Moot Thoughts & Musings

(this is just some kind of personal personal brain barf. don't feel the need the read or respond.)

So my thesis is about a late 17th c Italian manuscript. Yea, the book. The material artifact. I thought I was going to make an edition of a treatise in the book, which is why I jumped on the project to begin with. I thought it would be a good exercise, and I had a seminar on edition making (it's a musicology thing [and I believe in the activity of edition-making as a necessary step along the path {the controversy of the endeavor; it's a musicology thing, too}]), so I felt like I had tools to approach it. But I'm not making an edition; I'm analysing the book. I don't have tools for ms analysis, book history, or understanding the computus, but, hey, I'm figuring out as I go along.

I'm trying to make some final leaps in the figuring this thing out, and I'm wondering more and more if I need to leave the comfort of the materiality of the book and to start to draw the connections back to the compiler of the manuscript. This is scary, because I don't know who he is. He's a nobody, and it's not a significant ms. Just some random compilation. It's a little freaky to start drawing conclusions about a person who barely has a historical existence.

But I think I can say some things about him:
* he has really good handwriting. this book has been super easy to read. Which is a little boring, because don't we all love a little paleographical challenge? But I'm not complaining. I could be eating my words a year later on a different project.
* he makes mistakes. There is no original material in this ms. I've been able to trace sources for a good bit of it, but not all. The stuff I haven't found sources for, though, is basic stuff like calendars and reciting tones. There are some really bad mistakes in the music section. Like, he doesn't get the solmization syllables in the right order. The plainchant example is utter musical nonsense.
* I'm 99% sure the compiler is a "he". There's a title page (a notable feature unto itself) with the name BLASIUS BELLUNENSIS where the author's name goes. No leads on any Blasius's or (Italian) Biagio's having any connection to Belluno in the 17th c.
* I'm pretty sure he's an ecclesiastic. (There is a seminary in Belluno by this time.) The sum total of the contents wouldn't make sense for anyone else. There's the music part that contains information for singing the liturgy, the computus for calculating the date of Easter (very confusing liturgical calendar stuff--thank heavens for the Oxford Companion to the Year), orthographical treatises on Italian and Latin, and alphabets--Hebrew (after Aldo) and Greek, and then a bunch of ancient and Eastern alphabets. Those latter alphabets are kind of interesting, because they seemed to pop up in some 16th c mss, where people would translate prayers and offices into these ancient alphabets. It's kind of weird and fascinating, because you wonder, who the heck cares about 'salve regina' in ancient Chaldee? It may be something I would be interested in pursuing after this thesis.
* but then the speculation begins. Yes, the compiler put together this book whose content reflects some about who he is, but even more, its physical features reflect his relationship to the book as a book, namely as an author. A relationship that couldn't have existed a couple hundred years earlier. So, breaking it down: we can say something about his identity based on the contents--likely an ecclesiastic. Is he young? a student? those mistakes were bad; mistakes you allow from someone whose education is incomplete, so either a student or a dropout or even maybe self-educated? I like the student theory, because there was a rise in creating seminaries for clerical education in the 17th c., including one in Belluno.
* but what about his identity in relation to the book? I would argue that he places himself in a position of authorship. Namely because of the title page. Manuscripts just don't have title pages...not like this one, at any rate. This is a title page that looks just like a printed title page. Manuscripts don't have authors. Printed books do. (Okay, huge over-generalization there, but it's big picture time.) This ms provides a picture in microcosm of a particular point in book history, a time beginning to be dominated by print culture, but also a time that still valued manuscript culture. There are many aspects in which the compiler created the ms to look like the printed book. At the beginning of the age of printing, printers made books look like mansucripts, because that's what they knew. By the late 17th c, it's very easily the other way around. The compiler wanted his book to look printed because that was cooler, more authoritative.
*so, bringing it back to the compiler--as it's very easy to start writing the biography of the book at this point--the physical features of the ms give us insight into how the compiler may have viewed the literary culture around him and how he placed himself within that culture. (Why do I feel so over my head?) Is that crazy? can I talk about the compiler's point of view like that? It just seems so invasive.

To close I will quote this line I read out of a monograph when I was a history major undergrad (loosely remembered). "Listening from the distance of centuries--across the death chasms and howling kingdoms of decay--it is not easy to catch everything."