Gather Up the Fragments: An Introduction

Gather Up the Fragments: An Introduction Benjamin Albritton, Elaine Treharne, Mateusz Fafinski, and Shiva Mihan The fragmentation of medieval books through accidental damage, deliberate dismemberment, recycling of materials, or slow decay across the centuries began very soon after those codices were first produced and continues to the present day, as the dismaying number of manuscript leaves offered for sale in a variety of markets attests. The traces of past volumes appear in binding waste, re-used in unexpected objects like lampshades, linings of hats and purses, as wrappers for later books, as souvenirs acquired by travelers on the Grand Tour, as decorative art hanging framed on walls around the world, and more recently as leaf books, portfolios, and teaching materials in schools and private collections. The study of fragments can be traced back centuries to antiquarians who recognized the value in these scraps of texts, scraps that hinted at the enormous loss of global textual heritage, leading to the development of a field closely aligned with book history and textual studies and focused on the study of these fugitive remains.1 While fragment studies are a well-established sub-field in manuscript studies across many textual and cultural traditions, digital fragmentology, the study of fragments of manuscripts assisted by digital images and software, as a distinct area of study (and perhaps even a field) has undergone a period of rapid growth and development over the course of the last decade. This exciting period has brought many new reflections on both the object of study for the field and the methods End Page 1 used to carry out that study. Some of these reflections are firmly rooted in scholarly traditions closely associated with the study of Western medieval manuscripts; others are in the early stages of bringing a fragmentology that looks to bring global perspectives to the study of the pieces of once-whole objects that Marina Rustow describes, in this volume, as shreds, drawing an analogy to the study of pottery sherds. The essays gathered in this two-volume special issue, for which a public Call for Papers was made so as to solicit a broad range of contributions, represent a wide variety of fragmentology topics. The authors offer a range of geographical, chronological, and methodological approaches that hint at potential future directions for the field; discuss advances in current knowledge of fragment collections; ponder various definitions of "the fragment" and consider the impact of those expanding definitions for manuscript and book studies more broadly; and demonstrate how fruitful detailed examination of individual examples can be. There are a growing number of forums for scholarship related to the study of fragments, and several research groups and projects active in this space.2 These volumes of Digital Philology complement existing fragmentology outlets by bringing a variety of cultural perspectives and methodological approaches into dialogue with one another, with the aim of providing a collection that we hope will spark conversations about ways to broaden participation in this burgeoning field. The seventeen articles included in this double issue of Digital Philology thus explore multiple facets of fragmentology. Readers will find a range of fascinating essays, from methodological considerations of fragmentology and its role in the digital sphere to in-depth case studies of singular fragments or fragment collections. The editors have worked with the authors to arrange these essays into thematic groups, though the borders of these groups are quite porous, and ideas and approaches recur across the groups, while some of the more provocative challenges to methodologies and assumptions force us to rethink the study of fragments after the digital turn and to consider the landscape of scholarship that now allows exploration of more examples from the comfort of home than any single researcher could have done in a lifetime before this abundance of image data became available. Digital Resequencing of Otto Ege's Broken Books In North American fragment studies, Otto Ege, the notorious biblioclast, has had an outsized influence on the types of questions being asked and methodologies explored, leading to a focus in some circles on digital End Page 2 reunification or resequencing of the many books that Ege destroyed and sold to private and institutional collectors...