University of Virginia Library

J. W. [von] Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. John S. Blackie (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1834), 69 (2.6). Faust indulges Mephistopheles's stipulation that their fatal bargain must be in writing, and defiantly allows him to choose the substrate as well as the writing tool: "Say, devil—paper, parchment, brass, or stone? / This I leave to thee alone: / Style, or chisel, or pen shall it be? / Thou has thy choice of all the three."

Tennyson's Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Juvenilia and Early Responses, Criticism, ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr., Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1971), 120; quoted by Jennifer L. Mnookin as epigraph to "The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10 (1998), 1. Compare William Logan: "We considered ourselves eighteenth-century, / judging things by what the eye could see, / as if every landscape were a mirror / of the Age of Reason" ("Floods in Cambridge," New Republic 9-16 Sept. 2002: 40).

"[A] full hypertext system ... offers the reader and writer the same environment. Therefore, by opening the text-processing program, or editor, as it is known, you can take notes, or you can write against my interpretations, against my text. Although you cannot change my text, you can write a response and then link it to my document" (emphasis added). George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 7.

Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, A New York Times Book (New York: Knopf, 1970). Copyright by The New York Times. For information about Chappell see Paul A. Bennett, "Designer, Artist, Illustrator: Warren Chappell," Publishers' Weekly 1 Oct. 1955: 1586-88, 1590; and Sonia Benson, "Chappell, Warren, 1904-1991," Something About the Author 68 (1992): 48-51.

Trajanus was first issued, in an incomplete format, by the German type foundry D. Stempel AG (Frankfurt am Main) in 1939. In the forward to Trajanus, a specimen pamphlet published by Haskell House in New York after the war (1948?), Chappell remarks that the name had been supplied by the foundry. For exemplars see J. Ben Lieberman, Types of Typefaces and How to Recognize Them (New York: Sterling, 1968), 120; and Christopher Perfect and Gordon Rookledge, Rookledge's International Type-Finder (New York: Beil, 1983), 16-17.

A broadside keepsake reproducing Chappell's frontispiece design from A Short History was issued by the Caxton Club (Chicago) for its meeting of March 1992.

In chapter 2, "The Alphabet," Chappell illustrated one typeface and nine historical styles of script with the same motto, "Littera scripta manet." He used the same strategy in Littera Scripta Manet: My Life with Letters (New York: privately printed for The Typophiles, 1974)—which also twice reproduced his calligraphic interpretation of the phrase, including the ascription to Horace. See also Chappell's The Living Alphabet (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1975), 49.

Lane Cooper, A Concordance to the Works of Horace (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1916). Q. Horati Flacci, Opera, ed. Fredricus Klingner, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1959); rpt. PHI CD-ROM 5.3 (Los Altos, CA: Packard Humanities Institute, 1991).

The error has been noticed before: "[T]he text is misattributed: Horace comes close (v. 390, Ars poetica), but no cigar: a respected Classicist suggests that instead, some wellintentioned mediæval schoolmaster perpetrated these words, although we shall likely never know for sure." Literary Texts in an Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services, 31st Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (Urbana: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, U of Illinois, 1994), n. pag.

Chappell's Short History appeared in a second edition in 1999 (Point Roberts, WA: Hartley), revised by Robert Bringhurst, who acknowledged that Chappell's "dates and names were not always correct" (ix). Chappell's calligraphic frontispiece, with its ascription to Horace, is omitted from this edition. On p. 273 Bringhurst notes that "[t]he phrase does not appear in any of [Horace's] works."

Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett, Loeb Classical Library (1914; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978), 278-299 (3.30, the last ode of book 3), ll. 1-7:

Writing as such was not essential to the durability of poetry: ordered, formulaic oral poetry like Homer's could survive in performance, to all appearances substantially unchanged, for a long time. But Horace was boasting of what he had written.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (1916; rpt. London: Heinemann, 1966), 226-227 (15.871-879). Edmund Spenser, sonnet 75, Amoretti and Epithalamion (London, 1595; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbus Terrarum, 1969). Robert Herrick, "The Pillar of Fame," Hesperides (London, 1648; rpt. Menston, Eng.: Scolar, 1969), 398. Ian Donaldson surveys this topic with an ironic eye in "The Destruction of the Book," Book History 1 (1998), 1-10.

