Queer Transmissions: English Manuscript, Italian Print and a Discomforting History of the Book ^☆

Abstract What does it mean when we rehearse the time‐worn temporal phrase, ‘ from manuscript to print’? For several decades, scholars have offered powerful models for understanding how queer individuals and communities experience both the restrictive and liberatory potentials of living against the grain of normative, linear time. Time has likewise been a perennial concern in the history of art, whether focused on how sequences of objects produced by a given community obey a unique temporal logic, how the endurance of objects outside of their ‘own’ time makes affective demands on the contemporary viewer or how notions of originality and epigonism are themselves time‐bound. This article engages such discourses of non‐normative temporalities while examining British Library Arundel MS 66, an English manuscript of mostly astrological texts with images copied from printed Italian sources, focusing in particular on the figure of Andromeda, variously rendered as a beautiful trans woman, unjustly bound. The purpose of this essay is to offer a point of resistance against the prepositional paradigm, from/to , that has dominated book history and in so doing expose the broader social imperatives that such an evolutionary model has underwritten. More than a critique via a case study, this essay will point up what is to be gained by considering manuscripts copied from printed books not as a perverse reversal of prepositional decorum, but instead as generative conjunctions.