House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts

In his 1994 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida begins an excursion through memory, psychology, culture, and technology by musing on the origins of the archive. The term, he writes, develops from the practice in the ancient world of housing civic documents in the dwellings of the supreme magistrates, the archons. By means of this practice, the archons enforced control over both the documents and their interpretation, so that the archive existed, and exists, "at the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority." ¹ Derrida calls the passage of documents into the spaces of the archive "house arrest." ² His metaphor gives me my title, as I believe it describes, metaphorically and indeed literally, the situation of medieval manuscripts in the modern archive. The reading of a medieval manuscript today requires the scholar to enter a space that is both physical and imagined, and the manuscript's dwelling in this place thus controls both kinds of access.

The implications of this "house arrest" were suggested to me on a recent trip to New York, to study the manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in the possession of Columbia University Library and the Pierpont Morgan Library. On one of the days I was at Columbia, a magnificent translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum, Plimpton MS 263, was being examined at an adjacent table; the scholar perusing it invited me to have a look, because "they don't let it out very often." ³ This slightly facetious exchange is mirrored more poignantly in the reflections of one of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century book collectors studied by Robert A. Shaddy. Adrian Joline contemplated the dispersal of his collection after his death by remarking, "No one will ever be as fond of my pets as I have been, and at no distant day they will be scattered among the bidders at the inevitable auction-sale which awaits all collections save only those consigned to perpetual burial in some library." ⁴ The dispersal of collections, the unevenness and occasional capriciousness of access to many archives, are indeed part of house arrest as it applies to medieval manuscripts. ⁵ Yet house arrest, as I conceive it, is not merely a matter of the physical incarceration of manuscripts, but also of their entanglement in a web of assumptions about what is extratextual or uninteresting and, therefore, irrelevant--to all but the wild-eyed bibliographer. If one sees bibliography, following D. F. McKenzie, as the "sociology of texts"--as that which considers "not only the technical but the social processes of [textual] transmission"⁶--then every form in which a text is manifested is an appropriate object of study, and the signs of passage from one condition to another need to be examined. In the case of the medieval text, then, one attempts both to approach the object in its "medieval" condition--to recover the medieval book--and to trace the evidence of that object's passage from one culture to another. But these efforts are conducted in specific surroundings, and McKenzie notes that "the construction of systems, such as archives, libraries, and data-banks," is part of the construction of texts. ⁷ In what follows, I explore, through the specific details of two Gower manuscripts and my access to them, the larger questions of how archival practices and archival encounters structure and control our reading of medieval books and the texts they contain.

John Gower might seem at first glance a peculiar choice for this exploration. The manuscripts of his more famous contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, are in some ways more obviously imprisoned. On a recent trip to the British Library in London, for example, I had to ask that MS Harley 7334 (a copy of the Canterbury Tales) be removed from a display case so that I could read it. While this is...