The survival or loss of literary manuscripts has always depended upon many factors, but questions of value are chief among them: the cultural value, or otherwise, ascribed to them by authors, collectors, publishers, libraries, funders, and government agencies; and the commercial value, determined in part by cultural value but also through questions of rarity, authenticity, competition, fashion, and research potential. This chapter explores these issues through the consideration of manuscript examples ranging from the first manuscript in the English language to survive wholly in the hand of its author, dating from c. 1200, to digital texts accruing monetary value through non-fungible tokens. It looks at how authors have ignored or embraced their manuscripts as financial assets and how that may affect their textual meaning; how contingencies surrounding funding or legislation, particularly export control, contribute to our understanding of the literary canon; and how institutional collaboration or competition, together with decisions made in the book trade can shape the archival landscape. Finally, it speculates about the implications for the material literary manuscript, as a tangible witness to the writer’s hand and an artefact relatively easy to value in commercial terms, in a world where collectors are beginning to privilege digital artefacts.
The cult of Joan of Arc has its roots in the political and social upheavals of fin de siecle France, during the same time period when film as a medium is birthed in Lyon by the Lumiere brothers. (1) The events themselves are coincidental, though film will quickly be used at the service of myth-making. Hailed by the French Right as the embodiment of the true French state, Joan of Arc's recreated legend galvanized a generation of artists who joined the growing chorus of Catholics demanding the canonization of Joan. Called Blessed by 1909, Joan became Saint Joan in 1920, a year after the end of the Great War and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and almost five hundred years after her death. This study examines the role of literature and film in determining Joan's place in history and popular culture. Until the nineteenth century when the Joan explosion manifested itself relatively few writers had chosen Joan as their subject. In 1429, two years before Joan's death at the stake, Christine de Pizan celebrated her life and exploits in her Ditie de Jehanne d,Arc. (2) As Maureen Quilligan points out, hers is the only signed poem written during Jehanne d'Arc's lifetime explicitly to celebrate her miraculous deliverance of France. Christine herself saw Jehanne as proof of the rightness of her programmatic argument for the divine favor God had shown to women. (3) Quilligan argues that Christine's prophetic portrait of Joan accorded the Maid of Orleans with a legitimate female authority: It cannot be entirely an accident then that the unique and singular female writer in late medieval France should so overlap the advent of a singular female warrior; although it is not possible to prove such things it does make sense to suppose that Christine's arguments, so highly visible to all court members, may have helped prepare them to accept a woman's authority. Her constant retelling of the Amazon myth, arguing for their legitimate domain in a martial realm in text after text, could very well have prepared the culture at court to see a woman warrior as something other than a monster. And this preparation would not have hurt Jehanne's chances for being well received by that court. (280) (4) A less flattering British portrait was presented on the stage in 1590 in Shakespeare's Henry VI, in which Joan's dialogue is replete with double entendres and in which there is no doubt that Joan's exploits are the result of a satanic pact. (5) Almost one hundred and fifty years would elapse before Voltaire would take up Joan's story for his poem La Pucelle d'Orleans (1762). Voltaire's pen puts Joan's story at the service of his anticlericalism, and reduces her to a rustic incarnation with all too human lusts that must be sublimated for the cause of the state. Paradoxically, with the exception of Voltaire and a play Jeanne d'Arc a Orleans by Rodolphe Kreutzer performed at the Theatre des Italiens in Paris in 1790, the century of revolution is almost silent in its evocation of Joan, and completely silent in its evocation of Joan as a symbol for the creation of the new French state, preferring instead to identify Liberty with the image of Marianne. Joan's transformation into the Romantic imagination began with Friedrich Schiller's 1801 La Pucelle d'Orleans, in which a tormented Joan struggles with her love for the British general Lionel and her duties to the mission given to her by the Virgin Mary. Schiller presents a conflicted Joan whose femininity is renounced at the expense of political triumph, but not without bitterness. It would this version of the Joan story that Tchaikovsky would later select for his 1881 opera La Pucelle d'Orleans, first presented at the Theatre Marie in Saint Petersburg. Jules Quicherat's monumental five-volume compilation (1841-1845) of the complete texts of Joan's trial of Condemnation and Nullification written in Latin and Old French appeared at a time when France was once again in search of its political soul. …
I. Readings of Porete: Past and Present Marguerite Porete's critics, ecclesiastical and legal authorities in the main, adamantly misread her work. They took passages out of context, fracturing the unity of her work and distorting her confessional perspective. They then declared both her and her work to be heretical. Ultimately, they burned her, along with her book, at the stake. Such misinterpretation obviously abuses both Porete's theological import and her literary expertise. Similarly, modern assessments of Porete's work differ, either admitting to a sense of defeat before the disparate composition of her text Le Miroir des ames simples et aneanties, or asserting thematics based on the examination merely of a part of a whole. Peter Dronke and Robert Cottrell have performed the most provocative readings of Porete's work in recent years. Dronke postulates the significance of an emergent (and, to my mind, acontextual) feminism arising from incidents of what he calls in Le Miroir. He finds that Marguerite expresses personal concerns through the eruption of poetry embedded in prose: Marguerite... uses a 'bound' form... The canzone is her prologue, her first 'manifesto'; the rondeau comes near the close, and is perhaps the most effective crystallization of her thoughts. The other lyrical passages occur at high points, at the most climatic moments [This shows] a greatly increased subjectivity.(1) While such an interpretation importantly lobbies for a notion of 'selfhood' in her work, it does not grapple with the theological issues which so clearly motivate the construction of Porete's text. Robert Cottrell develops a sophisticated Lacanian reading of Le Miroir, taking as his emblem for the interpretive process an introductory allegorical incident. Porete describes a maiden yearning for her far-away lover. Attempting to capture his image and bring him closer, she commissions a painting. Through the contemplation of this painting, she not only succeeds in representing her lover, she actually effects his presence. Referring to the 'mirror stage,' Cottrell talks about the apprehension of the 'other.' Once totality with the 'other' is achieved, voice is extraneous; speech subsides into a non-Logos. Cottrell examines the structure of language in Porete, demonstrating that it enacts a form of linguistic via negativa. While Dronke spoke of selfhood, Cottrell obviates personal intervention in the text. He cites Porete: ... cette parole depasse nos ecritures, si bien que nous ne pouvons pas [la] comprendre.(2) Cottrell's stimulating study, however, still skims the surface of theological concerns. The theological dimension of the text is everywhere present, yet incessantly eludes critical focus.(3) Significantly, Marguerite Porete sent the first copies of Le Miroir to clerics and to the Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne. The proof that a theological interpretation lies at the crux of her textual production is the irony that her self-selected readership should turn inquisitorial; they take her word as a confessional statement embodying distortion and heresy. Marguerite was called before the inquisitorial tribunal of Haute Lorraine, then remanded to the Inquisition in Paris; on May 30,1310 she was publicly burned. Her theological perspective was judged derivative of the teachings of Meister Eckhard, themselves labelled heretical in 1311, and also deemed representative of teachings of the heretical sect of the Free Spirits.(4) II. Theological Parameters One way to try to come to terms with the theological component of Porete's work is to examine traditional doctrine, applying it as an interpretive grid outlining the parameters which her work exceeds. My contention is that rather than producing an heretical document, Porete in fact entered into a prolonged and thoughtful dialogue with church doctrine, exercising literary techniques to illustrate, empower, and sometimes, to expand, traditional theological positions. …