It twists the back. It breaks the ribs and belly. It makes the kidneys ache and fills the whole body with every kind of annoyance” [oculis caliginem facit. dorsum incurbat. Costas et uentrem frangit. Renibus dolorem inmittit et omne corpus fastidium nutrit]. Invitation: come feel what it’s like to make a book by hand.

Hey, so I was cleaning up my photos today, and