Document Type
Article
Abstract
In this article I describe an encounter with a fifteenth-century manuscript and its assertive "fifteenth-century-ness," as exemplified by the style of dress in this manuscript's miniatures. While this historical specificity would normally offer a premise for reconstructing the past, I instead feel a powerful sense of difference and distance. Try as I might, I cannot "fit" into clothes in this manuscript's images, as they are tailored to the life of different person in a different time. This temporal self-consciousness leads offers an alternate way of thinking about the historical meaning of this object: I narrate how this manuscript might manifest the desires and anxieties of its patron, in tandem with my own emerging anxieties and frustrations as I attempt to understand the past.
Repository Citation
Sullivan, Brendan. "Dress You Up in My Angst: Living with the Past in Français 2646." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–25. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss1/6