Sonnet 55, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Never Before Imprinted (London, 1609; rpt. London: Scolar, 1968). "[P]owrefull rime" does not specify written poetry (it might be oral); however, the last line of sonnet 65 does so specify, in expressing the poet's desire "[t]hat in black inck my loue may still shine bright."

Adam Murimuth, Continuatio chronicarum, published together with Robert de Avesbury, De Gestis mirabilibus regis Edwardi Tertii, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889), 3: "Quoniam, ut scribitur per antiquos, `Res audita perit, litera scripta manet,' . . ." Murimuth invokes the maxim at the very outset of his chronicle as a justification for bothering to write it; however, his authorities for the maxim—ut scribitur per antiquos, "as is written by the ancients"—remain obscure.

The spelling litera, less correct by classical standards than littera, was common in medieval Latin.

I owe thanks to George Sheets, Wolfgang Mieder, Tom Hill, F. R. P. Akehurst, and Dennis Lien for helping me find early instances of this formula. Katherine Hedin and Professor Sheets also gave me helpful advice on several legal details.

William Caxton, prologue to The Mirrour of the World (1481); The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W. J. B. Crotch, Early English Text Society Original Series 176 (London: Oxford UP, 1928), 50. Caxton interpolates the observation into his translation of a French manuscript, where it does not appear; see N. F. Blake, Caxton and His World (London: Deutsch, 1969), 154-155.

H. T. Riley, A Dictionary of Latin and Greek Quotations, Proverbs, Maxims and Mottos (London: Bell, 1902), 631a.

Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi: Lateinische Sprichwörter und Sentenzen des Mittelalters in alphabetischer Anordnung, ed. Hans Walther, 9 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1963-86), 2: 750 (no. 13903a).

Thomas Branch, Principia Legis et Æquitatis, ed. William Walter Hening (Richmond: White, 1824); as cited in Latin Words and Phrases for Lawyers, ed. R. S. Vasan (Dons Mills, Ont.: Law and Business Publications, 1980), 142.

Gurney Benham, Benham's Book of Quotations, Proverbs and Household Words (London: Harrap, 1948), 206.

Thanks are due to James E. Parente, Jr., for noting these connections.

The maxim does not appear in J. W. Jones, A Translation of All the Greek, Latin, Italian and French Quotations Which Occur in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, and Also in the Notes of Various Editions (Philadelphia: Johnson, 1905). Nonetheless, at least by the nineteenth century the maxim had become a regular part of legal discourse; see note 13 above. In 1804 the Supreme Court heard the maxim quoted by an attorney, who cited the principle that "written evidence is in its nature of superior weight to mere parol testimony, for verba volant, litera scripta manet; words barely spoken are fleeting, but when written become permanent" (Church v. Hubbart, 6 U.S. 187, 203). See also James Wigram, A Treatise on Extrinsic Evidence in Aid of the Interpretation of Wills, ed. John P. O'Hara (New York: Baker, 1872), 49: "The law holds out a bounty on the reducing of contracts to writing by precluding the adduction of parol evidence in such cases. If extrinsic evidence was freely admitted, the utility of a written instrument would be greatly curtailed, while the defects and errors of memory would be substituted for the permanent litera scripta."

Blackstone does not mention that early in the eighteenth century the Worshipful Company of Scriveners of London, who were chiefly responsible for preparing legal documents, revised their armorial bearings to include the motto LITTERA SCRIPTA MANET—instead of the motto SCRIBITE SCIENTES, which had figured there from early in the seventeenth century. (Later yet, the original motto was restored.) See John Bromley, The Armorial Bearings of the Guilds of London (London: Warne, 1960), 217 and plate 45; and Francis W. Steer, A History of the Worshipful Company of Scriveners of London (London: Phillimore, 1973), 49. I thank David L. Vander Meulen for bringing this fact to my attention.

