As much as we like to think of words as conceptual, they nonetheless are always embodied, whether we are speaking and listening to them (in the vibrations of our bodies), or whether we are writing signs. Though a text can be printed in many different forms (as the Bible has been over generations), when we read, we are nonetheless always looking at and probably touching a physical object, whether it be a piece of papyrus, a scroll, a handmade book, or a computer screen.

The presence of paper and other media of text has long been seen to suggest the presence of the source of the text. As Edmund Spenser's sonnet frames it, the paper of the poem is indeed the physical go-between, mediating between writer and audience, standing in for the desired and desiring bodies:

Happy ye leaves! when as those lily hands,
Which hold my life in their dead doing might,
Shall handle you, and hold in love's soft bands,
Like captives trembling at the victor's sight.
And happy lines! on which, with starry light,
Those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look,
And read the sorrows of my dying sprite,
Written with tears in heart's close bleeding book.
And happy rhymes! bathed in the sacred brook
Of Helicon, whence she derived is,
When ye behold that angel's blessed look,
My soul's long lacked food, my heaven's bliss.
Leaves, lines, and rhymes seek her to please alone,
Whom if ye please, I care for other none. (Amoretti 1)

In Revelations 10:8-11 the consumption of the physical book is synonymous with the internalization of the text, the word of God:

8 And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth.
9 And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.
10 And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
11 And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.

This physicality of the text may displace the actual conditions of the page, which has its own texture and history. If you turn the pages of a parchment book, you will likely notice that some openings are darker and others lighter. Look more closely at the dark pages and you may notice pores. The darker side is the outside of the contributing animal's skin; the lighter side is the inside. In a Medieval or Renaissance piece of paper, you will notice fibers (likely cotton, flax, or linen) and lines and a watermark from the mould in which the paper was made. Austen's hot-pressed paper was a more recent invention, smooth and consistent. The pages of the books in this exhibition are all remarkably supple, much more so than pages of many books published only decades ago. Unlike modern papermaking techniques, which use acid to break down wood pulp into tiny fibers that form a brittle product, the older techniques used long plant fibers, which bend with the paper. As for the parchment, its natural suppleness is actually maintained by occasional moderate use.

If we think for a moment about today's emerging technologies, we might note with interest that with the computer, one uses exactly the same tools for reading and for writing. The technology itself suggests that the formerly apparently separate spaces of reception and composition are in fact at least profoundly interrelated, and perhaps even the same space, in which different activities occur. The computer as a reading and writing device puts one into a physical space similar to that of the medieval copyist or the renaissance scholar with his commonplace book next to the book from which he reads (and which he annotates).