Relic Texts

Presented to the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT) meeting concurrently with the Eastern International Region of the American Academy of Religion in Waterloo, Ontario, May 4, 2012. Pdf file (without links) available for download from the Syracuse University repository.

Revised and published in How and Why Books Matter (Sheffield: Equinox, 2019), pp. 55-69.

I have previously argued that religious traditions typically ritualize their scriptures in three dimensions (Watts 2006). They ritualize the interpretation of sacred texts (their semantic dimension) with preaching, teaching, commentary, and private study. They ritualize the performance of their sacred texts (their performative dimension) with liturgical readings, dramatic performances, artistic illustrations and private meditation. They ritualize the physical form of their sacred texts (their iconic dimension) by their elaborate manufacture, stereotypical appearance, public display and ritual manipulation. Other kinds of texts may be ritualized in one or two dimensions, but the regular ritualization of a text in all three dimensions usually distinguishes it as a sacred text, a scripture.

However, there are some texts, or more accurately some specific copies of texts, that tend to be ritualized only in the iconic dimension. Though highly venerated, people do not often read them and even more rarely interpret their meaning, nor do they perform most of them verbally or dramatically. That is, they are not ritualized in either the semantic or the performative dimensions very much. Examples of such texts include most books on prominent display in museums, such as the earliest known manuscripts of the Bible and the Qur’an, Gutenberg Bibles, Shakespeare’s first folio and any valuable first edition, the autographs of the Declaration of the Independence and U.S. Constitution, and so on. Old or unusual copies of scriptures feature prominently among them, but so do political documents and works of literature.

I call such books “relic texts.” Relic texts are valued for being the specific objects that they are. They are rare, if not one-of-a-kind, and are in theory not reproducible. Relics, as known from Christian and Buddhist traditions and many other religions, are more appropriate models for how such books function than are icons. Both icons and relics are believed to mediate the sacred. But the value of icons is that they are reproducible, whereas the value of relics lies precisely in the fact that they are unique. Of course, because the demand for relics always outstrips the supply, the (re-)production of relics has long been the subject of scandal.

Relic texts can be distinguished from other books by how they are ritualized in the three dimensions. The iconic dimension of relic texts dominates and eclipses the other two dimensions. They are not read or interpreted very much because they share their semantic and performative dimensions with other, non-relic copies of the same texts. Their social function therefore differs from other ritualized texts. Their authority is not invoked to settle disputes over doctrine nor do people usually look to them for help in achieving performative inspiration. Because relic texts are ritualized in the iconic dimension alone, their chief function is legitimation. Owning them legitimizes individuals and communities and conveys a sense of empowerment. Losing them threatens group identity.

These effects have appeared prominently in many recent news stories about how individuals, private institutions, and government agencies have gone to great efforts to gain and to keep particular relic texts for themselves. These stories show the similar ways that owners use their relic texts to legitimize themselves, their institutions, their nations, and their religions.

Legitimizing Owners

Relic books convey the prestige of being the owner of a famous object. For individual and institutional collectors, that prestige can be valuable, as Nate Pederson observed:

A tip to any public libraries struggling with declining patronage: go digging around in your vault!  The public library in Windsor, Ontario discovered a Bible from 1585 languishing away in its vault earlier this year.  Librarians promptly put the book on display and saw a 40 percent increase in visitors last month (Fine Books and Collections, October 4, 2011).

The same motive drives many text digitization projects. Libraries and museums put high definition images online of their most iconic books in hopes of drawing more people through their doors to see the real thing. They also offer for sale physical mementos of the relic text, ranging from cheap postcards of individual pages to expensive facsimile reproductions of the entire book.

Jonathan Z. Smith noted the effects of reproduction on the status of iconic books when he distinguished “the sacred book as a sacred object, one that is always manufactured and all but infinitely reproducible, and, therefore, one to which there is almost never attached a claim of being ‘original’” from reproductions that “become themselves the subjects of narratives, as is the case, for example, of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Stonyhurst Gospel and the cult of St. Cuthbert” (Smith 1998, 298). Reproductions therefore seem to blur  the distinctiveness of relic texts, producing what Zeev Elitsur termed “pseudo-relic books” (Iconic BooksBlog, September 29, 2009). However, the tension between asserting the uniqueness of objects and producing many similar things for widespread distribution has been a characteristic feature of relic economies throughout history. In his study of the circulation of medieval bodily relics, Patrick Geary described their use to extend the influence of Popes:

The most important donor of relics was, of course, the Pope, who had at his disposal the vast treasury of the Roman catacombs, containing the remains of the early Roman martyrs. Prior to the mid-eighth century popes steadfastly refused to distribute these relics, preferring rather to distribute secondary relics or brandia, objects that had come into contact with the martyrs’ tombs …. From the mid-eighth century on, however, the Roman pontiffs began to exploit their inexhaustible supply of relics in order to build closer relationships with the increasingly powerful Frankish church to the north. (Geary 1986, 182-83)

Thus belief in the uniqueness of relics led to producing secondary relics and eventually finding ways to increase the number of apparently genuine relics available for distribution. Relic texts participate in the same kind of relic economy. It is characteristic of the use of relic texts that owners try to combine ritualized display of these unique objects with attempts to profit from sales of their reproductions. People also try to create new relic texts by making a reproduction somehow unique: hence the continual efforts to make the world’s largest Qur’an or Bible, or to cast a scripture in gold plates, and so on (see e.g. Iconic Books Blog, June 25, 2007; September 21, 2007; August 11, 2009; April 9,2012).

Private owners, by contrast, often want to hide relic texts and hoard their effects for themselves. Some people regard relic texts, like other kinds of relics, as having supernatural power. Scholars frequently ridicule such beliefs. They find the public’s veneration of a text’s iconic dimension problematic and complain that people should focus on the text’s semantic contents instead. That normative judgment stems from the scholars’ success in controlling textual authority through their own meritocratic system of semantic interpretation (see Watts 2010). But in order to gain access to relic texts owned by private persons, scholars often must seek allies in institutions and governments that want the legitimacy that comes from owning certain relic texts themselves. The different interests of individual owners, scholars and public institutions contributes to conflicts over relic texts.

For example, an international effort to preserve centuries-old Indonesian manuscripts had difficulty getting access to privately owned texts.

The surviving manuscripts were written in various languages and scripts, including Arabic, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Sasak, Balinese and the Wolio language of Buton Island. ... “The problem is that there are many more important ancient manuscripts in private hands,” [the coordinator for digitization] said. “The owners usually refuse us access to them because they consider them sacred relics that have been handed down for generations.” (JakartaGlobe June 26, 2009)

The Indonesian scholars only want access in order to make photographs and publish them digitally. The owners, however, seem to think this would desecrate the relic texts and weaken their potency.

Such conflicts do not just occur over religious texts. The same kind of issues swirl around secular relic books. A vivid example was provided by the publication of Carl Jung’s Red Book for the first time in 2009. The famous psychoanalyst wrote and illustrated the book by hand over a sixteen-year period starting in 1914. In it, he recorded 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 do so or even let very many people see it, until recently.

The Red Book’s relic status derives from its impressive physical appearance and one-of-a-kind nature. Sara Corbett described the book and its publication under the headline, “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious” for which she wrote a characteristic description of a relic book: “The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl” (New York Times Magazine, September 16, 2009). The reputation of the Red Book also depends on the story of its origins, what Dori Parmenter (2009, 299) calls the “legends of veracity” that surround relics and relic texts alike. Part of this story is the fact that Jung himself 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.” (quotation in Shamdasani’s footnotes tothe Red Book)

In the Red Book, therefore, Jung intentionally created a ritualized relic text, if only for his own use. For later Jungians, its ritualization in the iconic dimension as a relic text 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’.”

Corbett documents how the claims of the Red Book’s private owners and public scholarship came into conflict, as they do with other relic books the world over. “To talk to Jung’s heirs is to understand that … [they are] 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.” The tension leads to conflicting claims of ownership that run deeper than legal title or historical claim. The article quotes Martin about the quandary faced by Jung’s family and by Jung’s followers, among whom he counts himself: “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.”