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. A. W. Brian Simpson, 4 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979), 2: 297 (2.20.2). (A "lease or estate at will" would be a mutually voluntary and therefore nonbinding arrangement.)

2: 297. Aside from two punctuation variants, this passage appears unchanged in the ninth edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4 vols. (London, 1783; rpt. New York: Garland, 1978), 2: 297. Blackstone died in 1780.

Reviewing the early history of the loss of Greek literary texts, many of which perished along with the papyri on which they were written, F. M. Hall observes that "[t]he great losses . . . occurred in all probability before the papyrus roll was finally superseded in the fifth century A.D. by the parchment codex. With the invention of a practically indestructible form of book, literature was no longer at the mercy of the material upon which it was written, and was not necessarily doomed to extinction during a period of neglect." A Companion to Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 42.

"What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water"; Catullus, Carmina 70: 3, cited by John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 17th ed., ed. Justin Kaplan (Boston: Little, 2002), 93. Compare Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (San Francisco, CA: North Point, 1988), 27: they report a Latin commonplace according to which "memory is a signet ring leaving its impression on wax," and they cite a related comment in Aristotle, De Memoria et reminiscentia: "Some men in the presence of considerable stimulus cannot remember owing to disease or age, just as if a stylus or a seal were impressed on flowing water" (450bl-4).

The best-known instance is Keats's self-authored epitaph, solidly and indelibly inscribed on his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking, 1963), 400, 405-406; Oonagh Lahr, "Greek Sources of `Writ in Water,' " Keats-Shelley Journal 21-22 (1972), 17-18.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein implies that Trithemius was misled by "the topos which had first set durable parchment against perishable papyrus"; The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 14.

Regarding the durability of paper see Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1978), 309; also, Jutta ReedScott, Preserving Research Collections: A Collaboration between Librarians and Scholars (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries et al., 1999: "Paper made from cotton fiber has lasted for more than a thousand years, preservation microfilm can have a life expectancy of hundreds of years, woodpulp newspaper pages deteriorate within decades, and some types of computer disks show loss of information after a few years" (5). Cases vary, however, especially depending on storage conditions; in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random, 2001), Nicholson Baker describes and illustrates newspapers made from wood pulp that have survived a century or more without disintegrating (5, 17; illustrations between 212 and 213).

The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 521 (Phaedrus 275d). Socrates makes a similar objection to (oral) poetry in Protagoras, 347e (340).

Though Blackstone confirmed a materialist view of the identity of a deed, holding paper or parchment to be essential to the document, in another legal arena he helped to construct an idealist concept of the copyrightable work of literature, according to which "[t]he paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey . . . style and sentiment to a distance"—"style and sentiment" being deemed "the essentials of a literary composition." See Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), 89, quoting from English Reports 96: 189. Blackstone's differential insistence on and indifference to the materiality of the text is only apparently paradoxical. A deed exists as a unique exemplar, whereas a published work exists in multiple copies, which are themselves often copied.

Anthony Fitz-Herbert, New Natura Brevium, ed. Matthew Hale (London, 1730), 283 (sec. 122.I). (In medieval practice a "wager of law" was a formal commitment to disavow a debt, with the sworn support of referees; see Henry Campbell Black, Black's Law Dictionary, 4th ed. [St. Paul, MN: West, 1968], 1750.) For an account of tallies generally see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 123-124; and plate VIII and the facing caption. Clanchy makes the intriguing but unexplained comment that tallies were "harder to forge" than parchments (124).

Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England; or, A Commentarie upon Littleton (London, 1628), 229 (3. 370).

Gilbert à Beckett, The Comic Blackstone, rev. ed. (London: Bradbury, Agnew [1872]), 131. Ramsgate was a popular seaside resort.

G. C. Tiedeman, An Elementary Treatise on the American Law of Real Property, 2nd ed. (St. Louis, MO: Thomas, 1892), 742-743, as quoted in Blackstone, Commentaries, ed. William Draper Lewis, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Rees, 1902), 2: 756 n. 13. The reference to "unprepared skins of animals" contrasts to parchment, which is specially prepared sheepskin or goatskin.

