Skip to main content
Log in

Fleshing out the text: The transcendent manuscript in the digital age

  • Article
  • Published:
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

A medieval manuscript or document was crafted from the scraped and prepared skin of an animal, written upon with inks made from oak gall or crushed insects by the hand of a scribe who sometimes found the task spiritually inspiring, though physically arduous. The manuscripts were bound together with linen threads, often meticulously constructed and executed, but are now metaphorically dismembered for critical editions and academic studies, or literally broken up for digitization by expert scholarly teams, or for resale by unscrupulous booksellers. The textual object, though – the codex, document or remnants of codices – represents in its actual, real-world embodiment one of the most corporeal, fleshy and intimate links to peoples and cultures from centuries past. This article will seek to consider the bodies of books, their fleshy wholeness (even as fragments or single-leaf documents), and the ways in which their heft, their voluminousness and their textual potential are elided by modern scholarly techniques and representations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. TEXT with small capitals here consistently represents the superordinate of a notional semantic field that includes specific instantiations of ‘text’ – as the written words on a page, ‘paratext,’ ‘epitext,’ ‘context’ (Barry, 2007). It is effectively synonymous with the term I neologize here – ‘plenitext.’

  2. Thanks to Peter Stokes for this reference.

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Treharne, E. Fleshing out the text: The transcendent manuscript in the digital age. Postmedieval 4, 465–478 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.36

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.36

Navigation