A return to the roots

 
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape
- Derek Walcott, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory" 


This month, I started in a new short-term position, about which I might elaborate in future blogposts. It is a very welcome job, both because it gives a respite from unemployment and because it allows me to expand my knowledge and experience in my field of expertise, while also becoming better acquainted with new material. In the course of my work, I am cataloguing the appearance of saints in various sources from medieval Sweden. So far it's mostly calendars, which are fascinating and often challenging artefacts, because while they might contain a lot of information, there is also much that is either being implied or that was sufficiently understood by the intended audience of these materials that details did not need to be spelled out, much to the chagrin of modern-day researchers. Consequently, a lot of my time is now taken up with trying to ascertain just which saints are meant, and whether seemingly incongruous or unexpected details are due to scribal errors, unknown or poorly known traditions and practices, or simply because we have lost important clues with the passing of history.  

As I said, I might blog about this in more detail at a future stage, and some of these rather rambling points might make more sense in that context. For now, however, I want to focus on one very delightful and cherished consequence of my current employment, which constitutes a return to my academic roots, as it were. These roots take the form of the Oxford Dictionary of Saints, edited by David Farmer. When I first began my MA studies in the autumn of 2010, knowing that I would be writing on the cult of saints, I bought a copy of the fourth edition, published in 2004. When the fifth edition came in 2011, I had already become so fond of the fourth edition that I decided to stick with that, and it became a valuable reference tool when navigating a subject that was still very new to me, and whose subtleties I was trying to navigate to the best of my abilities. 

Since 2010, I have continued working on the cult of saints in the Middle Ages, and the Dictionary has often proved a useful (if at times frustratingly Anglocentric) reference work, and I have often made good use of it. In the course of my PhD, I set out to try to read it in its entirety, although not from start to finish, and this ambitious project is still left unfinished. The Dictionary has rarely been far from my physical or digital reach when doing my research, but as I have become more experienced in the field and become familiar with other reference works and amassed a more expansive library, I do not have recourse to it as often as I used to, to a large extent because much of the more detailed and elaborate information about certain saints must be sought elsewhere. For this reason, there was something almost nostalgic about the way I found myself returning to the now-tattered pages in the line of my present work. I was reminded that another reason why I no longer use it as frequently is that I have simply read it to pieces. And I was also faced with my previous botched attempts at repairing it, which have certainly taken their toll on the physical book, but also added to the attachment I feel to it, seeing how much effort - if poorly executed effort - I have put into keeping this particular copy in a sufficiently good condition for me to keep using it without having to buy a new one. 

     

The reason for sticking with this badly worn book, the colours of its spine bleached by sunlight, is not only a sense of nostalgia and gratitude for its service. It also has to do with the function and status which the physical copy has accrued in the course of more than a decade. It is not simply a work of reference, it is partly an archive of my own notes and observations, my own interests bracketed or highlighted by marginalia, in which I can see glimpses from my own evolution as a scholar. To put it differently, the sum total of details and information contained in this physical copy is now larger than what it was when I first bought it. This is one of the many reasons why physical books are such valuable tools to a scholar, and it is delightful to be reminded of this in the form of a tattered and poorly-repaired copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Saints.