The Archive Calls

There is just something about a very old book. It's different from any other kind of artifact--it evokes the sacredness of a church, the authority of a crown, the personality of an artist, and the humanity of a pair of shoes. You can see its richness and beauty, but you can also see shadows of the person who wrote it, the person who read it. This is certainly true of the beautiful illuminated medieval manuscripts that we looked at for our group blog post in the Lilly Library, but for me it is also true of my set of Dickens novels that used to belong to my grandfather.

Pictures from Sara Taylor:
http://writingperformance.blogspot.com/2012/10/group-blog-post-andrea-iris-jenna-sara.html

This assignment has reminded me again how much I love books--not just the ideas they contain or the theoretical approaches they support, but the physical books themselves. I think it has to do with my image of the scholar, which is, predictably, tied to medievalism. If I were to imagine the ideal image of scholarship, it would probably look something like this:

http://www.news.hypercrit.net/2012/08/10/poring-over-the-meaning-of-pore-over/

And while on some levels that idealized image is a problem that I'll need to grow beyond at some point, on another level that image informs me about what really calls to me in this profession and where my interests truly lie. I enjoyed looking at the Book of Hours and thinking about the theoretical applications of performativity to the manuscript, but I would much prefer to lock myself up alone with such a book for weeks on end, learning its old language and deciphering its script, maybe someday recovering something from it that no one has been able to read or understand for a thousand years. To me, the call of the archive is a powerful one, and during this project it has been helpful to realize more precisely why.