[No sound]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC - A MEDIEVAL CHANT]
THOMAS FORREST KELLY: Welcome to the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
I'm standing in the entrance hall.
And behind me is the door to the Reading Room where, with proper introductions,
you can come and look at some of the most beautiful books and manuscripts
and objects you can imagine.
There are various exhibition spaces.
I'm standing in one of them.
There are others upstairs.
But what I'd like you to see with me is an exhibition that a seminar at Harvard
has produced that shows Harvard's collection of medieval scrolls.
These are the scrolls that are talked about in this module,
and so this walkthrough of the exhibition
can serve us as an introduction to medieval scrolls
and to the scrolls in this module.
Or it can serve as a summary of all the things
that you may have looked at in more detail in each of the other units.
So in the largest of these exhibition rooms, the Edison and Newman Room,
we have laid out a collection of almost all of the scrolls
that belong to Harvard University.
The good news about this whole thing is that it
provides a wonderful representative sampling of the kinds of scrolls that
survive to us from the Middle Ages.
You'll see some interesting things about scrolls in general in this exhibition.
For one thing, a display case of this size
isn't the perfect way to display something that's 30 feet long.
So the majority of these scrolls have to be rolled up
at the ends-- which, of course, is how the scrolls are mostly
used when they're long.
Nevertheless, it makes it hard to examine the whole thing,
so it's made an interesting choice for us.
We've had to pick what part of each scroll
should be shown to the people who go through.
You lucky people have the opportunity to examine all the surfaces of all
these scrolls, because they've all been very carefully digitized
by the Harvard libraries.
There's a number of things that jump to the eye
when you see these things in the flesh-- in the parchment, as it were.
One is that they vary enormously in size.
On a computer screen, everything's about the same size.
But look at this great big scroll here.
This is a Universal Chronicle.
This is the only one that has had to be displayed sideways, because it's
wider than the display case itself.
But it's very handsome and very wide.
This is the biggest of the scrolls we have here.
And on the wall behind it is this tiny little poetical scroll
that looks-- you can see to look at it, even in its frame--
that it was once folded.
But it seems originally to have been a scroll and is a poetical dialogue.
So very large to very small, but there are other things
that it's possible to notice too-- like qualities of parchment.
Look at this handsome, white parchment here.
And some of the others, you'll see much darker, very beat up.
We also go from scrolls that are quite simple-- this
is a scroll in Greek with very little decoration-- to scrolls
that are very highly decorated.
This is a genealogy of English kings that has almost more pictorial elements
then text.
To this very beautifully decorated scroll
of prayers with decoration around the top
and the left-hand side, almost as though it were the left-hand page in a codex.
You kind of wonder why there's not decoration down the right hand margin,
and I think it's because the decorator knows how you do a decoration.
You go on the outer margin and the top.
But nobody'll know for sure.
And then there's this scroll here-- this very sad scroll.
This is a chronicle.
And you can see that it once had very beautiful pictures which are now faded
and that some great scholar, no doubt wanting to improve human knowledge,
treated the text of this thing-- hoping that it
would be possible to read it better.
And the result has been to make a hideous mass of the parchment
and of what was once a very, very beautiful scroll.
So the variety of things that we see here and the difference in types
of parchment, size of scroll, level of decoration, level of use
and where-- all those things are something
that you can only see when you're walking through this exhibition
and looking, almost touching, these very beautiful objects.
In this module, we talk about four kinds of scroll-- not really kinds of scroll,
but four reasons for making a scroll in the Middle Ages
when the standard way of conveying a text was in a book, in a codex.
So I think we have in a way, examples of almost all of those kinds of scroll
in this exhibition.
And looking at them in those categories will
allow us either to introduce or to summarise the other, more detailed,
units that we've had.
One reason for making a scroll is when you
don't know how long the scroll is going to be until you're finished.
One that's a little bit like that is this scroll over here.
This scroll is a legal scroll, and in a way,
it might be thought of as the kind that could be
extended as more information is needed.
In fact it's a copy of a treatise-- a treatise by a man
named Glanvill about how to run a court, how
to produce writs and various kinds of things.
And it is in the style of scroll that in England was
called a chancery roll-- that is, one that's
made, like all these other rolls, by making it
longer by adding an additional piece of parchment to the bottom of it.
The distinction was made in England because other kinds of scrolls--
and this group of scrolls here is sort of the other way of making rolls.
These are manor court rolls.
They are rolls that record the legal actions
in the courts of English manors-- because the lord of the manor
was officially a judge, and his judgment was recorded in rolls.
This kind of roll, called exchequer rolls,
is made by stacking the parchment up on top of each other
and binding it together across the top-- rather
like a flipchart in a classroom-- and then rolling them up.
So big ones of these are sometimes called pipe rolls,
because they looked sort of like a pipe.
So it's a very different kind of roll from any of the other rolls
we'll see here of this particular kind of scroll.
So it could get longer as you like, but you do it
by stacking the pages up rather than adding them to the bottom.
And so it's not really a roll.
It's really a codex-- except for the fact that they were stored rolled up.
So one kind of scroll is the kind whose length is not known.
Another reason for making a scroll is when you want it to be portable,
when you want to carry it around from one place to another.
And this little scroll on the wall here is an example of that kind of thing.
This is the smallest scroll at Harvard.
It may not be the smallest medieval scroll
there is, because there were lots of other times
when you wanted something very small.
You might want a life of Saint Margaret to wear around your neck.
You might want to have a little scroll of prayers
that you carry with you as a kind of an amulet.
This one is actually a poetic dialogue.
It's a fairly important text.
It's a dialogue between Ganymede and Helen about whether the love of man
or the love of women is better.
And you can see along the sides, the different characters as they speak.
It's a scroll that once was folded but probably was
intended to be rolled and held in the hand while reciting.
We know that actors very often had a roll.
Actors still play roles, and the reason what actors do
is called a role is because they held their part on a roll in their hand.
This is not exactly an actor's roll, but it's the kind of very small thing
that poets are often depicted as holding in their hands
and that we know actors did.
So the idea of having it be small so it can be portable.
There are other kinds of portable scrolls, not all of which
are illustrated, in this exhibition.
Sometimes processional music for churches,
you don't want to carry the whole, great big gradual around with you.
So you write the necessary stuff on a scroll
to go carry around and bless the crops or bless
the different churches of the city.
Across the way here is another scroll that we might think
of as being in the portable category.
It's a series of prayers that are designed
to provide you time off from purgatory.
This is a very beautiful scroll, and you can imagine that if it were rolled up,
it would be a little bit smaller than this.
So it might be a nice thing to carry around.
It might once also have been hung on the wall or down low for you
to kneel down and pray.
But if you say all these prayers-- you see that they almost all begin with
"O."
If you say all these prayers, you get x number
of hundreds of years off in purgatory.
You can see this scroll in here.
It was discussed in one of the other units.
But it seems clear that it's small so that it
can be carried around, because it's an object of personal devotion.