Abstract This essay is about books and the presence of the past. Its two case studies are a thirteenth-century French multitext manuscript (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1450) and one of the texts written in it (Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s mid-twelfth-century Roman de Troie). These are used to describe four regimes of historicity: modes of temporal experience that differ most in their sense of the past’s availability to the present, particularly in the form of (real and invented) books. Benoît’s classic articulation of translatio studii in the Troie prologue is read in terms of a regime that places emphasis on the inaccessibility of the past and the fragility of the present. The manuscript’s choices of arrangement—themselves often read as a form of translatio—are reframed, first via a codicological investigation and then with reference to the literary and material cultures of the mid-thirteenth century. The individual and comparative articulation of these regimes of historicity allows for a view of the manuscript as containing all of them in a structure of material simultaneity. This last regime, the manuscript present, involves an experience of the contingency of the past that constitutes a form of premodern historical consciousness, grounded in the material text.
Daniel Reeve (Fri,) studied this question.