Henry Ravenhall

Anachrony and Assemblage: Reading Manuscript Culture in Medieval Soissons

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By virtue of being copies, by being made after an “original” moment of fuller meaning, manuscripts complicate the linearity that literary history wants. Scholars usually resolve this problem by splitting the medieval work into its immaterial and material forms, even if it is only the latter that survive to us today. Manuscripts are thus presented as things to be seen through, where it is the ideal object behind them, the lost authorial creation, that persists as the real locus of critical attention. Drawing on a concept that has recently gained traction in art history and philosophy, I name this condition of manuscripts anachrony, that is, a refusal to belong in time and to sit neatly within a cultural genealogy.

 

No doubt this theoretical argument could be made by looking at any number of manuscripts. This was, after all, a medieval culture in which replication and repetition by no means entailed a loss of aura and authenticity. But Anachrony and Assemblage chooses to tell the story of one fascinating vernacular codex, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 17177, written and illuminated in late thirteenth-century Soissons. From a historian’s perspective, this manuscript is quite exceptional. First, we know where and when it was made. Second, its scribe copied three other manuscripts, making it a significant workshop for the time. Third, several of its seventeen texts survive only or in their best versions in this manuscript. Its largest component is one of the most influential and enduring, yet critically underexamined, texts of the European Middle Ages, the very first universal history in French, the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (“Ancient History up to Caesar”), which survives in over a hundred books. In other ways, however, this artifact is paradigmatic of the complexities of medieval manuscript culture, which are explored in more depth in each of the book’s chapters. Manuscripts have thick social existences—an ability to “act” within particular spaces—that get lost when we read their texts in critical editions. They straddle an ambiguous boundary between the oral and the written, being both a representation of past speech, a prior performance, and an anticipation of a future one. They enliven body, affect, and sensation, eliciting an experience and an imagination that depends on the interplay of text and image, as well as the tingle of parchment. They are often assemblages of many texts, split into smaller units, booklets, that could have once circulated independently. These booklets do not correspond to our modern practices of dividing texts up into authorial creations. What Anachrony and Assemblage reveals about BnF fr. 17177 may at times be specific to this object, to the Histoire ancienne, or to its social world in Soissons around 1300, but, in many ways, it is really about the challenges and intricacies of reading books in a manuscript culture.

 

Anachrony and Assemblage is not a conventional codicological exercise, though it does place importance on the richly informative minutiae of medieval codices. It is, instead, a theoretical provocation to one of the most fundamental heuristics in medieval literary studies, the separation of text and manuscript. Gravitating around the core concepts of networks, voice and subjectivity, polyphony, affect, and assemblages, this monograph proposes a new framework for centering the manuscript object in medieval studies, showing how close reading can work alongside cultural history, discourse analysis, and book history to draw out the full implications—and the anachronic operations—of vernacular manuscripts in the Middle Ages.