Other recent news about conflicts over secular relic texts include the report that a lost poem by P. B. Shelley was rediscovered in 2010, then immediately bought and sequestered by a private collector. Michael Rosen, speaking for the interests of literary scholars, argued in The Guardian (July 23, 2010) that this should not be allowed. “We can easily envisage an owner owning a manuscript while we collectively own and know the piece of literature it contains.” He was also reacting to the ongoing legal battles over Franz Kafka’s papers between the heirs of the publisher’s secretary who possess them and the state of Israel’s claims on them. An Israeli judge’s order that the papers should be publicly inventoried was hailed as “a victory for the National Library of Israel and by Kafka scholars around the world” (The Guardian, July 21,2010).

The tendency of relic texts to bring individuals, institutions and nations into conflict with each other exemplifies a typical feature of relic economies, as Geary observed:

High-prestige objects such as relics can play an important role in deeply divided communities. Disagreements and conflicts within society may be expressed and even conducted through disputes over the identity and value of such objects (Geary 1986, 188, citing Brown 1982, 222-50).

Circulating the pieces

Dealers often treat relic books like the relics of saints. Just as the bodies of dead saints were separated into small pieces to produce the maximum number of relics which were then displayed in elaborate and often framed reliquaries, so book sellers often tear apart relic books to sell individual pages to collectors, who frame them like artwork for public display.

This practice can lead to new conflicts over ownership, identity and proper display. For example, the Getty Museum is fighting a legal battle to retain ownership of eight illuminated pieces of parchment from the 13th-century Zeyt’um Gospels. The Armenian Church claims the pages were stolen during the genocide of 1916 and the Getty does not hold legal title to them. This controversy involved debates not only over the ownership of the pages but also about the ethics of separating a manuscript into multiple parts. In its defense, the Getty cited common practice:

Elizabeth Morrison, the Getty's acting senior curator of manuscripts, said that “well-regarded … collections around the world” contain individual manuscript sheets. “The Getty in no way condones the practice of taking apart manuscripts, but we continue to collect individual leaves after careful examination proves that they have not recently been removed … with motives of financial gain.” (Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2011)

Her argument, then, is that there are legitimate motives for taking books apart, but the pursuit of profit is not one of them. She did not mention another common motive. Libraries and museums have often disassembled valuable codices in order to display more than two pages at one time, because display, not reading, is the typical way in which relic texts get used. Once disassembled, though, they are more easily sold in pieces, and perhaps more valuable that way. Both for display and for profit, then, codices frequently get treated like bodily relics by secular institutions.

The Armenian Church claimed that the pages belong with the rest of the manuscript. It received scholarly support for its position from Columba Stewart, the executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He argued that the manuscript should be reunited for reasons of art, scholarship and religious devotion. The LA Times quoted Stewart as saying

“It’s better from an artistic perspective … it can [then] be studied by scholars as a whole object.” [Museums must avoid] “contributing to an improper fragmentation of a work.” … Beyond that, Stewart said, the Getty, … should consider that these works are still venerated: “Here's a living, breathing religious community, as opposed to classical antiquities.”

This tendency to parcel out relic texts produces other conflicts between private owners and institutionalized scholars who are trying to unify the pieces. For example, an Israeli museum has been trying to collect all the fragments of the oldest complete Hebrew Bible, the Aleppo Codex. But some owners have resisted parting from their pieces. One man always carried his small fragment with him for sixty years.

He was convinced that thanks to the parchment, which he kept with him always in a transparent plastic container, he had been saved from riots in his hometown of Aleppo during Israel’s War of Independence, and he had managed to immigrate from Syria to the United States in 1968 and start a new life in Brooklyn and make a living. The charm was with him when he underwent complicated surgery. (Haaretz, November 6, 2007)

Only when he died did the fragment become available to the scholars at the Yad Ben-Zvi research institute in Jerusalem. They, however, had their own iconic interest in asking for the fragments to be turned over to Israel. The head of Yad Ben-Zvi said “This is the No. 1 asset of the Jewish people, and I believe the Jewish people would do a great deal to have it back” (Haaretz, December 3, 2007). This situation illustrates a typical conflict over relic texts that pits the interests of scholars speaking for a reified collective (in this case, “the Jewish people”) against the interests of individuals (the Jews from Aleppo). The relic text serves to legitimize the collective (“the No. 1 asset of the Jewish people”), but provides individual owners a sense of empowerment (a “good luck charm”). The Armenian Church was able, however, to mobilize at least some scholars to speak for a communal claim against that of a scholarly institution. Both cases invoke scholarship that is grounded in the authority of semantic interpretation to buttress attempts to control relic texts that legitimize institutional and communal identity.

These cases illustrate clearly the contested values that swirl around relic texts, especially those that have been partitioned and parceled out, as people are prone to do with relics. Claims of historical title mix with communal identity claims, aesthetic arguments and the interests of scholarship to contest the ownership, location, and display of relic texts.

Nationalistic relic texts

The case of the Aleppo Codex also highlights the nationalistic interests in controlling the legitimacy conveyed by relic texts. Many countries make such efforts because sales of ancient texts frequently raise nationalistic concerns. Relic books are regarded as one-of-a-kind, so they often carry significant associations with particular places or countries. In 2007, the British government imposed an export ban on the Wardington Hours, a fifteenth-century illuminated Book of Hours. It acted in order to give the British Library time to raise the money to match a German buyer’s offer (BBC June 27, 2007). Similarly, when the St Cuthbert’s Gospel was put up for sale by the Jesuits in 2012, the British Library raised £9 million to acquire what it called the world’s “oldest intact book,” since the original binding of this seventh-century manuscript of the Gospel of John has survived (see Brown 2010, 60). The British Library intends to digitize the book so that it is available to people “everywhere” online. But its campaign to raise the money emphasizes the urgency of keeping the Gospel “for the nation” because it is “a precious part of our heritage.”

The political symbolism carried by relic texts can bring governments in conflict with each other. In 2009, Jordan asked Canada to seize and hold some Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts that were being displayed in Toronto (Globe and Mail, December 31,2009). Israel took control of the scrolls after the 1967 war when it conquered east Jerusalem. Canada refused to seize the scrolls, deferring the issue until settlement of territorial conflicts in the Middle East. Very clear from all the news coverage were the identity issues at stake for the Middle Eastern governments involved (Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority). Every side tried to employ the scrolls as relic texts to legitimize their own group and contested the others’ claims to them:

On Sunday, Israeli officials released a statement saying the Jordanian claims are “completely ridiculous” and that the scrolls have little or no connection to Jordan’s history. ... Palestinians have argued the scrolls, dating as far back as 250 BC, are an integral part of their heritage also. (CBC News, January 3, 2010).

The same kinds of issues swirl around an Iraqi Jewish archive consisting of 3,000 documents and 1,700 antiquities. They were found in the flooded basement of the Iraqi intelligence building in Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003 and transferred to the United States for preservation. Iraq has now asked for them back because, according to the Iraqi ambassador, “They represent part of our history and part of our identity. There was a Jewish community in Iraq for 2,500 years” (Washington Post, April 30, 2010). But the head of an Israeli museum dedicated to Iraqi Jews argued that the materials should be sent there: “The books belong to the majority of the Iraqi Jews, and they are not in Iraq. The books should be given to us, as the representatives of the Jews of Iraq” (Associated Press, January 16, 2010). Such efforts led to headlines in the Arab press proclaiming, “Israel suspected of seeking to ‘steal’ ancient Iraqi manuscripts” (Al-Arabiya, June 4, 2012). Here an archive of historical interest became a relic when it was used to represent conflicting communal and national ownership claims.

Historic political documents can be even more central to nationalistic concerns. The legitimizing effect of ritual display plays a major role in the treatment of nationalistic relic texts, such as the manuscripts of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Since 1952, they have been enshrined in the Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. All copies of the Constitution and Declaration are iconic in American political culture, but the manuscripts in the Rotunda are relics: they are not displayed so that visitors can analyze their meaning in depth or read them aloud in their entirety (the Declaration, at least, is much too faded to do either very well) but for their material, visual effect alone. Asked “Why is it important for people to come here to see the declaration firsthand?”, Archives senior curator Stacey Bredhoff described the effect of viewing the Declaration of Independence this way:

I think there is some kind of magic in standing in front of the original document. You’re standing in front of the original Declaration of Independence, faded as it is, but still you can make out some of the signatures and you think, “Whoa, these people were real. This really happened.” (Gannett News Service, July 17, 2007).

Walt Disney Studios capitalized on this mystique by making the Declaration of Independence the key to finding another treasure in its 2004 film, “National Treasure,” that grossed $347.5 million worldwide.

