Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Representative Bodies: Mass Production and the Parliamentary Manuscript in Late Medieval England. Sponsored by the Committee on Medieval Studies and Houghton Library.

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This talk situates illuminated manuscripts of the Nova Statuta at the intersection of art history and the history of the book. Intricately wrought volumes containing the records of parliamentary legislation, these manuscripts show both scribal and artistic signs of manual mass production, aspects that have led to their characterization as unexciting objects. Drawing on manuscripts in the Houghton Library, Harvard Law School Library, and other collections, I will show how these books, far from exhibiting a failure of imagination, succeed in conjuring an aesthetics of representative politics, embodied in pictorial and textual standardization. And yet, close examination of anomalies in these manuscripts shows how, beneath the veneer of homogeneity, lurk the profound challenges of representation.