Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day Three...

Day One of the Early Modern Research Techniques course was easy to write about, as was Day Two: but Day Three? Tricky...

If I close my eyes, the single image from it burnt into my retinas is of Charles Hope sardonically half-warning participants about the historical Class A drug that is archival research. Yes, he personally had partaken of it, and indeed fully inhaled; yes, truth be told he'd actually quite enjoyed it, and even become quite good at it; but being realistic, the chances that you'll find anything surprising in any archives anywhere range from Slim Jim McThin to zero.

As to the other speakers, Charles Burnett was (as always) excellent value: I could happily listen to him all day. Ingrid de Smet was good, and... look, every lecturer was good, so that's not the problem at all.

I'll try to explain what's been bugging me for a month - and why. You see, about halfway through my Master's, a particular kind of critical faculty awoke in me that takes the form of an active intuition that (in effect) 'listens in'. And so I get a parallel commentary on the subtext of what I'm reading: not "do I believe this (y/n)?", but "to what degree am I comfortable accepting this account is psychologically representative?" In a way, this added non-binary dimension gives me a sort of novelistic insight into non-fiction, and helps me smell not a rat, but the degree of rattiness. You can see this same kind of thing at play in Carlo Ginzburg's wonderful history books (which is probably why I've got so many of them).

And the funny smell I sensed here wasn't from the academics (who were all hardworking, insightful, pragmatic and great), but from the Warburg Institute itself. You see, for all the Renaissance pictures of obscure Greco-Roman deities filed upstairs, the biggest mythology stored there is about the usefulness of the Warburg.

What you have to understand about the Warburg Institute's collections is that they were constructed as a kind of mad iconological machine by Aby Warburg for Aby Warburg to decode the secrets hidden in Renaissance art... but which were never there to decode. The Warburg Institute is therefore a kind of bizarre 1930s steampunk Internet, where every sub-page is devoted to the art history semantic conspiracy behind a different artefact (and the whole indexing is 50 years behind schedule).

As an analogy, David Kahn, with perhaps more than a hint of a sneer, calls the study of Baconian ciphers "enigmatology": the study of an enigma that was never there. And "Voynichology" as often practised seems little different to Kahn's "enigmatology"? (Which is why I don't call myself a "Voynichologist" any more: rather, I'm just an historian working on the Quattrocento mystery that just happens to be the Voynich Manuscript).

In my opinion, "Renaissance iconology" (which Dan Brown fictionalized as Robert Langdon's "symbology" in the Da Vinci Code, bless him) or indeed what one might call "Warburgology" is no less a failed thought-experiment than "enigmatology", or indeed "Voynichology": all share the same faulty methodology of requiring an hypothetical solution in order to make sense of something else uncertain.

But what of the man himself? For me, I see Aby Warburg's quest as being driven by the desire to move (through his research) ever closer to touch Renaissance gods on earth, through the clues about their Neoplatonic Heaven they left hidden in their works. But now we see that they were instead just jobbing artisans with books of emblems tucked into their work smocks: life is disappointing.

Look, I feel an immense amount of goodwill towards the Warburg Institute and all the people who sail in her: but a large part of me wishes for the mythology that shaped it to fall into the sea. Perhaps the sincere search for a God or Goddess is simply a kind of displaced search for dead, absent or idolized parents in the noise of the world, not unlike Mark Romanek's film "Static": if so, I think it's time we called off the search for Warburg's parents.

A monstrance is born...

The best academic stories normally begin something like "I was chatting with [name-drop] in the bar/taxi/plane/train after the conference when...": so I'll do my best to shoehorn the following into that template...

After Day One of the Warwick/Warburg "Resources and Techniques" seminars in Warwick, I ended up standing in the aisle of a packed Virgin Pendolino train all the way to London, in the company of two fellow course participants (Zoe Willis and Charlotte Bolland) and Francois Quiviger, one of the course lecturers from the Warburg Institute. Francois knew little about the Voynich Manuscript, but was interested enough to take a look at the pictures in Jean-Claude Gawsewitch's "Le Code Voynich", the (how can I put it any other way?) French coffee-table edition of the VMs. (And yes, I was carrying a copy in my bag: as with all things Voynichian, you make your own luck.)