The mystique of relic texts moves historians too. The Philadelphia Inquirer (February 2, 2010) reported the re-discovery of a draft of the U.S. Constitution in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The researcher, Lorianne Updike Toler, reports the thrill of discovery in vivid language: “This was national scripture, a piece of our Constitution's history,” she said of her find in November. “It was difficult to keep my hands from trembling.” As other researchers “realized what was happening, there was a sort of hushed awe that settled over the reading room,” Toler said. “One of them said the hair on her arms stood on end.”

When texts become so iconic, the degree of authenticity required for relic status can be negotiable. The original Declaration of Independence was printed overnight after its adoption and distributed by the hundreds in Philadelphia and throughout the colonies. Only then was the well-known manuscript now displayed in the Rotunda written and signed by the delegates when they reassembled two months later (NARA). Elitsur would therefore call the displayed document of the Declaration of Independence a “pseudo-relic”.

Nevertheless, relic texts linked to national history or ideals prompt political and financial efforts to preserve national ownership even if they cannot plausibly claim to be “the original.” The winning bidder for the 1297 Magna Carta auctioned by Sotheby's in 2007 was motivated by the desire to keep it in the USA.

David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group private equity firm, paid $21.3m (£10.6m) for the document ... [He said] “I was concerned that the only copy that was in America would escape. I was convinced that it needed to stay here. This document stands the test of time. There is nothing more important than what it represents. … This is a gift to the American people. It is important to me that it stays in the United States.” (The Guardian, December 19, 2007)

However, lest the former colonies congratulate themselves too much, Oxford’s Bodleian library then indulged in what the Guardian characterizes as “scholarly one-upmanship” by displaying all four of its copies of the Magna Carta. Three date from 1217 and one from 1225, all older than the copy auctioned in New York. (The first charter was forced on King John in 1215. It is the 1297 version, however, that remains legally influential in England.) Attempts to keep a thirteenth-century copy of the Magna Carta in the United States date back to at least the 1930s, when the outbreak of World War II stranded Lincoln Cathedral’s copy across the Atlantic. Rubenstein returned his copy to the National Archives in Washington, DC, which displays it near the U.S. founding documents in the Rotunda.

Efforts to control the Aleppo Codex, the Wardington Hours, and St. Cuthbert’s Gospel show that governments do not limit their interest in relic texts to legal documents. Nations ritually index their identity and obligations through various kinds of relic texts just like individuals do.

Authenticity, Identity and Scholarship

As the above examples show, relic texts legitimize the person, institution or nation that owns and claims them, rather than providing the textualized authority and performative inspiration that humanistic scholarship usually addresses. They can also, however, be used to legitimize the textual tradition itself. Their antiquity and/or rarity can confirm the legitimacy of mass-produced copies of the same texts. Therefore relic texts can serve both scholarly and community or institutional stakes in particular textual traditions. Scholars consult relic books to authenticate details of the text, while public viewings of them serve to legitimate the prestige that the reproducible iconic text enjoys.

Owners involve scholars in ritualizing iconic texts and in disputes over ownership because the legitimizing effect of relic texts depends on belief in their authenticity. They must be as old and important as people say they are. The problem with relics has always been verifying their authenticity. Geary (1986, 186) described this process for any relic: “The account of the relics’ translation had to itself become part of the myth of production - the story of how they had come to their new community was itself part of the explanation of who they were and what their power was.” This is no less true of relic texts, which “become themselves the subject of narratives” as J. Z. Smith noted (see also Dorina Miller Parmenter 2009). For example, the New York Times (April 13, 2010) reported that when questions were raised about the whether a particular Torah scroll survived the Holocaust or not, the donor provided another scroll with a better attested Holocaust lineage. In this case, his goal was performative as well as iconic ritualization. The donor explained that he had donated the Torah to the synagogue “so its congregants could have the sacred experience of reading Scripture from a scroll that had survived the Holocaust. … As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”

The Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate the distinctive scholarly treatment accorded relic books. These manuscripts dating from the third to the first centuries B.C.E. were discovered in the mid-twentieth century C.E. One quarter of them contain texts of the Hebrew Bible, the earliest biblical texts now in existence. They have been the object of intense scholarly comparison with younger biblical manuscripts in order to legitimize and correct the biblical text. The other three-quarters of the scrolls contain non-biblical and previously unknown compositions. They also have received intense scrutiny as important sources for the history and religion of Judaism in the last centuries B.C.E.

Thus interest has focused on interpretation of the semantic dimension of the non-biblical scrolls, while the biblical scrolls are ritualized more in the iconic dimension as relic books to legitimize the biblical text. Modern culture treats some of these ancient texts as relics (iconic dimension) while using others primarily for interpretive purposes (semantic dimension). The distinction is confirmed by the display of the scrolls in the aptly named “Shrine of the Book” at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem: a biblical scroll (Isaiah) receives pride of place in the central display. The dominance of its iconic dimension for both scholars and the public confirms its status as a relic text.

The scriptures of most religious traditions presuppose an original relic text that persists only in its iconic copies. The original has long sense disappeared and in most cases never existed at all, at least in a textual form resembling its current manifestations (see for example on the Bible, Beal 2011). The desire to nevertheless legitimize the tradition by means of a relic original generates beliefs in its existence in heaven (Parmenter 2009). Thus the Torah written by God before the creation of the world, or the Qur’an that stays with Allah, or the Golden Tablets of Mormon reclaimed by angels ground religious traditions in heavenly relic texts that legitimize all their earthly copies. These relic texts cannot be viewed in a museum or place of worship, but belief in their existence can still serve to legitimize these scriptural traditions.

Relic texts legitimize a story about a community. People use them to identify with and place themselves in that story. This is one of the most important social functions of ritual: to demonstrate publicly one’s acceptance of a tradition and one’s place in a community (Rappaport 1999, 118-124). Relic texts frequently serve as important components of such rituals.

Relic texts are therefore an exception that proves the rule about ritualizing texts in three dimensions (Watts 2006). Though they are themselves not usually subject to semantic and performative ritualization, they owe their exceptional iconicity to the fact that other, non-relic, reproductions of the same text are ritualized in all three dimensions. When particular books are readily available for semantic, performative, and iconic ritualization, a few special exemplars can be set aside to serve purely iconic purposes as relic texts. The different effects of ritualizing books in each of the dimensions helps explain the popular appeal and social function of relic texts. Since ritualizing a text’s iconic dimension bestows legitimacy, people will go to great lengths and spend large sums of money to own and display a relic text. They do so in hopes of legitimizing a nation, a religion, a public institution like a museum, library or university, or just themselves.

References from books and journal articles:

Beal, Timothy. 2011. The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Brown, Michelle P. 2010. “Images to be Read and Words to be Seen: The Iconic Role of the Early Medieval Book.” Postscripts 6: 43-66.

Brown, Peter. 1982. “Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours.” In Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, 222-50. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geary, Patrick. 1986. “Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai, 169-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jung, Carl. 2009. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton.

Parmenter, Dorina Miller. 2006. “The Iconic Book: The Image of the Bible in Early Christian Rituals.” Postscripts 2: 160-89.

Parmenter, Dorina Miller. 2009. “The Bible as Icon: Myths of the Divine Origins of Scripture,” In Jewish and Christian Scripture as Artifact and Canon, ed. Craig A. Evans and H. Daniel Zacharias, 298-310. London: T. & T. Clark.

Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Jonathan Z. 1998. “Canons, Catalogues and Classics.” In Canonization and Decanonization, ed. A. van der Kooij and K. van der Toorn, 295-311. Leiden: Brill.

Watts, James W. 2006. “The Three Dimensions of Scriptures.” Postscripts 2: 135-59.

Watts, James W. 2010. “Ancient Iconic Texts and Scholarly Expertise.” Postscripts 6: 329-38.

References from news media:

Al-Arabiya, June 4, 2012: Israel suspected of seeking to ‘steal’ ancient Iraqi manuscripts transferred to U.S.

Associated Press, January 16, 2010: Iraq urges U.S. to give back Iraqi Jewish Archive.

BBC, June 27, 2007. British Library saves manuscript.

CBC News, January 3, 2010. Canada refuses to seize Dead Sea scrolls.

Gannett News Service, July 17, 2007. Viewing Declaration of Independence can be almost magical, by William Risser.

