This article draws on medieval accounts of athletic sport and its literary depictions to examine a tradition of Havelok the Dane's athletic prowess that runs across the Lai d'Haveloc, the Middle English Havelok, and numerous chronicles. Robert Mannyng describes a physical remnant of this athletic tradition: a stone lying in Lincoln Castle said to have been thrown by Havelok. By reading Havelok's stone not merely as a relic of a past king but as marking a playspace—the imagined site of a former game—we may understand the stone as a point of intersection between the pleasurable activities of contemporary sport and historicist imagining. In the romances, Havelok's athletic wonders highlight the social effects of wonder as sport. In turn, Mannyng's stone creates an imaginative playspace within his Chronicle: one that exploits an affective connection between the wonders of athletic spectating and an imaginative engagement with history.
The Ghosts of Bindings Past: Micro-Computed X-Ray Tomography for the Study of Bookbinding 4 This essay describes the results of a new application of micro-computed X-ray tomography (µCT) to conduct nondestructive investigations of the binding structures of premodern books. This application addresses a twofold challenge in the study of historic bindings and their construction. Few premodern books survive in their original bindings. Moreover, until recently, when books were rebound, the original structures were rarely documented, and the remains were usually discarded. Where original bindings do remain in situ, much of their structure is, by design, hidden. Particulars of construction may be surmised; but without destructive disbinding, little can be proven. µCT enables an exploratory, multilinear approach to codicological investigations that makes bindings accessible in the form of tractable volumetric data.
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