The Book Incarnate
Brian Cummings
The metaphor of the book as body is one oldest known, but it a metaphor? Stories abound books being punished if they were human bodies, or alternatively acting miraculous saviours in relation to injury death war. While these cases reach back sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars religion (and long before) are also found twentieth century, First World War, from which prayer-books have survived with bullet holes. chapter argues for mimetic relationship between container its owners. This investigated finally via Ragyndrudis Codex Carolingian era. It acts martyred book, place saint, suggests what Roland Barthes called ‘book-life’, capacity frame subjectivity.
Oxford University Press eBooks