Clothing Sacred Scriptures

New book:
Clothing Sacred Scriptures: Book Art and Book Religion in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Cultures, edited by David Ganz and Barbara Schellewald, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

Sensing Sacred Texts

The 2017 special edition in Postscripts has now been published as an independent volume, Sensing Sacred Texts, ed. J. W. Watts; Sheffield: Equinox, 2018:

All the human senses become engaged in ritualizing sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination.

Ritualized display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalizing the contents of texts by reading and memorization.

The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas. Books thus physically incarnate cultural and religious values, doctrines, beliefs, and ideas.

These essays bring theories of comparative scriptures and affect theory to bear on the topic as well as rich ethnographic descriptions of scriptural practices with Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and modern art and historical accounts of changing practices with sacred texts in ancient and medieval China and Korea, and in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures.

Old believer's iconic books

In recent months, two bloggers have drawn attention to the role of Iconic Books in different religious communities.
Vlad Naumescu, on the SSRC forum Reverberations, profiled the importance of iconic prayer books to Russian Old Believers. He includes a short video of the book in use in prayer.
MormonDeadHead, on the Faith Promoting Rumor blog, built on Tim Beal's exposure of the multiplicity of Bibles to find the same results from examining the manuscripts of the Book of Mormon.  

Occupy Rose Parade Constitutions

At the end of this year's Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California, Occupy protestors carried two giant replicas of the U.S. Constitution. The first beings "We the People," as usual, while the second started with "We the Corporations." Both reproduce its easily recognized iconic form as a parchment manuscript. (The picture appears in the Los Angeles Times, 1/2/2012.)

Thousands of rare books go up in flames in Cairo

Huffington Post has reported today that the "Institute d'Egypte, a research center set up by Napoleon Bonaparte during France's invasion in the late 18th century, caught fire during clashes between protesters and Egypt's military over the weekend. It was home to a treasure trove of writings, most notably the handwritten 24-volume Description de l'Egypte, which began during the 1798-1801 French occupation."

Thousands of volumes have been damaged, and many are burned beyond recovery. "This is equal to the burning of Galileo's books," Zein Abdel-Hady, who runs the country's main library, said.

The full Huffington Post article can be accessed here.

Mayan Book online

BiblioOdyssey reproduces a number of panels from a 13th century Mayan manuscript called the Dresden Codex. They are culled from the online exhibit by the Sachsische Landesbibliothek and the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI).

Iconicity from a Book History perspective

(Deirdre Stam participated in the Saturday sessions of last month's Iconic Books Symposium. She later wrote me some reflections on the event which I think are worth sharing with a wider audience. I'm reproducing them here with her permission.)

When putting myself in the shoes of a person in the field of religion, I could understand your statements about scholarship in that and other humanities areas ignoring the "iconic" element of texts and of their physical manifestations. Working in another area, though, as I have for many years, I've become aware of an enormous body of inquiry in "book history" about the physical history and properties of texts and the more recent expansion of concerns relating to the "book." Particularly since Donald McKenzie's work in the 80's, drawing significantly from the French theorists of the previous decades, the field has looked at both the physical book (its printing, manufacture, etc.) and, more recently, its uses and significance in its culture. Robert Darnton would be a principle proponent as would Anthony Grafton, both eloquent spokesmen for this approach. Many of the texts they have addressed have been iconic, and in some cases the editions are iconic. Sometimes even the copies they have examined have had iconic properties sometimes for reasons relating to the text, but sometimes for different reasons having little to do with the textual and/or intellectual content.

For this topic of iconic "books" in religion, I think it would be helpful to break down that word "book" into "text," "manuscript" if appropriate, "edition" if appropriate as for printed works (and family of editions), and "copy" within an edition. A copy, for example, can be iconic because of its unique binding, or its variants, or its association (such as having been owned by Thos. Jefferson as was a Koran recently used to swear in a Detroit congressman). The intellectual content was really secondary in this example. The term "book" while a good catch-all for the many issues addressed in a meeting such as this, is too broad, I think, for clear communication. It seemed to me that some attendees assumed the codex form when they heard "book," or allowed codex and scroll, but drew the line at web page or oral recitation. Others had a broader range of possible physical forms in mind when they heard the term. The distinctions described above might have eliminated some confusion.

For a sense of present-day book history, I would strongly recommend looking at the offerings of the Rare Book School, located at the Univ. of Va. but somewhat independent of it. RBS is a non-degree, continuing education program of about 100 courses a year, with some given at the Morgan Library and Walters Art Gallery and elsewhere, which are attended by (grown up) curators, academics, collectors, and obsessives of various sorts, with a small sprinkling of graduate students. The emphasis is on the physical book. While book historians have become interested in run-of-the-mill publications in recent years, the bulk of time is still devoted to iconic texts and publications. The new director is the charismatic book historian Michael Suarez, SJ, who left a pair of tenured positions at Oxford and Fordham to give the school a new and probably more scholarly direction. (It was very curatorial before -- but great anyway.) You'd enjoy meeting Suarez and I suspect you'd enjoy a week-long course at Rare Book School. Total and exhausting immersion. The Univ. of Va. has a vast workshop creating digital versions of texts and related databases; that is in itself an eyeopener. (There are Rare Book Schools at Lyons and UCLA but these are newer, smaller, and only tangentially related to the "mothership" at UVa.)