Globe and Mail, December 31, 2009. Jordanasks Canada to seize Dead Sea scrolls.

Guardian, December 19, 2007. Magna Carta fetches £10m in New York auction.

Guardian, July 21, 2010. Franz Kafka papers should be made public, Israeli judge rules, by Kate Connolly.

Guardian, July 23, 2010. Owning manuscripts is one thing: owning the contents is quite another, by Michael Rosen.

Haaretz, November 6, 2007. Fragment of ancient parchment from Bible given to Jerusalemscholars.

Haaretz, December 3, 2007. Ben-Zvi institute calls for return of centuries-old AleppoCodex fragments.

Jakarta Globe, June 26, 2009. Digital Age Provides Hope For Ancient Manuscripts.

Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2011. The Getty Museum is in a legal fight over ArmenianBible pages, by Mike Boehm.

New York Times, April 13, 2010. Two Torahs, Two Holocaust Stories and One Big Question, by James Barron.

New York Times Magazine, September 16, 2009. The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, by Sara Corbett.

Philadelphia Inquirer, February 2, 2010. Early draft of the Constitution found in Phila., by Edward Colimore.

 Washington Post, April 30, 2010. Iraq demands return of its Jewish archive, by Glenn Kessler.

References from other online resources:

British Library, April 16, 2012. British Library acquires the St Cuthbert Gospel – the earliest intact European book.  

Fine Books and Collections, October 4, 2011. Bishop's Bible Brings in the Visitors, by Nate Pederson.

Iconic Books Blog, June 25, 2007: Golden Qur’an at Pushkin Museum

Iconic Books Blog, September 21, 2007: Devil’s BibleExhibited in Prague

Iconic Books Blog, August 11, 2009: Giant WoodenQur’an

Iconic Books Blog. September 29, 2009. Scholem’s Mechanically Reproduced Relic Zohar, by Zeev Elitsur.

Iconic Books Blog, April 9, 2012: Giant Afghan Qur’an

NARA. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The Declaration of Independence:A History.

© James W. Watts 2012.

Revelation Media (Synthetic Scripture)

Reposted by permission from Zak Braiterman's Jewish Philosophy Place:

I caught Karen Heimbuch on a Christian radio ministry on the way up to Syracuse today, at some point between Amy Goodman and Mahler a bit past Roscoe, NY. (You’ve never heard of her.) They were playing cuts from and talking about her recently released 2 volume CD of her dramatic presentations of the Book of Revelation with the London Symphony Orchestra, performed from memory.

From the website, Heimbuch is described as follows: “Having been in ministry for over 25 years, Karen is a gifted speaker, worship leader, songwriter and dramatic performer. She is a licensed and ordained minister who has traveled extensively in North America and abroad, and loves to inspire and instruct others in the memorization and delivery of God’s Word.”

What I found very interesting was how Heimbuch understood the mediaization of Scripture according to multiple tracks. Regarding the Book of Revelations production, she described 4 separate tracks –the symphony, the chorus, the special effects, and “the Word of God” (the most important “track’). She describes how it took 3 years to get it “product ready,” and expressed every confidence that God was behind the production.

Neither the performance nor the cultural politics were to my taste, but I’ll wager that the awareness on her part of media is savvy and that the theory behind it stands up to critical scrutiny. I like attention to production values, the intersection between media and memory, and the idea of synthetic Scripture with its organization of multiple sound clips into a deliverable product.

Some Good Uses for Old Books, or, That's Kinda Cool

I suppose with all these old books laying around, in need of recycling, reshelving, and remaindering, some physical use can be made of them. There's a quirkiness here, and says something culturally, but once you start to look at several of these structures, there's not much more to it. Maybe being in the gallery, and smelling the book would add....

Miler Lagos' Home (see here)

Janet Cardiff is one of my favorite artists. This isn't one of my favorite pieces by her (here with George Bures Miller for Modern Art Oxford), but fun nonetheless. Full title gives it a bit of conceptual heft: The House of Books has No Windows.

Slovakian artist Matej Kren's installation Scanner

Marta Minujin's Tower of Babel. See here for more.

Off-site storage debate at NYPL

The Chronicle of Higher Education today reports on a debate at the New York Public Library over Off-site Storage. The Library is considering sending many more of its volumes to Recap, a storage facility run by Columbia, Princeton and the NYPL in New Jersey.

The library promises that materials sent to Recap will be safely stored and quickly accessible—usually within 24 hours—to patrons who request them. Critics say that remote storage doesn't work so well in practice, and that the wrong message is sent by taking books out of the heart of the librar.

This is a familiar debate which played out on my campus at Syracuse University two years ago. The rest of the Chronicle article, however, reads like an advertizement for off-site storage. It presents the objections and counters them, point by point, continuing a unfortunate trend at this newspaper to displace news with advocacy.

Bookbinding video

The Discovery Channel's "How Its Made" series shows the craft of book-binding in fascinating detail:

Free Qurans controversial in Germany

An interesting feature of iconic books is that the most cherished books may be given away free. This commonly occurs with scriptures and usually elicits little comment. But when a conservative Salafi Muslim organization began giving away free Qur'ans in Hanover, urging passersby in German to LIES! "read!", it drew media coverage and political outrage. The New York Times (April 16) reported:

The campaign to hand out the Korans drew nationwide attention — and widespread condemnation — last week after journalists who had criticized the effort were threatened in an online video. And on Monday, the interior minister in Hesse, a state in central Germany, called Mr. Abou-Nagie and his followers “pied pipers” and said that the danger from radical Islam had reached “a new dimension.”

Here again, for both Muslims and non-Muslims, the book has become the emblem for the religious community and everything that people think it stands for.

Library resort hotel in Thailand

Michael Lieberman also calls attention to The Library, a resort hotel in Thailand that caters to bookish tourists. It's webpage proclaims: "If you can finish one book while staying with us, we think this is more than an accomplishment of our team."

Compare the Library Hotel in Manhattan.

Robison book pictures

Michael Lieberman of Book Patrol calls attention to the book-themed photos of Joel Robison, such as "F is for finding fiction in the forest":

Britain keeps St Cuthbert's Gospel

Books associated with particular places often take on nationalistic significance. This happened again when the 7th-century St Cuthbert's Gospel was put up for sale by the Jesuits this year.
It is touted as the world's "oldest intact book" because the original binding of the Gospel of John manuscript has survived. The British Library intends to digitize the book so that it is available to people "everywhere" online. But its campaign to raise the money emphasizes the urgency of keeping the Gospel "for the nation" because it is "a precious part of our heritage":



The campaign was successful: the Library has now acquired "one of the world’s most important books" for 9 million pounds.

Franzen's fear of e-books

Jonathan Franzen made headlines in January by announcing the he fears the effects of e-books. The acclaimed author of the novels, Freedom and The Corrections, both available as e-books, lamented digital texts' lack of permanence:

I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.

“Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball.

“But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

This blog has frequently documented the desire for the preservation  of cultures and values in the form of material books.

Giant Afghan Qur'an

The Hindustan Times announced in January the completion of a hand-written and decorated Qur'an measuring 2.28 meters (90 inches) by 1.55 meters (61 inches).

An Afghan calligrapher has worked for five years to create the world’s biggest Koran, a bid to show the world that Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage and traditions have been damaged but not destroyed by 30 years of war. 

Mohammad Sabir Khedri, the master calligrapher behind the project, worked with nine students on a design that combines gold script with millions of tiny colorful dots, forming highly symbolic decorations around the giant pages.

“I wanted to use as many tasteful colors as possible to make this holy book look beautiful,” he said, standing beside his enormous creation in a room built specially to house it.

Encyclopedia Britannica goes Digital

Last week NPR reported on the decision by the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica to shift from print-and-digital to an all-digital format. According to the report, this will be the first time in 244 years that the Encyclopedia will not be available in print form.

The NPR story quotes from a New York Times article, which clearly delineates the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of America's iconic books:

In the 1950s and 1960s, a set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, an object coveted not only for its usefulness but as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. The books were often a financial stretch, with many families paying for their encyclopedias in monthly installments.

Indeed, I remember how fiercely proud my late mother was of our set of the Britannica. For her, it was a mark of our intellectual credibility. We may have been poor, but we were educated--and owning a set of the Britannica (and not just relying on the local library) was a tangible marker of that status.

