Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print

Description

1. Cut, Pasted, and Cut Again: The Fate of 140 German and Netherlandish Single-Leaf Prints at the Hands of a Limburg Franciscan and a Modern Connoisseur Chapter 1 reconstructs a manuscript by beghards in Maastricht. (Beghards were men who followed St Francis, considered themselves to be Franciscans, and who lived in community in towns and cities. They did not beg but made their living through their trade and labour.) By reconstructing this book, I can show how the beghards learned to integrate the new technology of printed images into the making of their manuscript. That book straddles the two technological moments and sees the creators adapting midstream. 2. A Novel Function for the Calendar in Add. Ms. 24332 A short Chapter 2 discusses the significance of the unusual calendar the beghards constructed, which goes some distance to help us understand how they thought in terms of fungible categories: these innovators in the realm of print technology were also inventing new ways of organising information. They experimented with how the book could be reordered to accommodate prints. These ideas speak to a larger concern in the era, one of reducing labour by using fungibility. What is surprising is that the beghards applied this idea to several different endeavours. This chapter will appeal to those who are interested in the history of organisational and indexing systems. I have given the subject a separate chapter because it is more technical than the other material. 3. The Beghards in the Sixteenth Century Chapter 3 analyses a second book that the beghards made, several decades later. The snapshot it provides reveals how the beghards changed over the turbulent early sixteenth century, how much the print market had shifted in 25 years, and how the book makers increasingly absorbed and normalised the new technology of single-leaf prints. 4. Manuscripts with Prints: A Sticky Idea Chapter 4 departs from the beghards to consider many other manuscripts and the prints they formerly held, and assesses the extent of this practice of pasting prints in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as the archives have destroyed most of the examples and given us a diminished sense of the importance of this development in book history.