Tiedeman, quoted by Lewis, 756 n. 13. Gerald Dworkin summarizes the requirements for a deed in brisk terms that recall Blackstone: "A document is some writing which furnishes evidence or information about something. All deeds are documents, but not all documents are deeds. For instance, a legend chalked on a brick wall, or a writing tattooed on a sailor's back may be documents but they are not deeds. A deed is, therefore, a particular kind of document. It must be a writing and a writing on paper or its like, e.g., vellum or parchment. . . . `Writing' includes print." Gerald Dworkin, Odgers' Construction of Deeds and Statutes, 5th ed. (London: Sweet, 1967), 1.

The formal requirements of a will are more relaxed. The Wills Act 1837 required, among other things, that a will be "in writing," but it did not specify any substrate. In a well-known case, Hodson v. Barnes (1926), the court entertained the claim that "writing on the shell of a hen's egg" was a proper will. In this case it decided, absent corroborating evidence, that the writing was only a memorandum, not a will. However, "[i]t was not difficult to conceive a state of facts in which unquestionably it would be a testamentary document"; for example, if the testator "had handed the eggshell over to a custodian to be put in a secret place." Times Law Reports 43 (1926): 71, 72.

In "From Written Record to Memory in the Law of Wills," Ottawa Law Review 29 (1997-98): 39-61, Nicholas Kasirer examines the equivocal implications of a probate case in Quebec, Re Rioux, which involved a purported will encoded on a computer diskette, and a paper printout generated from it.

Stephen Manes, "Time and Technology Threaten Digital Archives," New York Times Apr. 7, 1998, F4. Jeff Rothenberg, "Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents, Scientific American 272 (1995): 24-25.

Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 157.

Albert S. Osborn, Questioned Documents, 2nd ed. (Albany, NY: Boyd, 1929), 543. Questioned Documents was the leading twentieth-century treatise in the field of forensic document examination. Despite judicial misgivings that prevailed up to the end of the nineteenth century, Osborn helped to establish that field as a "science" (displacing the feebler pretensions of graphology), and he became increasingly influential in the courts as an expert witness. Skepticism about the field has re-emerged only in recent decades. For an account of Osborn's rhetorical skills, which made the most of an uncertain enterprise by catering to judicial needs and stressing ocular demonstration, see Jennifer L. Mnookin, "Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Reliability," Virginia Law Review 87 (2001): 1723-1845, especially 1757-60, 1814-29.

Kasirer, in "From Written Record to Memory in the Law of Wills," expresses some impatience with "conventional definitions of writings as visible, touchable entities and of signatures as inky, human marks," and with the privileging of "[t]he ability to see the will with the human eye, unassisted by technology" (59, 57). Compare the concerns expressed by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., "The Electronic Panopticon: Censorship, Control, and Indoctrination in a Post-Typographic Culture," Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992): "The ability to alter the past has always been potentially possible in analog culture. It has tended, however, to be enormously time-consuming and relatively easy to detect. . . . The alteration of photographic data by digital techniques represents a major problem in terms of the integrity of historical documents, and the extent to which we can trust the information from such sources in the future" (174, 179).

David Bearman, "Archiving and Authenticity," Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage, ed. David Bearman (Santa Monica, CA: Getty, 1996), 63. (Regarding the online version see 7.) See also Bearman's earlier collection of articles, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museums Informatics, 1994); and Peter S. Graham, Intellectual Preservation: Electronic Preservation of the Third Kind (Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1994). R. J. Robertson, Jr., in "Electronic Commerce on the Internet and the Statute of Frauds," South Carolina Law Review 49 (1998): 787-846, before recommending statutory revisions to authorize electronic commerce, summarizes the advantages of material writing and the disadvantages of immaterial, electronic writing, in terms that support the present analysis; see especially 795-796.

For a less anxious perspective see Peter L. Shillingsburg, "Polymorphic, Polysemic, Protean, Reliable, Electronic Texts," Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993), 29-43.

