Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (review)

This beautifully designed exhibition catalog demonstrates that between the mid-fifteenth century and the close of the seventeenth century in Europe, the hand was not only a site where "matter, mind, and spirit" (21) met but also a peaceable kingdom for the wisdom of oral, manuscript, and print cultures. To judge from the intriguing images gathered by Sherman, both curator and author, the hand was at once a versatile tool whose parts could be articulated as aides to memory, a trope in the paragone over the nature of creativity, a moralized door to sense experience, an irrefutable disclosure of character and fate, and a physiological marvel whose workings were revealed by dissection. In its capacity as a signifying instrument, the hand was widely represented in manuscript and printed books, broadsheets, and paintings. But it was also a book, a broadsheet, a painting, a notepad, even a calendar, sundial, and hymnal in its own right, a surface written upon, perused, revised, manipulated, and interpreted.

Writing on Hands opens with prefatory material by the directors of the two sponsoring institutions and by the curator-author; it closes with a select bibliography, an index of authors, an index of artists, photo credits, and notes on the distinguished contributors. At its center are four essays by experts in art history, philosophy of science, and musicology and a six-part descriptive catalog. The core is, of course, the catalog, which reproduces the eighty-three images of the exhibit. Each image is fully identified and commented upon; Sherman also provides translations of accompanying texts, opening the esoteric lore of hands to a range of readers. Up-to-date references to scholarly studies are placed in marginal notes.

Of the images, the majority by far are from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the fifteenth a distant third. German and Italian imprints predominate, but England, France, and the Netherlands are also well represented. Although Sherman's focus is on printed images, she does not allow the reader to forget that a rich medieval manuscript tradition lies behind many of these working hands. She includes, for example, a pair of eleventh-century "finger-calculus" hands (Cat. 40A, B), which rely on Bede's De ratione temporum, an eighth-century text (see also Cat. 11, a "wound-manikin"; 42A, B, a mnemonic for solar and lunar cycles; 57, a "Zodiac Man"; and 75, a liturgical hand). The four contributing scholars together add more than twenty images to clarify their arguments; two also join Sherman in acknowledging medieval precedent, so that change and continuity become a tense subtext. Martin Kep introduces the physiological hand, both as an object of artists' depictions and as a "wonder of mechanical design" (27) revealed by the early modern anatomist. Sachiko Kurasawa explicates the system of Bede's finger-numerals and the liturgical calendar reckoning (computus) developed from it by Anianus in the thirteenth century and persisting in modified form in the broadsheet calendars of early modern Europe (Cat. 45, a beautiful example engraved by Diana Scultori of Mantua). Susan Forscher Weiss explains the "singing hand," a system of music pedagogy deriving from ancient liturgical uses, Roman rhetoric, and the choir practices invented by the eleventh-century theoretician Guido of Arezzo that contributed to the encyclopedic schemes of Francis Bacon and Denis Diderot (Cat. 49). Finally, Brian Copenhaver, in the longest of the essays, surveys the hand as an object of divination and magic, extending the geographical and chronological reach of the catalog to late-twentieth-century Los Angeles.

The book is a delight to the eye and also one of the most useful teaching tools I have come across recently, an encouragement to warm discussion in both undergraduate and graduate classes. The University of Washington Press, the curator-editor, and the contributors are to be congratulated...