The Gilded Page
I finally finished reading Mary Wellesley’s The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts, which I started reading in late September. The delay is a commentary on the chaos of my life over the last few months, not on the quality of the book, which is fascinating.
I’ve read a great deal about illuminated manuscripts over the years, in both medieval Europe and the Islamic world. As a result, I feel like I have a firm grasp on the physical production of manuscripts, or at least as firm a grasp as a non-specialist, non-artisan can have. (Believe me, no one wants a book that I have carefully copied by hand, or one that I have illustrated. These are not my skills.)
Wellesley approaches the question of medieval manuscripts from a different angle. Though she never loses track of the manuscripts she discusses as physical objects—what she describes as “tangible, smellable, visual encounters with the past”*—she focuses on them as collections of human stories. They give us clues about the people who commissioned them, the scribes who copied them, the artists who illustrated them, the authors who wrote them—and the people who interacted with, and sometimes altered, texts over time. (Her discussion of the use and abuse of Chaucer’s text, and his persona, was particularly interesting. ) She looks at the role of scribes outside monasteries and the growth of commercial publishing prior to the printed word. And she repeatedly challenges our assumptions about who created manuscripts.
I suspect it will not surprise any of you that I was particularly fascinated by the glimpses of women as patrons, artists and scribes of manuscripts that are a running theme throughout the book, and are the subject of the final chapter , titled “Authors Hidden”. In fact, Wellesley uses the role of women in the production of texts in different ways to express one of her major points:
“Our imagination of the past is delineated by patriarchalism infused with prejudice. If we were wrong in imagining that all scribes were men, what else might we be wrong about? The past is, as ever, richer and more intriguing that we imagine.”
Sing it, sister!
* It had never dawned on me that parchment manuscripts, like old books, and for that matter newly printed books, would have a distinctive smell. Bibliophilia engages all the senses.
History on Display in My Own Backyard: The DuSable Museum of African American History
In early December, My Own True Love decided to make a long overdue visit to The DuSable Museum of African-American History, which is located roughly six blocks from our house. * We gave ourselves two hours, with the promise that we would return if necessary. And it will definitely be necessary. We only got through part of one floor, and we missed what looks like a spectacular immersive exhibit on the 1963 march on Washington.**
I had visited the museum thirty years previously, when my undergraduate advisor was in town.*** I had vivid memories of crowded display cases and exhibits with a homemade feel that were both passionate and heartbreaking. And it told the stories that were not told in most (maybe any) historial museums thirty years ago—including the first substantive exhibit I had ever seen about the Middle Passage. As a whole, the museum reminded me of a underfunded small town local history museum, held together by glue sticks and dedication. A lot has changed in thirty years, in terms of the history we tell and the technologies we use to tell it.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the museum was celebrating its 60th anniversary. As a result, the first exhibit we saw was dedicated to the career of artist/educator/activist Margaret Taylor Burroughs, who founded the museum, then the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art, in her home in Chicago’s Bronzeville in 1961. To my shame, I had never heard of Burroughs, who was a major player in Chicago’s Black Renaissance. I was fascinated, and I intend to seek out more of her artwork. Her black and white prints are powerful.
I made it through two additional exhibits. The first looked at the role of Black soldiers in the United States army from the American Revolution through WWI, focused in part through the experience of Illinois units. It included excerpts from letters from an officer in WWI , which were fascinating and (again) heartbreaking. It took a side trip into the experience of three Black women who were YMCA volunteers in the war, which was worth the visit all by itself. (And possibly a blog post. ) And it ended with Chicago’s experience of the Red Summer of 1919, after the troops came home. The second told the story of Harold Washington’s term as mayor of Chicago, using an animatronic figure of Harold Washington in his mayoral office and news footage from the time. It’s a period of Chicago history that I lived through, and followed avidly . The first exhibit made me angry. The second made me cry, just as I cried at the time of Washington’s death.****
I have no idea what exhibits are located on the lower floor. I don’t plan on waiting another thirty years to find out.
* The museum is named after Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, the Haitian-born son of a French mariner and an enslaved woman of African descent, who was the first non-indigenous person to settle at the site that would become Chicago.
**One of the security guards spoke to each person as they left the exhibit ,“Did you cry?” he asked. “I cry every time I see it.” (As an aside, I’ve never seen such friendly, helpful security guards in a museum. They acted like hosts.)
***I am sure I am not the only one who has been pushed inspired to visit a local attraction by the wishes of an out-of-town visitor.
****Is anyone else finding historical museums deeply moving these days, even when they include slightly creepy animatronic figures? Or is it just me?
Jonathan Spence and My Introduction to Chinese History
I just learned that eminent Chinese historian (or more accurately, historian of China) Jonathan Spence died on December 25. My world feels a little smaller.
I should make it clear that I never took a class with Dr. Spence and never met him personally. Nonetheless, he played a role in my introduction to Chinese history at the hands of fellow graduate student Rob LaFleur* over the course of several years.
For five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rob and I team-taught three of the four units in a course for the University of Chicago’s continuing education program. The continuing education program was (and is) whimsically called the Compleat Gargoyle; our course was grandly titled Asia and the Middle East. Rob was responsible for material dealing with China, Japan, and Korea. I was responsible for South and Southeast Asia and the Islamic world. It was a survey class writ large: 30 weeks in which to introduce our students, and each other, to boiled down versions of complex cultures and thousands of years of history. (As I remember it, Korea and Southeast Asia got short shrift.)
It was also a graduate seminar of two. On the ride home after each class we had intense discussions about not only the material we had covered in class, but about how to teach, and about questions of historiography, epistemology, R.G. Collingswood’s The Idea of History,* and post-modern theory in various forms.** It was, quite frankly, what graduate school should have been and so often was not.
I don’t know about our students, but I learned a lot. In fact, I would argue that Rob’s intellectual fingerprints are all over anything I have written about China in subsequent years.
Which brings me to three books by Jonathan Spence that Rob assigned at various times and that earned a permanent place on my shelves.**** All three are brilliant, not only in their treatment of specific subjects but as master classes in how to write history that is more than just one dang thing after another.*****
May I suggest for your reading pleasure: The Death of Woman Wang, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of Kang-hsi, and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
I’m tempted to re-read them myself.
* Now Dr. Robert LaFleur, professor of history and anthropology at Beloit College, and a great teacher. You don’t have to take my word for it. Check out his work on Confucius’s Analects in The Great Courses.
**A formative book for both of us
*** Unavoidable at the University of Chicago at the time
**** I do not say this lightly. I am currently making hard decisions about what books to keep and what books to pitch. This is not procrastination. This is self preservation. My study shelves runneth over, and the piles on the floor are daunting.
*****At first I typed “one dang think after another. “ That is, in fact, what I aspire to as a writer.