Modern Language Association of America, "Statement on the Significance of Primary Records," Profession 95 (1995): 27, 28. For an account of the preparation of this statement, see G. Thomas Tanselle, "Introduction" (29-32). For an institutional assessment of the practical and economic difficulties that face such demands, see Stephen G. Nichols and Abby Smith, The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2001).

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 221: "the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence." Benjamin was familiar only with imperfect, analog copies: his argument applies even more strictly to digital reproductions of digital texts, which are indistinguishable from originals. See Robert O. McClintock, "Marking the Second Frontier," Teachers College Record 89 (1988): 348: "Copies, in the familiar analog realm are costly to make and at best approximate, leaving clear traces of what is the original and what is the copy. In the digital realm, copies are nearly costless, [and] they are often indistinguishable from the original. . . ."

Graham, Intellectual Preservation, 3.

"[A]n illiterate king is a crowned Ass"—so Fulk the Good, Count of Anjou (d. c. 960), is said to have disparaged King Louis IV of France; see The Plantagenet Chronicles, ed. Elizabeth Hallam (New York: Weidenfeld, 1986), 22. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Unwin, 1979), 432, attributes the same remark— proverbial?—to John of Salisbury (d. 1180). Gibbon ridiculed an "illiterate king of Italy" in similar terms; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (New York: Penguin, 1994), 2: 526 (ch. 39).

Richard J. Cox, The First Generation of Electronic Records Archivists in the United States: A Study in Professionalization, Primary Sources and Original Works 3 (New York: Haworth, 1994), 3-4. Regarding the secrecy of secretaryship in the Renaissance, see Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), esp. 30, 47-48.

Robertson acknowledges "the difficulty of differentiating which forms of digital signature are based on sufficiently reliable algorithms and which are not" ("Electronic Commerce," 842). He envisions, ultimately, a national panel of experts: "The . . . issue of who should determine whether a security procedure qualifies under the relevant standards is . . . a difficult one. Ideally, a national or international accrediting body comprised of scientists or information security experts might come into existence and develop standards for security procedures in electronic commerce" (843). In the meantime he recommends relying on a state-level "administrative agency," which would "employ experts necessary to evaluate the procedure [and] take advantage of the knowledge in the information security industry" (844).

Kasirer dryly remarks that "[t]he technological dimension of creating digital signatures, involving a mix of computer science and applied mathematics called cryptography, is happily not beyond the understanding of all lawyers" ("From Written Record," 57 n. 82). He recommends, as providing "better explanations than those of the present author," a paper by N. S. Bender, "Digital Commerce and the Utah Digital Signature Act" (no longer available at the internet address that Kasirer gives, nor elsewhere online); and Sunny Handa and Marc Branchaud, "Re-Evaluating Proposals for a Public Key Infrastructure," Law/Technology 29:3 (1996): 1-26. See also A. Michael Froomkin, "The Essential Role of Trusted Third Parties in Electronic Commerce," Oregon Law Review 75 (1996): 49-115; and "The Long-Term Preservation of Authentic Electronic Records: Findings of the InterPARES Project" (2001), <http://www.interpares.org/book/index.htm>, consulted 13 Jan. 2003.

"Electronic Signatures Given Legal Standing," New York Times 1 July 2000, C3.

114 Stat. 464.

American Law Institute, Uniform Commercial Code, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: American Law Institute, 1978), 16; cited with other relevant texts in Michael Hancher, "The Law of Signatures," Law and Aesthetics, ed. Roberta Kevelson, New Studies in Aesthetics 11 (New York: Lang, 1992), 230-232.

Similar misgivings arise in the case of electronic balloting. See Secure Electronic Voting, ed. Dimitris A. Gritzalis, Advances in Information Security (Boston: Kluwer, 2003), especially the chapter by Rebecca T. Mercuri and Peter G. Neumann, "Verification for Electronic Balloting Systems," 31-42, which recommends establishing a corroborative "paper trail."

T. S. Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality," Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1963), 45: "Donne, I suppose, was such another / Who found no substitute for sense, / To seize and clutch and penetrate; / Expert beyond experience, / He knew the anguish of the marrow / The ague of the skeleton. . . ."

