Pocket Change: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383 and the Value of the Virtual Object

Abstract

The physical and temporal existence of the manuscript is changed utterly; in the recognition of this transformation comes the potential radically to reconsider our assumptions about the meaning of the manuscript’s original existence within both space and time. This chapter takes Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 383 as a case study in the attempt to appreciate manuscripts as physical objects from the position of our modernity and through the lens of the digital collection. It considers the significance of just one of the physical elements of this manuscript: its size. A modern smartphone, wildly anachronistic through it is, is in many ways a useful starting place in the reconsideration of the meaning of size, and in particular the problem of a frequently used size classification purporting to describe small medieval manuscripts: the pocket-book. Finally, and crucially, the overwhelming anachronism of the modern portable device serves to remind us of the fundamental and finally misleading anachronism of the pocket-book classification itself.