Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book by Elaine Treharne

Abstract

Reviewed by: Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book by Elaine Treharne Sonja Drimmer Elaine Treharne. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 272 pp., 29 illustrations. $40. ISBN: 9780192843814. It wasn't easy getting a copy of this book. When I accepted the invitation to review Elaine Treharne's Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book, I was told that, because Oxford University Press's website listed the book as out of stock, it might be challenging to get a hard copy; perhaps interruptions to the supply chain caused by the pandemic were partly to blame. Eventually, and happily, a hard copy arrived at my door. This is a book I could place on a shelf, reach for, hold, and use my hands to annotate. The logistics of a book's procurement are not usually fodder for a review, but in the case of Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts, they could be considered one of the intangibles cleaving to tangibility that Treharne asks us to consider in our engagement with books produced in the Middle Ages. The book's premise is that we attend to the whole manuscript as a thing in the world—inclusive not only of its material properties and content and accretions over time, but also of the many aspects of its immanence that are perceived through the senses but often elude the scholar's empirical capture. The theoretical armature for Treharne's proposal is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, which takes the embodied perception of the world as offering each individual their perspective on it; manuscripts are "are archetypally phenomenal objects, dependent on sensory engagement for their fullest interpretation" as whole objects irreducible to their constituent parts (6). A key term for Treharne's intervention is the architextuality of the book (a notion inspired by, but ultimately distinct from, the architext as conceived by Gérard Genette): its essence as a concrete object through which humans have passed and experienced its transcendent properties over time. Informing the study's concept of the manuscript as an actual and ideated form, and structuring its itinerary, is Riddle 26 from the tenth-century [End Page 147] (Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3501). The poem is spoken in the voice of a book narrating its own production and reception—not the book in which this riddle appears but a notional and abstract book inspirited with a voice that meditates on its own flesh. Excerpts from this riddle provide the heading for each of the book's chapters, which focus chiefly on British manuscripts from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries, and move us both logically and trilogically from the first three chapters on manuscripts' making and inscription to the central three chapters on the visible and invisible presences of successive users, to the final three chapters on manuscripts' representations from within medieval books themselves to their modern digital surrogates. Treharne's exegesis of this poem in chapter 2 shimmers, as she conjures its sensuality and the sonic allure of its unvoiced consonants, evocative of the parchmenter's scrape of a lunellum and swipe of a bone folder over thick membrane. As concerned as it is with its material facture, so too is this personified book aware of its transcendent value: its origins in violence and culmination as a glorious form echo the narrative of humanity's redemption through the Passion of Christ, the Word made flesh (26). The aperçu that cracks open manuscripts' affective power is that "books save lives"—whether lives here are read as Christian souls or the physical bodies that have been protected apotropaically and shielded literally by their form (35). The magnetism of the book as an enfleshment of affect resides particularly legibly in the traces of the scribes who left inky tracks of their handiwork across the pages. In this, what I found to be the most evocative chapter, Treharne reflects on the writing on the page as a manifestation of the union of scribe, tool, and effort. Here, Treharne merges the paleographer's resolute precision with a lyrical sympathy to the letterforms as they rest on the surface of skin, hover over a blind-ruled base line, and...