In One'S Own Hand: Seeing Manuscripts In A Digital Age

As museums increasingly place archival materials on display, a body of scholarship has emerged to provide practical advice for staff about exhibiting handwritten documents. However, there has as yet been little scholarship that problematizes the exhibition of manuscripts and the responses they elicit from their audiences. This essay, then, investigates the cultural perception of handwriting as an inherently unique and authentic embodiment of its writer, the assumption of which lies behind its display. Through a series of close readings of responses to the sight of the autograph, I examine the ways in which handwriting's association with the human body has been historically shaped and interpreted; its current function as a locus for concerns about the loss or degradation of corporeal identity in an increasingly technologized world; and how multimedia museum exhibitions of handwritten documents - as digitally manipulable surrogates of original artifacts expose, complicate, and break down the oppositions in this cultural discourse. Ultimately, I argue, digital interactives are part of a new exhibitionary paradigm, which not only offers new ways of considering an artifact's essential meaning, but also refines and redefines our understanding of human effort, intentionality, and embodiment in a digital age.