Iconic books are texts revered as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. In religious and secular rituals around the globe, people carry, show, wave, touch and kiss books and other texts, as well as read them. This blog chronicles such events and activities. (For more about iconic books, see the links to the Iconic Books Project at left.)

Thursday, June 21, 2012

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Bibles and Genealogies

I just stumbled on a couple sites which add something to a notion of iconic and performative bibles that maybe I've just been missing all along. These are bibles that are used now for genealogical records; the bible as a record keeper of birth, death, marriage, and telling something about the ancestors. There's a lot that's obvious here, and the keeping of records in family bibles is not uncommon., but I guess I'm interested in the role of material memory. There is a "semantic" meaning to having a specific date when a great grandfather died. Yet there is simultaneously something physical, tangible, about the inscription of that memory within the pages of the book. The bible as book-object then becomes enmeshed in that very genealogy. Not merely a carrier of memory, but the memory itself. 

See:
Bible Records.com 
"Cyndi's List"

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