Following up on some suggestive remarks by Jean Baudrillard about the relation between the "tactile" and the "digital" (Simulations [New York: Semiotext(e), 1983], 115), George P. Landow has identified "a single defining characteristic of the digital word" to be the fact that, "[u]nlike all previous forms of textuality, the digital word is virtual, not physical" ("Twenty Minutes into the Future; or, How Are We Moving Beyond the Book?", in The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg [Berkeley: U of California P, 1997], 215; see also Landow, Hypertext 19). In describing the consequences of this basic categorical shift Landow does not assess the mystification—and professional realignment—that it entails.

Aristotle's Poetics, trans. Leon Golden, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1968), 11, 14-15 (chs. 6, 7).

Writing half a century before Blackstone, Joseph Addison drew attention to "the proper Limits, as well as the Defectiveness, of our Imagination; how it is confined to a very small Quantity of Space, and immediately stopt in its Operations, when it endeavours to take in any thing that is very great, or very little. . . . The Object is too big for our Capacity, when we would comprehend the Circumference of a World, and dwindles into nothing, when we endeavor after the Idea of an Atome." Addison speculates that "this Defect of Imagination may not be in the Soul it self, but as it acts in Conjunction with the Body." Spectator 420 (2 July 1712); The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 3: 576-577. Bond cites precedents in Descartes and Hobbes (3: 576 n. 1).

Indeed, under current law, the physician is responsible for enabling such informed consent. For a comprehensive account of clinical and legal aspects see Ruth R. Faden and Tom L. Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent (New York: Oxford UP, 1986).

The handwriting "expert" gained a distinct authority in common usage even before the courts recognized his claim to expertise. For a while the noun expert, which had meant, generally, "[o]ne whose special knowledge or skill causes him to be regarded as an authority; a specialist," acquired the particular meaning "one skilled in the study of handwritings" (Oxford English Dictionary, sense 2.b., citing instances from 1858 to 1886). See also the controversial treatise The Handwriting of Junius Professionally Investigated by Mr. Charles Chabot, Expert (London: Murray, 1871). In the preface Edward Twistleton remarks that "he had occasion . . . to consult Mr. Chabot, the Expert"; and the note appended to Chabot's name details that "he has . . . during the last sixteen years exercised the profession of a general Expert in handwriting" (xii).

See note 32. The leading case is Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), which threatens all the forensic "sciences" with touchstone questions that are supposed to characterize genuine modern sciences; such as "whether the theory or technique in question can be (and has been) tested, whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication, its known or potential error rate and the existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation, and whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community" (509 U.S. 579, 580). It is an open question whether handwriting examiners will be able to pass these tests of credibility. Fingerprint examiners are in a similar fix, though the outcome may differ; see Simon Cole, Suspect Indentities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), 284286; and Jennifer L. Mnookin, "Fingerprint Evidence in an Age of DNA Profiling," Brooklyn Law Review 67 (2001): 13-70.

"[T]he role of the expert remains socially contingent: what is judged is not so much the content of the evidence or advice, as the credibility and/or legitimacy of the person giving that evidence or advice; if we trust the expert, we trust their expertise." Wendy Faulkner, James Fleck, and Robin Williams, "Exploring Expertise: Issues and Perspectives," Exploring Expertise: Issues and Perspectives, ed. Robin Williams, Wendy Faulkner, and James Fleck (London: Macmillan, 1988), 4.

Second Annual Meeting, Working Group on Law, Culture, and the Humanities; Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, March 1999. "Economies of Writing II," a program arranged by the Society for Critical Exchange for the 116th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of America; Washington, DC, December 2000. Internet Research 2.0 (second annual conference), Association of Internet Researchers; University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, October 2001. "Electronic Text and the Future of the Book," a special panel for the Tenth Annual Conference, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP); Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, July 2002. "Technological Innovation and Cultural Change: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Media and the Public Sphere"; European Studies Consortium, University of Minnesota—Twin Cities (with Universiteit van Amsterdam), September 2002.