In March 2025, I presented a talk for the “Medievalia at the Lilly Library” annual event called “VCEditor as a Tool for Speculative Codicology.” I started the talk with a description of the VisColl Project, which is concerned with the practice and theory of modeling and visualizing the physical construction (aka collation) of codex manuscripts. Next, I talked about VCEditor, which is the current version of the software we use to build and visualize models (using the VisColl Data Model).
VCEditor is typically used to describe books as they exist now, or how they existed at some point in the past (which one might call historical codicology). However, in 2022 I used it to create a manuscript that never existed and will never exist. That manuscript is a book of hours consisting of textual sections pulled from books of hours in various libraries in Philadelphia.
The book of hours was a popular genre of Christian prayer book, with its golden era throughout Europe in the 15th century. The central text in a book of hours is the Hours of the Virgin, with books of hours also including a calendar (at the front of the book), gospel readings, and various other sets of prayers. In 2018 I started a project called “The Book of Hours as Transformative Work” which examined the wide variation in books of hours even as they are remarkably consistent across space and time. That project led directly to me experimenting with the book of hours in VCEditor.
I started by asking myself, “can I use VCEditor to create a book that never existed?”
The answer was clearly “Yes;” the selection of the manuscripts and sections to include and the creation of the model took one afternoon (models of the manuscripts had been built during the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project (aka BiblioPhilly), 2016-2019, so I didn’t need to determine collation).
For ordering the text, rather than referring to the data from “The Book of Hours as Transformative Work,” I used the order presented by Roger Wieck in his book Painted Prayers.
Calendar
Hours of the Virgin
Gospels
Hours of the Cross
Hours of the Holy Spirit
Obsecro te
O intemerata
Penitential Psalms & Litany
Office of the Dead
Suffrages
I did insert Commendation of Souls between the Office of the Dead and Suffrages, because I wanted to make one change to this basic organization to personalize it a bit (see Kate Rudy, Piety in Pieces: How medieval readers customized their manuscripts (Open Book Publishers, 2016)). Following are example quire models of the various sections (made as though they were cut out of the parent manuscripts) and photos of the opening page of each section. You can see that, although they are all use of Paris, the style varies widely. The size also varies widely, although you can’t see that from these slides.
This was a fun exercise, and it was clear that VCEditor can be used to model books, like this one, that never existed and will never exist.
The obvious next step was to print the quires and bind them, creating a physical version of the model (which was itself created by imagining existing manuscripts being disbound, cut apart, and rebound together virtually). I printed the quires and made an initial sewing structure in 2022, then disbound it in 2024, and am rebinding it (with a more creative binding and slightly different text order) in 2025. I’ll be presenting on this “Franken-book-of-hours” and the reasoning behind it at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds this summer, and after that I will post a full description of the project on this blog.
Original sewing from 2022
If one can imagine creating a model of a book that never existed and will never exist, using elements of real books, one could also imagine creating a model of a book that is completely fabricated. I don’t have an example because I haven’t done this, but it would be very simple to do.
I do have examples of people creating books (or elements of books) that are fictional. The exhibit Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books, curated by book collector Reid Byers, was on display in the Second Floor Gallery at the Grolier Club in New York City from December 5, 2024 through February 15, 2025. According to the exhibit website, “this exhibition represents a substantial library of such books. It has been described as a collection of imaginary books and as a post-structuralist conceptual art installation. It consists entirely of simulacra, of parodies, of:
- Lost Books (with no surviving example),
- Unfinished Books (intended but left unfinished), and
- Fictive Books (imaginary books existing only in story or drama).”
From the exhibit website it appears that these are covers, and not complete books, but that could simply be how the books are displayed.
Screenshots from the Imaginary Books website
This exhibit shares a spirit with my Franken-book-of-hours, and I call it speculative codicology (although I suppose for Mr. Byers’s exhibit, it would more properly be called speculative bibliography.)
Speculative codicology is inspired by the literary genre speculative fiction, which is (among other possible definitions, and quoting “Speculative Fiction” by Marek Oziewicz, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78), “…a super category for all genres that deliberately depart from imitating “consensus reality” of everyday experience.” The list of genres included in the article includes horror, science fiction, and fantasy, and a slew of subgenres.
Importantly, historical fiction is considered a subgenre of realistic fiction, not speculative fiction, and fiction set in the past with speculative elements is considered speculative fiction, not historical fiction. I borrow this distinction for my definition of speculative codicology.
Speculative codicology, according to my definition, refers to manuscripts – or manuscript-like objects – that are recognizable as manuscripts but are not manuscripts that exist now or existed in the past. They may, like my Franken-book-of-hours, be compiled from pieces of existing manuscripts in some virtual sense (I consider my printing-and-binding to be a type of virtuality in this case), or they may be completely fictional. For example, Meg Kennedy’s artist’s book There Are No Words (2024), created for the Material Worlds exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania and later purchased by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. There Are No Words is a textile roll, modeled on a manuscript aesthetic, but is clearly not a manuscript.
You could also insert here any number of fictional manuscripts mentioned in video games, films, books, etc. etc. Is it a manuscript? Did somebody invent it? Congratulations, you have speculative codicology.
Importantly, under this definition I would not consider historical reconstructions of manuscripts (such as Lisa Fagin Davis’s Beauvais Missal Project) to be speculative codicology, instead I would call this historical codicology.
I think it’s important to differentiate between attempted fact (historical codicology) and intended fiction (speculative codicology).
What do you think of my definition of speculative codicology? Is this a concept worth exploring more? Let me know!