alba amicorum

Before social media, the Rolodex and the little black book, mobile medieval scholars would collect mementos of their encounters in “friendship books,” as Hyperallergic informs, whose entries were regaled with anecdotes and personal emblems to denote both private and academic connections.
A really engrossing discussion ensues on the human drive to document the ephemeral and specificity is the soul of narrative insofar as these encounters often, absent the means of taking a selfie, contained a wealth of detail that surpassed the attention of chroniclers—a sort of metadata—illustrating that there’s little new under the sun, at least not without its historic antecedents.