My mother passed away in 2009, and being her only child, the task fell to me to sift through her possessions. I made the decision to part with the set of Encyclopedia Britannica, now more than thirty years out of date. There have been many days, however, when I have second-guessed that decision. Should I have kept them? Not for what they contained, but for what they meant, to my mother, and to me, all those years.

To me, there is no better criteria for the iconic status of a book (or set of books) than this: that you would be willing to make space in your life for them for no other reason than their sentimental value; not even for what they meant to me, but for what they meant to somebody else.

SCRIPT at EIR

This SCRIPT panel will take place at the AAR's EIR meeting in Waterloo, ON:
May 4, 4:00-6:00

Panel: The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT)

Room: REN 1404

• David Dault, Christian Brothers University: "On a Controlled Bibliographic Vocabulary for SCRIPT and its Related Organizations: A Response to Deirdre Stam"
• James W. Watts, Syracuse University: "Relic Books"
• Karl Ivan Solibakke, Syracuse University: "Identity, Mimesis and Script: Walter Benjamin's Mimetic Function Revisited"

SCRIPT at SECSOR

This SCRIPT-themed session took place at the SECSOR meeting in Atlanta on March 4, 2012:
Theme: Theology of the Book
Steven R. Harmon, Gardner-Webb School of Divinity, presiding

• David Dault, Christian Brothers University: "‘This way of living is different from communism because...’: The Ideological Control of Scriptural Interpretations of Acts 4 in the Editorial Rhetorics of Popular Study Bibles"
• Dorina Miller Parmenter, Spalding University: "Portraits of America’s Iconic Book
• Kelly West Figueroa-Ray, University of Virginia: "Twisted Scriptural Tokens: The Bible According to Jerry Falwell"

Afghan protests over accidental Qur'an burning

The accidental burning of Qur'an's by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan have provoked two days of violent protest so far and led to U.S. bases and offices being locked down for security. Scripture desecrations, including Qur'ans, has been a frequent subject of commentary on this blog as well as the topic of my 2009 online case study.

Brian Dettmer's work, again

Jim Watts noted an exhibit by Brian Dettmer a few years ago. Dettmer seems to be continuing his book art work in some fascinating ways, as see in the images here.

Dettmer is also noted in the following book, which I don't think this has been noted in these pages, but this looks worth checking out (especially considering the subtitle):

Book Art: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books

Wrapping Torah Scroll around Preacher

A remarkable video shows a Messianic Jewish rabbi and charismatic preacher, Ralph Messer, wrapping Bishop Eddie Long in a Torah scroll as a ritual of enthronement and new birth:



The video prompted a storm of controversy. Messianic Jews have repudiated Messer, and Bishop Long has apologized. But Messer has done such things before, as this video proves:

Aside from being ritually unprecedented in either Judaism or Christianity, Messer’s explanation of the ceremony is full of falsehoods. He claims that the Torah was a “constitution of God” given to every ancient Israelite king and wrapped around the king at his inauguration. There are no such accounts in the Bible. This is the first I’ve ever heard of a Torah scroll being wrapped around anyone. Messer also recounts some Jewish practices accurately, such as using a pointer so as not to touch the scroll with bare hands, while simultaneously breaking that practice himself.  Brent Strawn of Emory University did a good job of pointing out the mistakes and problems on CNN.

Messer’s actions at New Birth Baptist Church are interesting both as an example of how ritual innovation gets justified and as an example of the ritual use of an iconic book. Ritual innovation is usually disguised as ritual restoration: rather than starting new practices, an old practice is being revived. So Messer claims to be reproducing an ancient Jewish royal. His attempt differs from many other ritual innovations only in how obviously implausible they are.

Messer’s actions are also a remarkable example of the common practice of manipulating an iconic book to invoke its authority while ignoring, even contradicting, its contents. Ritualizing the iconic dimensions of texts typically functions to convey legitimacy to the people manipulating or receiving them. That’s exactly what Messer does for Bishop Long: by wrapping the Torah around Bishop Long, he proclaims his coronation and his “new birth”—claiming the legitimacy of the scripture for a religious leader embattled by scandal.

(My thanks for Bradford Anderson for bringing this to my attention.)

Fantastic Flying Books

This fantasy of living books has been nominated for an Oscar this year UPDATE (2/26/12): It won the Oscar!

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.)

Copying the Whole KJV

The Wall Street Journal reports the story of a man who, though in poor health, is hand-copying the entire King James Bible. He has completed about three-quarters of the text and hopes to finish in 2012.

Intellectual curiosity, rather than religious fervor, led Patterson to the project. The idea came out of a conversation with his partner of 20 years, who died of a liver disorder in February 2010. A Muslim who owned a collection of handwritten Korans, he suggested that Patterson transcribe the Bible. The concept instantly appealed.

But he plans to donate the finished set of volumes to his church in Spencertown, New York. And a local artist has created a photographic journal and blog about his work.

The article cites an expert in Christian history on the rarity of such practices, citing the lack of a devotional manuscript tradition in modern Christianity. But I suspect that the practice is more common than we suspect, but poorly documented. Aside from well-publicized efforts like the calligraphed and illuminated St. Johns Bible using the NRSV text, the Missouri Springfield Journal reported in 2007 about a man who spent 40 years copying the KJV.

(One benefit of a blog like this is the ability to document such phenomena to get a better idea of how rare or common they are. If anyone has heard of other examples of modern Christians hand copying the BIble, please let us know!)

Heritage Librarians as "Ambassadors of the Book"

The University of Antwerp will host an international library conference on February 1-2, 2012, on the theme "Ambassadors of the book: Competences for heritage librarians." The conference website explains the goal:

It seems trivial, these days, to state that libraries have been challenged by recent technological, social and economic developments. On the other hand, these developments have not minimized the library’s mission as a memory institution, quite the contrary. Among the many roles that libraries will continue to play in the 21st century and beyond, their responsibility for the preservation of the written heritage is perhaps the one that is questioned least.

I am less optimistic that preservation remains widely acknowledged as a core service of libraries. Rhetoric about accessibility and digitization dominates discussions I've heard and read much more than memory preservation does. I think the organizers are right, though, that preservation remains the chief cultural role of libraries, especially research libraries. It is the one that corporate interests are least likely to replace.

Relic Armenian Manuscript Pages

The Los Angeles Times reported last month on the Getty Museum's legal battle to retain ownership of eight illuminated pieces of parchment from the 13th-century Zeyt'um Gospels. The Armenian Church claims the pages were stolen during the genocide of 1916 and the Getty does not hold legal title to them.

An interesting feature of this controversy is the debate over the moral issues involved not just in ownership of the pages but also over the ethics of separating a manuscript into multiple parts. On the one hand, the Getty cites common practice:

Elizabeth Morrison, the Getty's acting senior curator of manuscripts, said that "well-regarded … collections around the world" contain individual manuscript sheets. "The Getty in no way condones the practice of taking apart manuscripts, but we continue to collect individual leaves after careful examination proves that they have not recently been removed … with motives of financial gain."

Her argument, then, is that there are legitimate motives for taking books apart. Though not mentioned here, libraries and museums have often disassembled valuable codices in order to display more than two pages at one time. Once disassembled, though, they are more easily sold in pieces, and perhaps more valuable that way. Both for display and for profit, then, codices frequently get treated like bodily relics by socalled "secular" institutions.

On the other side of the argument is the claim that the pages "belong" with the rest of the manuscript.

Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk and executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., said that a whole work of art is better than a divided one, and that when a museum has the power to turn a fragmented manuscript into a complete one, it should do so. "It's better from an artistic perspective … it can [then] be studied by scholars as a whole object," said Stewart. . . . Acquiring individual sheets of a manuscript is improper, he said, unless the original work already is so fragmented or scattered that there's little chance it can be made whole. Museums must avoid "contributing to an improper fragmentation of a work. In this instance, it would not be a terribly complex matter to restore the whole."

Stewart invokes the needs of scholars to view a work entire, but also an aesthetic value of the integrity of the work of art. Only then does the article mention specifically religious considerations:

Beyond that, Stewart said, the Getty, which in recent years repatriated more than 40 artifacts to Greece and Italy after evidence showed they had been looted from archaeological sites, should consider that these works are still venerated: "Here's a living, breathing religious community, as opposed to classical antiquities."

This case illustrates clearly the contested values that can swirl around relic texts, especially those that have been partitioned and parceled out, as people are prone to do with relics. We have had the opportunity to observe these processes at work with various kinds of relic texts on this blog (click the label relic at left for more examples).

