Objects of instruction
The 12th century volume of commentaries on the epistles of St. Paul held in Harvard’s Houghton Library gives students in Professor Jeffrey Hamburger’s freshman seminar “Picturing Prayer in the Middle Ages” insight into the minds of medieval religious scholars. What’s really valuable to Hamburger as a teacher, however, is the bookmark. “It’s precisely the type of hands-on object that can draw students into these books and the whole world that is literally opened up by them,” he said. “A medieval bookmark that not only marks your place in the book on a page-to-page basis, but also allows you to pinpoint the line on which you left off reading or, perhaps more important, left off copying. That lets us know that it’s not the book or the folio — originally these books were not paginated or collated — but the opening that is the governing semantic unit both for the maker and...