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Technologies of knowledge
in the age of manuscripts

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Stephen G. Nichols

Last spring, I lectured to a graduate seminar in Germany.!The focus of the program was the materiality of the medieval codex and my assignment was to illustrate new research techniques using digitized manuscripts in sites such as our Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts (www.romandelarose.org). I made sure to leave lots of time for discussion. Navely, I assumed students would want to talk about ways of working with digital manuscripts, or the availability and use of annotation or transcription tools. Alternatively, we might have explored how data compiled from dozens of manuscripts of a work inevitably alter our understanding of the mode of existence or even the denition of medieval literature. These are all questions made possible by having unlimited access to digital facsimiles of manuscripts, and I couldnt imagine others not feeling the excitement sparked by endless vistas of under-explored territory. I cant say that the students did not perceive any of this. What they chose to talk mainly about, however, surprised and puzzled me. Even though most of them had never actually studied manuscripts in repositories, they followed the lead of their professor in decrying what Bruce Holsinger felicitously terms the digitization of the parchment inheritance1!
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Why such hostility? Neither I, nor anyone else to my knowledge, have suggested that digital repositories should replace medieval manuscripts. On the contrary, everyone understands that codicology and paleography require access to the original document. And one of the ironies of large-scale manuscript digitization is that that they have made paleographical and codicological studies more urgent than ever, since we need accurate dating, provenance, scribal hand identication and other manuscript data to validate observations drawn from large-scale comparison studies.

Still, listening to the impassioned defense of presence, aura, tactile sensation, and the other shibboleths supporting the manuscripts-can-only-be-studied-in-the-esh argument, I realized just how anachronistic, unmedieval, and curiously irrelevant to the nature of the object itself such mantras are. Our medieval precursors valued the books they produced, took pride in making beautiful objects, and continually improved technologies of representation. What they did not do, however, was to fetishize the book as (precious) object. On the contrary, sumptuous illuminated manuscripts such as Christine de Pizans Live de la reine (Queens Book) [Fig. 1], presented to Isabeau de Bavire, Queen of France in 1404 (British Library, MS. Harley 4431), or !Girart Acaries Roman de la Rose, copied for Franois 1er in 1520 (Morgan Library, MS. 948) [Fig. 2] served high political purposes. They were state documents intended to set forth edifying moral precepts for ofcers of the realm, such as (in the case of Christines book) Queen Isabeau of Francel, or to illustrate the integral role of art and letters in the policy of a Renaissance king like Franois 1er, ruler of a kingdom running from the mountains in the East to the sea in the West, as shown in the background of Girart Acaries presentation painting. The technology of the codex, in other words, was a function of royal governance and had been so even before Charles V created the rst royal library around 1368 in a tower of the Louvre, his ofcial residence [Fig. 3]. Charless library represented the largest single collection in the realm and it changed the cultural life of Paris, and ultimately of Europe. Why was it so signicant? Because Charles made the data it contained an instrument of governance. He did so by aggregating information that, from a medieval perspective, could inuence statecraft and cultural life because the data sets represented the best philosophy and theology, from Aristotle and Cicero to Augustine and Aquinas. To make this information accessible, the king commissioned translations into French of the greatest philosophers in the known world, both ancient and modern. For the rst time, these Nichols, Technologies of Knowledge!2
Figure 1. London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, f. 3 (Paris, 1406-1414) Christine de Pizan presents her collected works to Isabeau de Bavire, Queen of France

works occupied the epicenter of royal power; were read in the language of the court; and were glossed to show their relevance to contemporary French life. He then installed these books in his own residence, where court poets and counselors alike could and did read them. In ne, he envisaged the royal library as a resource for integrating moral, practical, and religious philosophy to court society on the one hand, and, to state policy on the other. Charles made no secret of his motives. He justied his books as benecial to the state; enlisted the best minds of his timemen like the philosopher Nicole Oresme and theologian Raoul de Preslesand paid them handsomely from his own funds. In 1371, for example, he asked Raoul de Presles to undertake a French translation of Saint Augustines De civitate Dei (City of God), saying it was for the good of the public, of the kingdom, and of all Christendom.2 [Fig. 4]
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Figure 2. Roman de la Rose, N.Y. MS. Morgan 948, f. 4r (Paris, 1520), Girart dAcarie presents his book to Franois 1er