All I want for Christmas is a Controlled Vocabulary...

...or, at least, to start a conversation about one.

A "controlled vocabulary" is a standard used in taxonomies to help control ambiguity about objects and resources. It cuts down on syntactic clutter.

What sort of clutter? Consider the word "football." The term means one thing in America, sure. As soon as we are out of the US, however, it could easily refer to what we yanks call "soccer," or even (in other parts of the world) rugby. As a descriptor, "football" is a poor one.

In the worlds of Iconic Books and Material Scripture, we have a similar problem. Our terms, especially terms like "book" and "text," are imprecise and (at worst) utterly confusing. Since these are the core objects of our discussions, it makes sense to take up discussions to adopt a standard of terms, a "controlled vocabulary," that will allow us to reduce ambiguities as we move forward in our research.

I am by no means the first person to call for such a move. Those who attended the third Iconic Books symposium in 2010 will remember Deirdre Stam's "Talking About 'Iconic Books' in the Terminology of Book History." I feel now - as I said then, as we were commenting on her paper - that this is the single most important matter facing our research. Hands down.

Now that SCRIPT is viable and attracting new members, we are at a perfect point to undertake a serious conversation about finding a scholarly standard for our bibliographic terms - a shared, controlled vocabulary that we can endorse and encourage the use of in all SCRIPT-related endeavors and publications. (Think of this is terms of the SBL Style Guide, for example - in principle if not in execution - offering a standard reference to writers in the field.) Now, precisely when things are still small and manageable, is the ideal time to put such standards in place.

I speak from bitter experience. In the process of writing my dissertation, I concocted an 80-page chapter where - in my utter ignorance - I attempted to develop a vocabulary out of whole cloth for theologians to talk about physical books. It was terrible; a Frankenstein's monster sort of affair. Moreover, it was executed in complete ignorance of the excellent groundwork in bibliographic studies that already exists.

It is my fear, if we don't establish such a standard, that my experience will be shared by many SCRIPT scholars to follow. Each will take their turn at the attempt to define their subject from the ground up, wasting time and effort that could be spent advancing the conversation in new directions.

For those who have never thought about these issues before, let me suggest two starting points for discussion. The first (shorter) is G. Thomas Tanselle's "The Arrangement of Descriptive Bibliographies," from Studies in Bibliography, Volume 37 (1984) and available online here. In the article, Tanselle suggests the second (longer) starting point, which I'd like to also include here, Principles of Bibliographic Description, by Fredson Bowers.

What is needed, ultimately, is a set of terms upon which we agree, that we will use moving forward to reduce ambiguity in our scholarly conversations. Tanselle and Bowers are two sources I have come across in my own research, but I have no doubt many readers of this blog have encountered others that they might suggest. Please do.

My hope (my Christmas wish!) is that this discussion will be taken up across all quarters of the SCRIPT universe in the next couple of years. I encourage my colleagues to follow Deirdre Stam's lead, and to present papers and perhaps whole conference panels where options for standards can be presented and debated. I also encourage robust discussion on these blogs about the question.

There are well-established, robust standards of bibliographic description out there. Let's share them, search out new ones, and eventually decide on the one that will best serve our scholarship. Then let's agree on it, use it, and move forward to the frontiers.

I'm very interested in suggestions and responses. Please share them in the comments below! Thank you, and happy holidays,

David Dault, Washington, PA

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.

Norms for reading postures

I recently responded to a query on the SHARP discussion list that may be of interest:

My SHARP query: in conjunction with my research on graphic novels, I'm looking at the normative act of reading--how readers are supposed to use their hands, not move their heads, NOT move their lips, not move their fingers over the words, not underline passages, not write in the margins, etc., and how they are supposed to sit rather than stand or lie down or kneel, etc. (except with regard to public readings of liturgical texts, obviously). I'd be interested to know if anyone has done work or is presently working on the relationship of hierarchical codes inscribed in the book object to the physical acts involved in reading. My sense is that reading was physically engrossing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and progressively less so in the 19th and 20th. Morris, Gill, Morison, Warde all have notes that point to the disembodiment of reading, and I assume that somewhere there must be a mid-20th century book or film or filmstrip that actually depicts for children how they are supposed to comport themselves nicely as they read, but I haven't located one, and if anyone has, I'd be grateful for a citation.

Michael Joseph
Rutgers University Libraries

My response:

In compiling and analyzing a pictorial database for the Iconic Books Project, we noticed the significant role of art in promulgating norms of reading behavior, especially posture. This appears as early as ancient Egyptian portraiture and ritual texts, shows up famously (though not uniquely either in time or culture) in late medieval and renaissance depictions of Mary's Annunciation, and remains a prominent feature of contemporary illustrative photography and art.


Posture varies, of course, depending on the material form of the text and also the situation of its use. In many religious communities from antiquity to the present, for example, liturgical reading takes place standing while devotional reading is usually depicted in a seated posture--often simultaneously in congregations where the liturgist reads the scripture from the pulpit while congregants follow along in their own Bibles. Maybe the increasing publication of genres for private use has led to emphasizing sitting modes of reading to the point of disembodiment (an idea that echoes devotional, even mystical reading practices), but I should point out that standing to read publicly remains the norm, even (especially?) in academic conference presentations.

Beyond these general observations, though, I can't point out much specific bibliography. Study of the embodied and material uses of texts is in its infancy, especially comparative study that begins to generalize about norms of reading and their social significance. That makes it, for me at least, a very exciting subject to work on!

Jim Watts
Syracuse University
jwwatts@syr.edu

Publishers embellishing physical books

The Herald-Tribune reports a publishing trend of embellishing book covers and adding pictures to sell physical books:

Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.

It seems to be working:

There are indications that an exquisitely designed hardcover book can keep print sales high and cut into e-book sales. For instance, “1Q84” has sold 95,000 copies in hardcover and 28,000 in e-book — an inversion of the typical sales pattern of new fiction at Knopf.

The attempt to create books that are beautiful objects not only emphasizes beauty over against e-books, but also permanence:

... “If we believe that convenience reading is moving at light speed over to e,” Mr. Schnittman said, using the industry shorthand for e-books, “then we need to think about what the physical qualities of a book might be that makes someone stop and say, ‘well there’s convenience reading, and then there’s book owning and reading.’ We realized what we wanted to create was a value package that would last.”

... In October, the British novelist Julian Barnes underscored that point when he accepted the Man Booker Prize for “The Sense of an Ending” by urging publishers to pay attention to aesthetics. “Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you think of its contents, will probably agree that it is a beautiful object,” Mr. Barnes told the black-tie crowd in London. “And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.”

Exhibiting iconic books

Nate Pederson on Fine Books & Collections points out:

A tip to any public libraries struggling with declining patronage: go digging around in your vault!  The public library in Windsor, Ontario discovered a Bible from 1585 languishing away in its vault earlier this year.  Librarians promptly put the book on display and saw a 40 percent increase in visitors last month. 

In my paper on "Iconic Electronic Texts" for the Religion & Media Workshop in San Francisco last month, I argued that the same motive drives many digitization projects. Libraries and museums put there most iconic books online in hopes of bringing more people through their doors to see the real thing. Once there, they may buy physical momentos of the relic text, ranging from cheap postcards to expensive facsimile reproductions of the entire book. So, far from detracting from the appeal of physical books, digitization provides new means for marketing their display as relics.

Libraries symbolizing hope and ideals

This fall brought several news storis showing that libraries--respositories of material books--continue to function as powerful symbols of the ideals of free thought, empowerment and counter-culture. The most obvious example was the "People's Library" that sprang up at the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York and was frequently highlighted in news coverage of the event.

This picture (from The People's Library, scroll down to October 11) captures much of the library's symbolic interest. "Literacy, Legitimacy and Moral Authority" reads the sign above the donations box. The media interest reflected the sentiment that the library was somehow representative of the movement. After police evicted the protestors, ruined books were displayed in front of the New York Public Library to portray repression of the movement (from The People's Library, scroll down to November 20).

Michael Lieberman posted pictures on Book Patrol showing the book theme in the protestors' signs, too.

The theme of libraries as tools of empowerment and liberation also appeared in the New York Times' story about the Read/Write Library's new location in Chicago:

Formerly known as the Chicago Underground Library, Read/Write rejects the selectivity of traditional libraries and collects “anything from university press to handmade artists’ books to zines made by 13-year-olds,” Ms. Taylor said. “We want to give people a much broader sense of who’s out there.”