A number of rare book libraries have scholarships for brief projects on the history of the book using their collections. (Fellows need to use the materials uniquely held in these institutions -- the emphasis is on the physical.) The attendees might like a list of these fellowships even after the fact of the "Icon" conference itself -- the libraries include AAS, Newberry, and a dozen or so others. Some of these libraries belong to the Independent Research Library Association (IRLA) and their fellowships would be accessible, directly or indirectly, through the web site of that organization. The SHARP newsletter lists a lot of these opportunities. While many fellows study iconic works in the collections of these libraries, I think that the emphasis on the "iconicism" itself, especially within religious materials, would be novel and welcome. AAS does a theme each year; I wonder if this theme might appeal to them for a future summer.

Carl Jung's Red Book

Sara Corbett wrote a long article for the New York Times Magazine about the publication of Carl Jung's Liber Novus, "New Book," better known as his "Red Book." The Times also provides a photographic sample of its handwritten pages including many full-page paintings by Jung of what Corbett calls

a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him.

Jung wrote and illustrated the book by hand over a sixteen-year period to record his dreams, active imaginations and self-induced hallucinations. These experiences became the basis for much of his later theorizing about myths, dreams, and the unconscious.

Jung never published the book and his family refused to publish it or even let very many people see it. Corbett's description of the book's history presents a detailed case study of the three dimensions of an important text and their social consequences.

The book itself is beautiful and imposing, as an iconic book should be:

There sunbathing under the [photographer's] lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically.

... The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl.

Here we find a paradigmatic description of an iconic book, even a relic book. Its iconic status derives from its impressive physical appearance and one-of-a-kind nature, but also from legendary stories about its origins (what Dori Parmenter calls "the myth of the book"). That iconic/relic status precedes and lays the basis for its inspirational reading (performance) and semantic significance.

[Jungian analyst Stephen Martin] added “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book, but for him that made it all the more tantalizing. His hope was that the Red Book would “reinvigorate” Jungian psychology, or at the very least bring himself personally closer to Jung. “Will I understand it?” he said. “Probably not. Will it disappoint? Probably. Will it inspire? How could it not?” He paused a moment, seeming to think it through. “I want to be transformed by it,” he said finally. “That’s all there is.”

Jung himself seems to have recognized the iconic power of textuality. One of his clients recorded his advice on how to process her inner life:

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

The first and chief semantic interpreter of the Red Book is its translator, Prof. Sonu Shamdasani who teaches at University College, London. In the classic tradition of textual experts of any tradition and era, he emphasizes semantic expertise:

He tends to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he deems guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally unsentimental attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him, at times, awkward company among both Jungians and Jungs.

... Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade, Shamdasani — who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz — these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only very recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him this summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was just adding his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.

As with other relic books the world over, the iconic claims of private owners and public scholarship come into conflict:

The relationship between historians and the families of history’s luminaries is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side works to extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls.

... To talk to Jung’s heirs is to understand that nearly four decades after his death, they continue to reel inside the psychic tornado Jung created during his lifetime, caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics and between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency to judge and rejudge its own playmakers.

As a result of all of these factors, the Red Book's publication next month seems to arouse apprehension as much as excitement from everyone involved. Corbett observes that its publication

is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.

... The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red Book — which on one hand described Jung’s self-analysis and became the genesis for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange enough to possibly embarrass the family — held a certain electrical charge. Martin recognized the descendants’ quandary. “They own it, but they haven’t lived it,” he said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it. ... This is the greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells the story of his inner life.”

... The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure.

The book will be reproduced for mass consumption (as every icon should) early next month by W. W. Norton. The original Red Book will soon be on public exhibit (as every relic should) at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

Google Imitates Print

Google is introducing FastFlip, a new interface for online publications that, according to the Associate Press,

is meant to duplicate the look and feel of perusing a printed publication. The stories are displayed on electronic pages that can be quickly scrolled through by clicking on large arrows on the side instead of a standard Web link that requires waiting several seconds for a page to load. Readers can sort through content based on topics, favorite writers and publications.

The rest of the story focuses on FastFlip's potential for diverting more advertising dollars to publishers. Of interest to this blog, though, is Google's embrace of technology to reproduce the experience (but certainly not the "feel"!) of print magazines and books. The "flipping" feature suggests that magazines are the real inspiration. Much more elaborate software to reproduce turning the pages of books has been used by the British Library for some time now to present rare books and manuscripts online. Much publicity recently surrounded the addition to this collection of the fourth-century C.E. manuscript of the Christian Bible, Codex Sinaiticus.

All of which illustrate the strength of the urge to reproduce the physical page in electronic form. In the case of rare manuscripts, there is at least a functional advantage to turning the electronic pages: codex books frustrate museum and library curators because only two pages can be shown at any one time. Visitors who would never be allowed to turn these rare pages can now do so electronically, often on a computer screen in the vicinity of the real manuscript.

But Google seems to be extending the principle to magazines purely in hopes of appealing to more readers. The iconic page exerts a strong pull on the electronic imagination!