C'est la fin des haricots!

Just for Bastille Day. Funnily enough, when I went online to celebrate my completion of the index for a 420-page book (oof!), everyone was playing that "Pick up the nearest book, go to page 56, and write down the fifth sentence" game. Out of curiosity, I did the same, and the result is not as irrelevant to Bastille Day as I might have expected:

"On pense particulier à son article 'Mourir pour la patrie (Pro Patria Mori) dans la pensée politique médiévale', dans lequel l'historien analyse un aspect essential de cette référence: être l'absolu au nom duquel un pouvoir peut exiger la mort de ses sujets."

This is from Béatrice Fraenkel, La signature: genèse d'un signe, which I picked up after one of my committee members referred me there so that I could prove that the early moderns (fabulous as they undoubtedly were) did not pioneer the collapse/confusion/canny rhetorical juxtaposition of "monument" with "muniment." The interesting thing is that I'm not sure this is the connection that is at stake in what I'm writing about. I think - I think - that what I'm most immediately concerned with is the association of books or documents with monuments, that first link to a physical object and one, moreover, that is about maintaining some kind of collective memory. It is probably a sign of an unsound scholar to be so hung up on this, but I can't escape Matthew Parker's statement that his Anglo-Saxon types would "renew for you the memory of that ancient and once familiar language."

There is a tension between Parker's statements like this or all of the times when someone refers to books or texts as monuments and the way that Parker treated the manuscripts he got his hands on. The physical objects were not treated as monuments that ought to be preserved in the way that modern conservators would preserve a medieval book. Instead, Parker had no qualms about separating, joining, erasing, annotating, and generally manhandling his books. So, the "monument" he's after must not be the physical form of the book, right? And yet Parker was determined to use the script of Old English manuscripts (a feature of their particular form) for his printed editions and to passionately defend this as a way of demarcating and memorializing an Anglo-Saxon past that included texts in both English and Latin - even the Latin text of Asser's Life of King Alfred, which was not, so far as we know, written in Anglo-Saxon minuscule, was printed in Parker's Anglo-Saxon types. This gets right to the heart of the question, what is preservation. Either Parker was a two-faced, lying cad, or else "preservation" meant something different to him and other early modern library-builders than it does to us. I am inclined to side with Jennifer Summit on this one, but this is not the place for me to embark on my explanation about diachronic textual communities.

Now, the further link with muniments (fortifications, ammunition) becomes really interesting when I stop and think about Parker's suggestion that learning your way around the "Saxon" typeface will also help you learn Irish (written in Insular scripts, after all), which will be useful for the Elizabethan state: anyone "engaged in any duty of embassy or entangled in any other way in the affairs of the island" will be able to extend knowledge of these characters to knowledge of the language. Recalling that the link did not originate with Parker, is it nevertheless safe to suggest that this is one of the ways in which his monuments become muniments? What about the fact that Parker saw his editorial work as fortifying the Anglican church? That may be flogging a dead horse. Dead horse or not, I clearly need to think more on this.