Marco? Polo?
“If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet.”
In this season of Easter and Passover, the curious tale of a traveling bible reveals unexpected connections. This is because the stories contained in certain objects sometimes live on beyond the natural life of the object itself, in the materials used and the residue left by people whose hands it has passed through.
In 1685 a Jesuit priest traveled to China and returned with a bible, which he presented to the Medicis, hinting that it had belonged to Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer who visited the court of Kublai Khan in 1275. The bible was tiny - no bigger than the palm of a man’s hand and came to be known as the Marco Polo Bible. Eventually, it ended up in the Laurentian Library in Florence, Italy, where it languished, wrapped in a yellow silk scarf, inside a cherrywood box, for four hundred years, crumbling into ten thousand pieces.
During its reconstruction, the microbial content smudged on the miniature book’s seven-hundred-year-old pages was analyzed using a new science known as proteomics. Human cells contain billions of proteins that contain a vast trove of information. It’s a microscopic encyclopedia, an atlas that contains traces of disease, food, illness, medicine, poison and a host of additional data in the residue of human touch and human behavior. In this case, the samples revealed that the bible had not been written on fetal lambskin as previously thought, but on vellum - the skin of newborn calves, in France in the early 1200’s.
Proteomics is an outgrowth - or at least a close relative, of forensic architecture, a field developed by the British Israeli architect, Eyal Weitzman, and used to uncover hidden information in crime scenes such as sites of genocide. He describes it as the interrelated spatial relations between an event and the object in which traces of that event are registered, as well as the relation between the object and the forum that assembles around it and to which ‘speech’ is addressed.
If we apply these principles to the Marco Polo bible, additional stories emerge. The bible’s presence in medieval China can be understood as an artifact - a remarkable object in the history of Christianity in Asia. In that telling, the words object and history sanitize the significance of the bible’s presence in a place so far from the European Christianity because they omit the larger context of intent. Put another way, the bible’s microbes invite us to speculate on the bible’s travels, dormancy, disintegration, repair and return as an instrument of spiritual colonization: the bible was originally carried to China sometime after 1250 by an early Christian missionary.
The Marco Polo bible is also an expression of history from a beyond-human perspective, in this case a story told by microbes. Molecules, not people, start to talk. Not surprisingly, many of the gatekeepers of historical objects, especially those that work with fragile manuscripts, are reluctant to allow them to be swabbed for microbial analysis. The reason put forth is the desire to protect ancient objects from harm. The deeper truth is that, as techniques improve for extracting samples without risk of damage to the artifact, the evidence revealed by microbial analyses changes the story. Sometimes that means history must be revised. Keepers of antiquities are uneasy.
Early bibles and early dictionaries share certain similarities: both were the work of men who sought to create a permanent, authoritative record of the words that described their beliefs about what was right and true. Bibles and dictionaries were scribed, composed, interpreted, edited, and illustrated from images and understandings in white, Christian, educated men’s minds. The first Oxford English Dictionary is a good example: it took more than fifty years to compile, though the bulk of the work occurred between 1857 and 1895, contemporary with much of Britain’s accelerated colonial expansion. Not only the words and definitions were selected by men: the sentences put forth as examples of how a word was to be used were quoted from books authored by men. Though women contributed more than fifteen thousand words to the effort, only men decided which words to include and which to omit. Only men decided what words were discarded - primarily the vocabularies of the poor, of servants and laborers, and words used by women for womanly things. Only men were invited to the celebrations of the dictionary’s publication. In ways both subtle and overt, dictionaries and bibles set the parameters of the language to be used to describe both quotidian and spiritual experience.
In earlier times, as now, missionaries traveled to remote places to bring the Christian God to non-Christians in the belief that only certain words were acceptable to describe the Divine, and specific ways were required for proper worship.
After the Marco Polo bible was restored, it once again traveled to China, where it was presented, along with its unlikely story, to a group of scholars at the university in Beijing. For some of those present at its modern unveiling, in addition to its historical significance, the bible’s return to China may also have been an uncomfortable testament to missionary hubris.
The afternoon was humid. The bible was placed on the podium. When it was opened, the pages fluttered briefly, as if responding to a memory. Alberto Melloni, the man who had first unwrapped it and, later, carried it back to China, said that the pages had a sense of movement, like they were wings. Perhaps the bible’s brief longing for flight hinted at something trapped, awaiting release. Perhaps it was also a reminder from beyond the human realm that, in the end, microbes make the world. Things aren’t always, or only, what they seem.
