In chapter seven of Introduction to Manuscript Studies, titled "Encounters with Damaged Manuscripts" Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham present the many ways in which a manuscript can be damaged over time. They are divided into two sections; intentional damage and unintentional damage. The unintentional damage to a manuscript can result from a number of misfortunes, including fire and water damages, insect (such as worms, roaches, and silverfish) and rodent bites, acidic erosion depending on the ink used (over time the erosion would burn completely through the paper, leaving nothing but a hole in the shape of the original letter), and poor storage conditions.
The intentional damage inflicted resulted from recycling of parchment, rebinding, combining pages of different manuscripts together to create a new text, and censoring words no longer acceptable once the manuscript falls into the hands of a later era, one where the political, religious, and social climate has changed. The most obvious instance of such a censorship is during Henry VIII's reign, when papal references were omitted from most manuscripts in order to erase the Catholic church's presence. Of course this points to the most interesting aspect concerning damaged manuscripts; that the damage itself tells a history as much as the manuscript does. It gives the modern medievalist a glimpse into the mindset of the people who were handling these books, as Clemens and Graham recognize, "Ironically, however, a damaged manuscript may contain more useful information than a well-reserved one. Damage can provide important evidence about the history of a book, including its provenance and the type of use to which it was put."
However, there were times when intentional damage was done with the intent of preserving the text, but attempts ended up being counterproductive (and perhaps popular methods of preservation used now are counterproductive and we do not realize it?). It is also worth noting how many of the manuscripts were decorated with words and images from later time periods, or how many lost pages were supplemented with pages from other manuscripts. These additions produced what Clemens and Graham refer to as a hybrid text. These hybrid texts can be deemed aesthetically awkward in that they display handwriting and designs not always harmonious with one another (I saw an example of one of these texts at the exhibit at the Met) and I would imagine they are frustrating and inconvenient for to work with. Yet I personally find hybrid texts to be beautiful, for they represent the relationship between two time periods and/or different places. They ultimately create a unique work representing two histories, the history of the original text's time, and the history of the later time reinterpreting it.
In chapter eight, titled, "Assessing Manuscript Origin and Provenance" Clemens and Graham inform the reader on the various methods employed to detect a manuscript's time and place of origin. These include scribed colophons (a type of signature), evidence within the contents, presence of a known scribe, coats of arms (often from laypeople), ownership inscriptions, library shelf marks, and medieval library catalogs. They also address the distinction between the terms "dated" and "datable" (a "dated" text means the actual date of origin is traced, "datable" means the scholar must rely on context clues in the manuscript for a general time frame).
When tracing a manuscript's origin, one of the issues that inevitability confronts scholars is forgeries. When reading about forgeries, I was particularly interested in the poilitical manipulation that was attempted through them. That is not to say all forgeries carried sinister purposes. Sometimes their intent was to replace a lost document of monastic or ecclesiastical importance. Nevertheless, while not all forgeries were based on such self serving interests, Clemens and Graham point out that, "but in many cases they were the results of efforts by institutions to establish a bogus claim to land or to demonstrate that a piece of land had been given to them much earlier than was truly the case" (123) This book is not about Medieval history but rather Medieval manuscripts, so the authors did not provide many examples. But I think this would make an interesting topic for class. I wonder how often this claim was successful, how often it failed, and what was the penalty for the guilty party when the forgery was discovered.
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