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Mutilation is a hot topic among us medievalists nowadays. We study the disfiguration, dismemberment, and torment of the human body and its image in theater, literature, criminal law, and the biographies and paintings of saints and martyrs. That may come as no surprise to most people -- after all, it was the Middle Ages. But for medievalists it's a sea change from battle and diplomacy, archival registers of tax rolls, agricultural accounts, and last wills and testaments.
I'm working on a mutilation narrative of my own. It involves cultural and political mutilation: the historiography of the kingdom of Naples in the late Middle Ages. But during my research I've encountered mutilation of another kind, involving Google Book Search.
That massive text-digitization project, working in collaboration with several of the world's most important library collections, has now made available, in both PDF and text view, tens of thousands of 19th-century titles while it awaits the results of a legal settlement to determine whether and how it will make available tens of thousands of 20th-century works. Meanwhile Google Books offers scholars all the pitfalls and benefits of using the research results of the 19th century: Much of the fiction, essays, and nonfiction of that century is no longer of much critical or entertainment value. But thousands of pages of primary-source materials in their original editions -- the great historical enterprises of that century -- are now available at one's desktop with a few clicks of the mouse. While that is no substitute for primary research in the archives or in manuscript collections, it's truly a revolution in research on previously edited and published documents. For the history of late medieval Naples, with its relative paucity of physical archives and its dependence on later editions, Google Books is a godsend.
Naples was a kingdom mutilated almost before it had a chance to name itself as the Kingdom of Sicily. It was so called from its origins until torn apart by the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers. The kings and queens of the realm were enthroned in Naples but continued to call their kingdom "Sicily," almost in physical memory of that lost limb, the trauma of mutilation. With the early-modern period the kingdom celebrated its reunion by declaring itself...