Francois very kindly suggested a number of things I might consider: for example, when looking at the pharma section, he immediately asked if the idea that the ornate "jars" might be optical instruments (such as unknown kinds of telescopes) had been considered (it has, of course). He also wondered about the apparent resemblance between some of the (apparently) fantastical glass objects in the VMs' pharmacological section and the monstrance, a word so beautifully obscure I simply had to look up on my return...

From the dawn of Christianity onwards, many churches owned (or claimed to own) holy relics: bones or teeth of saints, ephemera linked with miracles, nails or fragments from the One True Cross, Christ's baby teeth, even the Holy Foreskin (yes, really: there's a fascinating 2006 article from Slate here about its modern history), and so on. (Coincidentally, Michael Cordy's novel "The Messiah Code" which I mentioned here name-checks many of these still-existent objects of veneration.)

Quite reasonably, many historians now wonder whether many of these were simply medieval money-making scams for attracting pilgrims and parting them from their money: Internet hype, circa 1250. But the pilgrim had to be able to see the relics whose claimed powers they had travelled so far to have contact with (in some cases literally - the blind could allegedly be cured by rubbing the Holy Foreskin on their eyelids, it says here): and therein lay the problem.

Right from the start, boxes or caskets containing relics needed to both protect the relic and to help make it accessible to pilgrims, as well as allowing the relic to be carried around on particular saint's days: and so these reliquaries evolved into gaudy carrying-cases, sometimes fashioned in part from transparent rock crystal, thus solving all the problems. Technically, the precise term for a partly-transparent reliquary is a a philatory, but this is such an incredibly rare term that it is unlikely to help you much in your Googling: indeed, philatory will get you nowhere.

A monstrance, then, is a very specific kind of philatory, not for an ancient relic but for a special kind of relic that is recreated all the time - the consecrated Eucharistic Host. In Catholicism, the wafer and wine are believed quite literally to turn into Christ's Body and Blood (the whole process is "transsubstantiation"), a real mini-miracle. Churches needed some affordable way of displaying the Host, of demonstrating the Real Presence of Christ to the assembled faithful: but how?

To solve this problem, someone invented circa 1475 the "monstrance": a portable golden object, typically with a central "luna", a circular glass area (for the transformed wafer to slip into for display) not unlike a pair of oversized glass specimen slides (modern monstrances are sometimes categorized by the diameter of the luna). And these remain in use today, with only cosmetic changes from this basic design.

Etymologically, monstrance comes from the same Latin roots from which we get "demonstrate", and so retains its meaning of 'showing something': another obscure word (though one probably even less useful for Scrabble players) for the same object is ostensorium, which is presumably somehow linked with ostentatious.

What I find interesting in all this is that, just beneath the surface history, I can catch a glimpse of the kind of properly Warburgian history Francois Quiviger was talking about when he looked at the pharma section. From 1450 onwards, the invention and manufacture of beautifully-clear cristallo glass in Murano transformed the whole way objects such as philatories and monstrances were conceived: by breaking the need for (what was ludicrously expensive) rock crystal, cristallo made visibility an affordable design feature.

Could it be, then, that what we are seeing in this part of the VMs is not a set of purely fantasy glass objects, but possibly a kind of mangled brochure for a range of designs for cristallo-based philatories or monstrances, in the period at the end of the Quattrocento when the former was somehow seguing into the latter? 1475 is the earliest date I've seen quoted for a monstrance, but I would be unsurprised if the actual date of origination were to be found to be a little closer to 1450.

I couldn't claim (by any stretch of the imagination) to be an expert on early modern reliquaries, philatories and monstrances (and how many such experts are there in the world, anyway?): but it's an intriguing suggestion, one on which I'd be interested to hear any comments...

Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day One...

