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ANTIQUITIES, VISUAL culture, FACSIMILES of manuscripts, MEDIEVAL manuscripts, and ANTIQUARIANS

This article queries the distinction between image and text within antiquarian visual culture through an examination of three pen facsimiles of medieval manuscripts created by Maurice Johnson II (1688–1755). Johnson, founder of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society (1710) and a founding member of the reconstituted Society of Antiquaries of London (1717/8), epitomizes the eighteenth-century antiquary as consumer and producer of manuscript and print media. As representations of historic documents, his facsimiles are images of script as text and object, content and form. As visual media they require viewers to be readers, to understand the visual form and context of text while also understanding text as inseparable from its aesthetic qualities and physical context. By contextualizing Johnson's facsimiles within the wider archival collections of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and their relationship to antiquarian prints such as those created by George Vertue (1684–1756) for Vetusta Monumenta , the article challenges the distinctions between text and images or objects often assumed to define eighteenth-century antiquarian visual culture. The circulation and use of facsimiles and other "imaged texts" serve as a reminder of the predominance of scribal forms of publication within eighteenth-century antiquarian culture (and early eighteenth-century culture more generally), and of the benefits of scribal over print publication as a mode best suited to meet the needs of antiquaries individually and in coterie. The article thus argues for a reassessment of antiquarian manuscripts and scribal publication as the vital foundation of antiquarian visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MONUMENTS, ANTIQUITIES, ANTIQUARIANS, and AESTHETICS

From the beginning of the Renaissance antiquaries had been publishing monuments at such a pace that publishing as much as collecting or studying monuments could be counted amongst the defining features of antiquarianism. However widely and routinely practised, the publication of monuments revealed substantial divisions within the world of antiquarianism. Antiquaries were faced with the choice of either textualizing monuments — turning monuments from visual or tactile objects into reading material — or attempting to reproduce their materiality — even if the monument was a text. The paper analyses Johann Joachim Winckelmann's Monumenti antichi inediti (1767) as a significant example of the former and the discussion concerning the publication of Domesday Book that took place in the rooms of the London Society of Antiquaries in 1768 as a compelling example of the latter. Juxtaposed to one another, Monumenti antichi inediti and the projected facsimile of the Domesday Book provide mutually revealing accounts of the aesthetic and intellectual complexities of eighteenth-century antiquarian practice. Where Winckelmann patently sought to rid monuments of their materiality in an effort, perhaps, to nobilitate antiquarianism — while nevertheless keeping it in a suitably ancillary position to literature — the fellows of the Society of Antiquaries chose the facsimile as the vehicle of preservation and transmission best suited to conveying their admiration of texts as material objects, indeed, as non-representational art. As necessarily (and self-consciously) imperfect attempts to reproduce original monuments, facsimiles provide both a market of deep scepticism about the possibility of ever really knowing the past and a precious trace of past versions of the past — of what could be seen and deemed worthy of preservation, scholarly investigation and aesthetic appreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]