The Sixteenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

Working outward from a single scholar’s present desire to understand a perchance encounter with an anonymous seventeenth century manuscript affectively seeking to be forgotten, this paper first examines the set of frameworks ranging from digital humanities and book history scholarship, to social ecology with the hope of unweaving the tangled web of desire present in the archival history of even the most mediocre manuscripts. I hope to move toward a dialectic vocabulary engaging the space between corruptibility and desire, between preservation and arrest. Or, at least, in the process of tracing my relationship to MS 24, to suggest such a vocabulary appropriate to this single case.