That is rhetoric more frequently associated with the internet, but here motivating an all-volunteer effort to preserve and present a material collection.

The Nicholas Kristof in the NYTimes also highlighted work to extend literacy by founding libraries around the world:

John Wood handed out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.

Kristof makes the virtues of literacy very clear: "Schooling is cheap and revolutionary. The more money we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow."

These stories illustrate the fact that books and libraries continue to function as powerful material symbols of people's hopes for a more equitable, enlightened and peaceful world.

Burying Outdated Missals

On November 27th, use of the new translation of the Roman Catholic Mass became mandatory for English-speaking congregations. The Washington Post's coverage of the change emphasizes the more conservative tendencies of the new version, which replaces on produced in the 1960s after the Second Vatican Council. But what drew my attention was this parenthetical comment:

Millions of books are being replaced; each parish must buy its own. (What becomes of the old books? The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recommends burying them on church grounds or in a parish cemetary.)

The statement of the U.S. Bishops' Conference also suggests ritualizing the disposal process by saying a blessing when retiring the outdated books. It notes that because books used in the liturgy are blessed, they should be treated "with respect."

The collection of essays edited by Kristina Myrvold, "Death of Sacred Texts," surveys how various religious traditions handle this problem. Dorina Miller Parmenter's essay in that collection points out that Christian traditions tend to have fewer mandates regarding the disposal of sacred books than some other religions, but that lay Christians often voice discomfort at simply trashing or recycling Bibles or other sacred texts. The bishops were responding to queries motivated by such concerns when they issued these instructions.

This is not, however, just a religious concern. Unease over book destruction or disposal is widespread Sacred texts only provide more focused examples of a broader concern, as several previous posts (here, here, and here, as well as the entries under the label "disposal" at left) have observed.

Presentations at AAR/SBL 2011

Members of SCRIPT (The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts) were active presenters at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), November 18-22:

• Jim Watts (Syracuse) talked about "Iconic Electronic Texts, or How Ritual Makes Virtual Texts Material," in the Religion and Media Workshop's day-long session on "What’s Next for Texts: Scripting Religion in a Networked World" (November 18)
• Dori Parmenter (Spalding) and Yohan Yoo (Seoul) presented to the AAR's Arts, Literature, and Religion Section's session on "The Arts of the Book: Reading Images, Looking at Words" (November 20)
• Jason Larson (Bates) talked about "The Iconic Gospel as Monument: Gospel Books as Imperialized Sites of Memory in Late Antiquity" to the SBL's Religious World of Late Antiquity Section's session on "The Materiality of Texts / The Word as Object" (November 20)
• David Dault (Christian Brothers) presented "'It Fell from Heaven': The United 93 Crash Site Bible as Icon and Totemic Object" to the AAR's Religion and Popular Culture Group (November 22)

SCRIPT CFP

The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT) has issued an open call for papers for its May 4-5 concurrent meeting with the EIR/AAR in Waterloo, Ontario.

Please consider joining in doing new research on iconic books and performative texts. Click here for details about SCRIPT. Click here for online membership form. Membership includes an online subscription to Postscripts, which later this year will publish the papers from the third Iconic Books Symposium in 2010.

Creating Relics of Endangered Alphabets

Tim Brookes has been documenting the world's alphabetic heritage by carving specimens on local curly maple in his Endangered Alphabets Project. The website explains his motivation:

Every one of the Endangered Alphabets (Inuktitut, Baybayin, Manchu, Bugis, Bassa Vah, Cherokee, Samaritan, Mandaic, Syriac, Khmer, Pahauh Hmong, Balinese, Tifinagh and Nom), carved and painted into a slab of Vermont curly maple, challenges our assumptions about language, about beauty, about the fascinating interplay between function and grace that takes place when we invent symbols for the sounds we speak, and when we put a word on a page—or a piece of bamboo, or a palm leaf.

The text in each case is Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Brookes chose these alphabets because:

Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.

The Atlantic, in describing his work, commented: "Letters in carved wood filled with black enamel paint ... make everything sharper and convey something of the awe of ancient inscriptions." Brookes art should certainly serve the purpose of relics, which is to contain and preserve things of great value, in this case, alphabets.

(h/t Fine Books and Collections)

The burden of saving a book collection

In June, numerous media outlets (e.g. 1, 2) reported on the problems of Shaunna Raycraft of Saskatoon. She saved a collection of 350,000 books when a neighbor threatened to burn them. She and her husband brought a small house onto their property to store the books, but the weight of 30 tons of books threatened to collapse the building.

Raycraft tried selling the books on eBay, and to collectors and used book stores, but no one wants the task of sorting through them. ... "We are kind of at a standstill," said Raycraft. "I work at two jobs. My husband is a full-time student. We have three kids and no time. And no money. And so we're at the point now where were looking at having to burn some of the books ourselves."

The news coverage prompted almost twenty people to volunteer to help sort and dispose of the books. I have not found any later reports of how that effort is going.

Internet (Physical) Archive

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. But this year it announced that it is also creating a physical archive to back-up its digital collection.

A reason to preserve the physical book that has been digitized is that it is the authentic and original version that can be used as a reference in the future. If there is ever a controversy about the digital version, the original can be examined. A seed bank such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is seen as an authoritative and safe version of crops we are growing. Saving physical copies of digitized books might at least be seen in a similar light as an authoritative and safe copy that may be called upon in the future.


As the Internet Archive has digitized collections and placed them on our computer disks, we have found that the digital versions have more and more in common with physical versions. The computer hard disks, while holding digital data, are still physical objects. As such we archive them as they retire after their 3-5 year lifetime. Similarly, we also archive microfilm, which was a previous generation’s access format. So hard drives are just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed us that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era.

They are therefore creating a facility that can accomodate up to ten million items in long term storage.

They are accepting donations of large collections and libraries. Their comments about the donors feelings are pertinent to this blog:

Working with donors of books has been rewarding because an alternative for many of these books was the used book market or being destroyed. We have found everyone involved has a visceral repulsion to destroying books.

Arcimboldo's Librarian

Michael Lieberman on Book Patrol lays some markers for tracking the influence of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's painting, The Librarian, in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.

Arguing over digital texts

In July, James Glieck writing in the New York Times Sunday Review, meditated on the digitization and web publication of rare manuscripts and books by libraries around the world. He celebrated the advantages of open access for historical research and derides critics of digitization such as Tristam Handy, who wrote in the Guardian that "it is only with MS in hand that the real meaning of the text becomes apparent: its rhythms and cadences, the relationship of image to word, the passion of the argument or cold logic of the case." Glieck responded:

I think it’s sentimentalism, and even fetishization. It’s related to the fancy that what one loves about books is the grain of paper and the scent of glue. ... We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. ... Nor is obscurity a virtue. A hidden parchment page enters the light when it molts into a digital simulacrum. It was never the parchment that mattered.

Glieck did notice that desire for the material book, at least rare books and texts, continues unabated which he finds "odd":

Oddly, for collectors of antiquities, the pricing of informational relics seems undiminished by cheap reproduction — maybe just the opposite. ... Why is this tattered parchment valuable? Magical thinking. It is a talisman. The precious item is a trick of the eye. The real Magna Carta, the great charter of human rights and liberty, is available free online, where it is safely preserved. It cannot be lost or destroyed. An object like this — a talisman — is like the coffin at a funeral. It deserves to be honored, but the soul has moved on.

The label "magic" is the oldest (really: thousands of years old) put-down of scribal culture. This blog concurs with recent scholarship on magic that such polemics obscure transactions of real social power, whether in the form of magical objects or material (or, for that matter, digital) texts. We should therefore remember that a digital text, after all, is composed of matter too. It can certainly be destroyed (rather easily, in fact), and even all the copies of a text can disappear (less easily, but very likely as years turn into decades and centuries). When that happens, I doubt its soul will be any easier to find that those in human bodies.

E-Books and Print-On-Demand in the News

A busy spring and summer made me neglect this blog. It's time to dig into the accumulated pile of news of (iconic) books in the news. Doing so immediately reveals one advantage of procrastination: I can now pull together a series of items of about the rise of e-publishing.

