Specimens in Hand

Early modern Japan witnessed the emergence of tekagami, albums that sequenced and labeled specimens of writing excised from various antique and contemporaneous manuscripts. Whereas prevailing scholarship casts tekagami as landmarks in the history of calligraphy, this article reimagines the agency of the medium and reads them instead alongside analogous practices in the natural sciences. So doing raises important questions concerning the intersections of the arts and sciences in early modern and modern Japan, with their parallel yet distinct investments in archiving morphological change.