Material Texts

The rhetorical significance of sacred books in the North African controversy between Caecilianists and Donatists remains underexplained. In this article I situate the act of traditio in its historical context by employing insights from the study of material texts. The Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs, the arguments of Augustine and Optatus, and even apotropaic practices reveal a social logic in which the physical book does more than transmit text. I argue that this theology of the book provides a richer account of traditio than the economic and sociological explanations in current scholarship on the North African controversy. The sacred book functions as a metonym for Christian confession, an avatar of divine presence, and a powerful agent of healing. To hand over the sacred books for destruction was thus to destroy objects which embodied divine truth, presence, and power.

The codex has become ubiquitous in the modern world as a common way of presenting the materiality of texts. Much of the scholarship on the History of the Book has taken this endpoint for granted even when discussing pre-modern writing and manuscript cultures. In this essay, I would like to open the discussion to other possibilities. I will draw on my research on medieval South Asian religions and from my hands-on work with manuscripts in two collections: the Rāmamālā Library in Bangladesh and the Indic collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Drawing examples from these two collections as well as noting broader patterns within them, this essay reflects on what South Asian manuscript traditions can contribute to our understanding of the materiality of texts. First, I consider how different articulations of orality, memory, ritual, and aesthetics in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism helped to shape the development and formation of manuscript traditions in South Asia with dynamics that might differ from medieval manuscript traditions shaped by Christianity in the West. Then, I turn to specific insights into the materiality of South Asian manuscripts in relation to the task of cataloguing, preserving, and digitizing materials in the Rāmamālā library.

This essay traces the emergence, reappearance, and reception of the sibyl through Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing—moving from newspaper essays, notebooks and letters, to The Statesman's Manual (1816) and Sibylline Leaves (1817). The sibylline exists in relation to a corollary category that cuts across bibliographic, commercial, poetical, theological, and philosophical contexts: the fugitive. Coleridge invokes the sibyl as an authorizing figure for the mediation of fugitive knowledge and its variously recursive and revelatory logics. Fugitive knowledge offers fresh interpretative possibilities for understanding the relationship between the poet's "wilderness of Scraps" and his projected great works.

As a young girl Sarah Brown Herreshoff (1773-1846) of Providence, RI developed a taste for British comic opera; later as a married mother of five she bequeathed her passion to her eldest daughter, Anna Francis. This paper tells the story of a collection of manuscript music that Sarah and Anna Francis created together from 1801 to 1829. Over the course of many years, the two women diligently copied music by hand into this handsome bound volume. Their efforts reveal a tender engagement with printed sheet music, which they transformed into a talisman of mutual affection. This paper treats their collection as a kind of diary and narrates the events in two women’s lives as interpreted through the music they copied for each other. Amateur music making has been long considered trivial or inaccessible to music historians. Yet the commitment and skill displayed in personal volumes such as Sarah and Anna Francis’s shows that this private realm has much to teach us about the consumption of printed music, feminine accomplishment, and musical taste in the long eighteenth century.