In April, the American Association of Publishers revealed that the number of e-books sold in February surpassed the number of hardback and softback sales together. Digging further into statistics showed, however, that e-books grossed the published $90 million, print books still grossed $215 million. By September, the Association was reporting that e-book sales were taking market away from mass-market paperbacks in particular. And Michael Lieberman on Book Patrol pointed out the trend that the headlines missed:

While much of the focus has centered on the meteoric rise of e-books and their effect on the publishing industry it is the print-on-demand segment that has really taken off. In 2010 there were almost 8 times the number of print-on-demand titles then traditional titles!

APHA Conference Early Bird deadline approaching

For folks who might be interested in attending the 2011 American Printing History Association conference in San Diego this fall, the deadline for Early Bird registration is this Thursday, September 15th.

The theme this year is "Printing from the Edge":

What have been the transformative moments in printing history that have changed the direction of printing, typography, papermaking, bookbinding, or book design, and moved us to a new edge? What are today’s frontiers? Where is tomorrow’s edge?

The conference takes place October 14-15 at UC San Diego. More information can be found here at the APHA website.

SCRIPT-related events at the AAR/SBL

Iconic Books and SCRIPT events will be taking place during the simultaneous meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in San Francisco:

Friday, November 18, 9:00-4:30 - "What’s Next for Texts: Scripting Religion in a Networked World" - The Religion and Media Workshop

Sunday, November 20, 9:00-11:30 am - "The Arts of the Book: Reading Images, Looking at Words" - AAR's Arts, Literature, and Religion Section

Sunday, November 20, 1:00-3:30 pm - "The Materiality of Texts / The Word as Object" - SBL's Religious World of Late Antiquity Section

Monday, November 21, 6:00-8:00 pm - SCRIPT ANNUAL MEETING: Library Bar, Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter Street

Dault on NYTimes, Vatican and Bible

David Dault, on Material Scripture, compares Kenneth Woodward's characterization of the editors of the New York Times wielding cultural power like the "Magisterium" with the power of editors of mass-marketed Bibles. Dault had already compared Bible editors with the magisterium in his doctoral dissertation, and now brings the leading American newspaper into the same set of comparisons:

What interests me about Woodward's assertion above is the ideological power that is brought to bear when these magisterial effects are wedded with certain types of material objects. That editors and corporations control the content (and therefore, to an arguable extent, the possible readings) of books and newspapers is plain. But the Bible is not an ordinary book, just as the Times is no ordinary newspaper, in terms of the relative cultural power wielded by both.

By virtue (is this the proper word?) of their respective material presentations, the editorial decisions that go into the construction of an imprint of a Bible version or an issue of the Times are of an elevated ideological nature. Words in the New York Times are different, in their weight and influence, than similar words found in the Chattanooga Times, for example.

Dault's comments are well worth reading and digesting in full. But including the NYT in this set of comparisons highlights one difference between mass-produced Bibles on the one hand and the newspaper and the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: for the latter two, prestige is vested in the institutions they represent and only derivatively in the documents they produce and distribute. Bibles, on the other hand, carry their prestige for being the material objects that they are; their publishers and editors are as likely to derive prestige from the product they produce.

Digital Destruction of Values

Alan Kaufman wrote an essay in Evergreen comparing the decimation of book culture by digitization to the holocaust:

the awful scene is reoccuring everywhere: venerable, much beloved bookstores closing and that portion of the populace who cherish books—an ever-shrinking minority—left baffled and bereft; a silent corporate Krystallnacht decimating the world of literacy.

The comparison prompted ridicule from Newsweek (note Kaufman's response at the bottom). But though overstated, I think Kaufman's piece is important for emphasizing the sense of sacrality that many people attach to books. He also points out the dualism inherant in the electronic separation of text from physical artifact:

[Mass media] in subtle ways positions the destruction of book culture like so: “books” in and of themselves are nothing, only another technology, like the Walkman or the laptop. What is sacred are the texts and those are being transferred to the Internet where they will attain a new kind of high-tech-assured immortality. Like dead souls leaving their earthly bodies the books are, in effect, going to a better place: the Kindle, the e-book, the web; hi-tech's version of Paradise.


... The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.


Further, we are told that to assign to books a particular value above and beyond their clearly inferior utility as a medium for language is to mark oneself as an irrelevant social throwback. ... As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven.


... To me, the book is one of life's most sacred objects, a torah, a testament, something not only worth living for but as shown in Ray Bradbury's ‘Fahrenheit 451’, something that is even worth dying for.


... Not since the advent of Christianity has the world witnessed so sweeping a change in the very fabric of human existence. Behind the hi-tech revolution is an idea of Progress that in many regards resembles the premises of Christianity itself. The superseding of the new way over the old, of the New Testament over the Old Testament, the discrediting of the traditional as inferior or even evil, a sense of powerful excitement about the revolutionary, and of course, most importantly, the promise of heavenly immortality over the temporal limitations of the wasting physical body—the accursed haptic book versus the blessed Holy Ghostly Internet—all these earmark the hi-tech pogrom against the book.


Heinrich Heine, the early 19th century German Jewish poet, wrote: “"Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people." The advent of electronic media to first position in the modern chain of Being—a place once occupied by God—and later, after the Enlightenment, by humans—is no mere 9/11 upon our cultural assumptions. It is a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human

The benefit of Kaufman's over-heated rhetoric is that it make very clear that books are about values. We pursue the study of iconic books in order to explain why books carry such values. Commenting on Kaufman's article on the SHARP list, Bill Bell notes that "it has for generations been conventional to invest books with human characteristics." He provides three examples:

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. - Charles W. Eliot

The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. - Washington Irving

For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble. - Francis Bacon

I think Kaufman is right that e-texts do not carry values the same way. Why that is the case must have to do with our own embodied natures. The realms of values--religion, ethics, literature, aesthetics--require physical artifacts with which our bodies can interact. The ephemeral texts cascading down my computer screen do not fill that bill very well.

Ark of the Covenant in Zimbabwe

The Ark of the Covenant--that fabled container of the most iconic of texts, the Ten Commandments--has had considerable impact on the folklore and practices of several African peoples. Now the BBC reports that a replica of the ark that is possibly 700 years old has been placed on display in Harare, Zimbabwe.

The "ngoma lungundu" belongs to the Lemba people - black Africans who claim Jewish ancestry. They say the vessel was built almost 700 years ago from the remains of the original Ark ...

Tudor Parfitt, who rediscovered the artefact three years ago, told the BBC he believed it was the oldest wooden object ever found in sub-Saharan Africa.

"On each corner there is the remnants of a wooden ring, and obviously at one point, it was carried by inserting poles through these two rings on either side," he said.

"Of course in the biblical account, that's precisely how the Ark of the Covenant was carried across the wilderness."

The BBC's Steve Vickers in Harare says the vessel was unveiled to great fanfare at the city's Museum of Human Science.

Lemba leaders from across Zimbabwe attended the ceremony, along with government ministers.

This ceremony demonstrates once again the political as well as ethnic legitimacy that can be at stake in the preservation and display of iconic texts, or their reliquaries.

Scroll, Codex, E-Book

Lev Grossman, in "From Scroll to Screen" in the New York Times today, makes a very important contribution to the comparisons between paper books and e-books. He rightly points out that the most important precedenct for this technological change in book production is not the invention of printing by Guttenberg and others, as much tech PR maintains. It is rather the invention of the codex and its adoption by Christians in place of the scroll that dominated ancient literature. Now as then, the material form of the book makes a big difference to how readers use it:

But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

... Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. ... But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience.

A/V Texts: E-Reading with Music

Betsy Morais on The Atlantic's blog, offers some fascinating thoughts on the future of e-reading: add a soundtrack to your e-book.

For those of us interested in sacred texts, what would you pair with, say, the Rg Veda's opening chapters, Kojiki on the Sun Goddess, or the book of Revelation? (Of course, we know the Revelation one: "Ride of the Valkyries"!)

The final paragraph goes some way toward delineating the power of the medium on the message:

What plays on inside a reader's head might be the ultimate value of reading. In silence, the mind can parse through a phrase without distraction, and attention can be paid to meaning more than pace. As Blaise Pascal wrote in 1670, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Then again, a soundtrack that performs the words on the page might shut out the incessant whirring of the world to provide, for those who want it, a way of plugging yourself into a book.

Of course, it all reminds me too of Friedrich Kittler's Heidegger-inspired fear of everything being reduced to The Code...