Similarly, in 1374, he authorized a payment of 200 gold francs to Nicole Oresme as salary and for his efforts in translating two books [of Aristotle] which are very necessary to us, namely his Politics and Economics.3
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Charles Vs lavish acquisition and translation policy was strategic in allowing both aggregation and rapid dissemination of knowledge on a new scale. Together, the library and his campaign for French translations of religious and philosophical works constituted a policy for creating an ethical code of court society. Unlike the code of courtly love of the twelfth century, or the dolce stil nuovo of the late thirteenth century, Charless moral code was meant to be distilled from a data base derived from the amalgamation
Figure 3. Muse Cond MS 65, f. 10v. Palais du Louvre: Trs Riches Heures du duc de Berry (Paris, c. 1412-1416)

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of ancient philosophy and Patristic theology. And for that, a library was necessary for three reasons. (1) FIRST, a library aggregates and preserves collections of exemplary knowledge organized on specic criteria and categories. (2) SECONDLY, the data aggregated in the librarys collections conrms the importance of knowledge based on those principles, by offering examples that can be emulated and woven into new work. (3) THIRDLY, a library makes its data or collections accessible to users or as we might say serves as a distribution node for the information it stores. In this respect, it is a social media resource enabling users to exchange ideas based on data accessed from the repository. Finally, we should note that the creation of Charless library organized according to topically-oriented acquisition principles offers a rare insight into the formation of an inuential text network with far-reaching consequences for Parisian literary culture of the late fourteenth and early fteenth century. In the absence of his library, Charless acquisitions would simply satisfy the passions of a collector. On the other hand, as part of an acquisition policy for his library, Charless commissions attest to the kings exercise of a politics of knowledge aggregation and distribution. Moreover, as crucial components of the collection, the French translations represent cultural capital symbolized by the presence of the library in the royal palace. And, nally, by virtue of situating the library in the heart of the Louvre at the center of court life Charles feeds the librarys data into court society as social mediaanother rationale for making this knowledge available in French, which, as we know, was not only the language of the French court, but the lingua franca of Europe and England. Lets not forget that besides making knowledge available in French, Charles insisted on formatting codices (as manuscript books are known) to maximize the visual impact of each folio,
Figure 4. Raoul de Presles translation of Saint Augustines De civitate Dei, (Paris, 1375-1377) BnF MS. fr. 22912, f. 3r

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not only by means of miniature paintings and historiated initials, but also by abundant use of rubrics and glosses. In other words, his manuscripts made liberal use of hypertext and metadata. They did so for the same reason Charles V insisted on translating Greek, Latin, and Arabic texts into French: not simply to make the works more accessible to a wider audiencea laudable, but passive functionbut to assure that they would function dynamically as disseminators of data through the paintings that portrayed events graphically, and through the commentaries they contained, which explained the relevance of the data for the 14th-century public. Charless codices, in short, constitute a technology of knowledge-representation that made Paris the most advanced book culture in the West in the 14th century. By now the convergence between Charles Vs large-scale knowledge repository in the Louvre and contemporary mass digitization projects should be evident. The more so, in this case because a large percentage of the codices currently available in digital form on our site at Johns Hopkins come from the library Charles V founded in 1368. Rather than decry such projects, we should recognize the common purpose of aggregating and disseminating knowledge shared by Charles, and ourselves. If we do not have the same political agenda as the French monarch, we do share the objective of seeking to understand just what that agenda was, how his large-scale database helped him to achieve his goals, and how the aggregation of his books in one repository changed French thought and letters at the end of the 14th century and for the duration of the Middle Ages. Johns Hopkins University

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Notes

Bruce Holsinger, Medieval Studies in the Age of Big Data, December 13, 2012. http://

burnablebooks.com/medieval-studies-in-the-age-of-big-data-a-serial-forum/

pour lutilit publique du royaume et de toute la Chrtient. Mandements de Charles V, p. VII; quoted from Lopold Delisle, Recherches sur la Librairie de Charles V, Partie 1 (Paris: Honor Champion, 1907), p. 2.

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Delisle, Recherches, vol. 1, Appendice X: Somme donne Nicole Oresme pour sa traduction dAristote (31 aot 1374), p. 379.
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