The first one-day session of the Warburg/Warwick Early Modern Research Techniques course was yesterday: though it was pretty good, I think I'm breaking no great confidences if I say that this felt likely to be the, errrrrmmmm, least strongest of the three days... despite Warwick's strong Renaissance department, everyone was just itching to get on to the Warburg text and image days. But as with most post-grad things, you learn just as much from the other students as from the lecturers: so Day One was no hardship.

It became quickly apparent that all the participants were both properly web-savvy (it's nice to see people surfing at the speed of thought) and Excel-smart (for fun, I tried Access instead, but unfortunately it was just as clunky as I remembered), and had already drained all the loose juice from JSTOR, EEBO, and their low-hanging ilk. But still, everyone falls short of 100% coverage in these things, and so there were plenty of webby windfalls for us all to put into our baskets. Here are a few highlights I thought I'd share...

Richard Parker from the University of Warwick (who co-presented two of the sessions with the pleasantly dry Francois Quiviger from the Warburg Institute) has brought together a large number of art history web resources on the Warwick website here. Though Richard somewhat deprecatingly refers to his efforts as "pre-Web 2.0", his general pages page is just about as good a high-level starting point for online art history web research as any I've seen - and within the subject pages, his images link page is a bit of a gem too (and within that, check out the iconography and emblems page). His personal favourite is the TASI advice page on finding and using online images: if you're at all unsure about this kind of thing, it's an excellent link.

Bibliographical searching was another key topic. Of late, I've managed to get my research done without having to resort to Inter-Library Loans: so while I was cool with WorldCat, COPAC and (my favourite, despite its uber-dull name) the M25 consortium, I hadn't noticed the (frankly rather amazing) KVK creep up on us all... a simple way of searching a staggering number of world libraries without any significant danger of mouse-related RSI. Recommended!

Incidentally, I didn't realise that this course runs every year: I wish I'd known about it 3/4 years ago. But my guess is that as, not so many years ago, the web and historians were only just starting to 'get it on', Day One would originally have been the most eye-opening for those attending. But we're now all so wise to that stuff, it all seemed slightly, well, 'rusty', if not slightly antiquated.

Yet the world is changing blazingly fast: in a year's time, I'd hope that Day One is based instead on such amazing new Programming Historian tools as Zotero (which I found through the Early Modern Notes blog). And it would be the most amazing day once more! :-)

Very cool Warburg/Warwick course...

I've booked myself onto what promises to be a fascinating three-day workshop run between University of Warwick (in Coventry) and the Warburg Institute (in London), on "Resources and Techniques for the Study of Renaissance and Early Modern Culture". It aims to give post-grads the kind of in-depth specialist research training they need to look at Renaissance / early modern artefacts in a very cross-disciplinary way, by grasping many of the different ways and methodologies available for researching them.

It is almost a top-end DIY course for Voynichologists, as it seems to cover every one of the areas of Voynichological interest (apart from herbal mss, which basically forms a medieval genre)... which is of course why I've signed up for it. Oh, and the lecturers are fantastic too (don't get me started on yet another Charles Burnett panegyric).

But the match between the two is perhaps not as coincidental as you might at first think. What is not widely known is that the Warburg has a deep affinity with all things Voynichian, thanks to its long association with hidden/occult histories and medieval astrology. Its library has a number of books on the VMs (all on the same open shelf, so much friendlier than the British Library), and so it would be highly unsurprising if breakthroughs in our understanding of the VMs came from someone schooled in this Saxl / Panofsky / Yates / Burnett tradition.

Still, the Voynich's academic "kiss-of-death" reputation lingers: and perhaps rightly so, for it is painfully easy to misread its layers and signs, and glimpse in them a story written only on the not-so-blank slate of your own overfertile psyche. All the same, we are now in an era which tolerates multiple academic [hi]stories, even things like Liane Lefaivre's re-reading (of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as having been written by Leon Battista Alberti), which seems at odds with the (basically Venetian) object itself (it's signed, for goodness' sake!): so perhaps the penalty for daring to try is not as high as it formerly was?