The crystal codex: Iacobus, Galicia, and the dream of the archive

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on two previously unpublished photographs of the Dream of Charlemagne, one of most famous illuminations from the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus (Santiago Cathedral Library, MS. CF 14), which allow the reconstruction of details of its composition that seemed to have been lost. The search for these photographs goes parallel with an immersion in the archive of the Seminario de Estudos Galegos, a research institution that was preparing the first modern edition of the Codex Calixtinus, including photographs of its illuminations, when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. The Seminario was closed down after the war by the Francoist regime leaving the scattered galleys of the Codex Calixtinus edition as its last ruined monument. I propose a Benjaminian pilgrimage through the archive of the Seminario, taking the Dream of Charlemagne as a “dialectical image” allowing us to meditate on the historical processes to which this illumination bears witness. The article engages with the theory and materiality of photography, the archaeology of archives, and the significance of medieval manuscripts as national emblems in the twentieth century. As a coda, it reveals the medieval model inspiring Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, turned by Walter Benjamin into an image of his “angel of history.”