Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval ...

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Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early 

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Catherine Brown 

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Remember the Hand: Bodies and 

Bookmaking in Early Medieval 

Spain 

CATHERINE BROWN 

I admit that among those of your tasks which require physical effort that of the 

scribe, if he writes correctly, appeals most to me. (Cassiodorus, Institutiones I.30.) 

Why should scribal work be so appealing to Cassiodorus? He surely does not 

mean that it is his favorite job in the monastery; it would be a mistake to 

imagine the founder of Vivarium enjoying the manual labor of writing the 

Institutiones in his own hand. Indeed, late ancient aristocrat that he was, 

Cassiodorus (d. 580 CE) almost certainly got no ink on his hands when he 

dictated this praise of the scribe. The act of writing he has in mind is entirely 

instrumental: it is a means to an end, and that end is the dissemination of ‘‘the 

precepts of the Lord’’ [‘‘Domini praecepta’’]. 

Happy his [the scribe’s] design, praiseworthy his zeal, to preach to men with the 

hand alone, to unleash tongues with the fingers, to give salvation silently to 

mortals, and to fight against the illicit temptations of the devil with pen and ink. 

[felix intentio, laudanda sedulitas, manu hominibus praedicare, digitis linguas 

aperire, salutem mortalibus tacitum dare, et contra diaboli subreptiones illicitas 

calamo atramentoque pugnare.] 1 

Cassiodorus mentions these fleshly hands and their material instruments only to 

figure away their corporeal specificity: ‘‘Every word of the Lord written by the scribe 

is a wound inflicted on Satan’’ [‘‘Tot enim vulnera Satanas accipit quot antiquarius 

Domini verba describit’’], he concludes (Cassiodorus, Institutiones I.30.1). 

While Cassiodorus treats the nexus of corporeal inscription and spiritual 

efficacy from the position of an observer of writing, his younger contemporary 

Gregory the Great (d. 604) approaches it as an observer of reading. He begins 

the preface of his massive commentary on the book of Job, the Moralia 

(finished 595), with a reader’s question: ‘‘It is often asked, ‘Who wrote the 

book of Job?’’’ [‘Inter multos saepe quaeritur, quis libri beati iob scriptor 

habeatur’]. 2 For a paragraph and a half Gregory entertains various attributions 

of the biblical book, but then dismisses them: the author, not the writer, 

is the one who matters. ‘‘It would be foolish indeed to inquire who wrote the 

book, when one faithfully believes that the Holy Spirit is the author’’ [‘‘Sed 

quis haec scripserit, ualde superuacue quaeritur, cum tamen auctor libri 

spiritus sanctus fideliter credatur’’]. 3 

In his ensuing discussion, Gregory takes pains to establish the difference 

between authors and pen-pushers: 

The writer is the one who dictates things to be written. The writer is the one who 

inspires the book and recounts through the voice of the scribe the deeds we are to 

imitate. We might read the words of some great man in his letters but ask by 

This essay has been enriched by the eyes and 

ideas of audiences at Bryn Mawr College, 

Cornell University, and the Medieval 

Academy of America, and by the many 

friends and colleagues who read drafts and 

patiently offered suggestions. Special thanks 

to John Williams for his unfailing generosity. 

1 – Cassiodorus, Institutiones I.30.1. Latin from 

Cassiodorus, Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. 

Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 75. Translation: 

Cassiodorus, Divine and Human Letters, trans. 

Leslie Webber Jones (New York: Columbia 

University Press, 1946), p. 133. Citations of 

primary texts will be by standard divisions, 

divided by periods (Book.chapter.paragraph), 

followed after a semicolon by page numbers 

in modern editions. Where no translator is 

credited, the version is my own. 

2 – Pope Gregory I, Moralia in Job, Praef.1, ed. 

Marcus Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum 

Series Latina (Turnholt: Brepols, 1979), vol. 

143, p. 8. 

3 – Ibid. 

262 WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 27, NO. 3, JULY–SEPTEMBER 2011 

Word & Image ISSN 0266-6286 # 2011 Taylor & Francis 

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/02666286.html 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2011.541112


4 – Ibid. 

5 – Ibid. 

6 – Pope Gregory I, Registrum Epistularum,ed. 

Dag Norberg, Corpus Christianorum Series 

Latina (Turnholt: Brepols, 1982), vol. 140A, p. 

874. The bibliography on this statement is vast--see 

in this journal alone Lawrence Duggan, 

‘‘Was Art Really ‘The Book of the Illiterate’?,’’ 

Word & Image 5 (1989), pp. 227-51; Celia 

Chazelle, ‘‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: 

Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of 

Marseilles,’’ Word & Image 6 (1990), pp. 138-50. 

See also Michael Camille, ‘‘The Gregorian 

Definition Revised: Writing and the Medieval 

Image,’’ in L’Image: Fonctions et usages des images 

dans l’occident medieval (Paris: Le Leopard d’Or, 

1996), pp. 89-107. 

7–(Moralia, Ad Leandrum.5; ed. Adriaen, 

vol. 143, p. 6). 

8 – This chain of transmission from author to 

reader is represented with particular clarity in 

the mutually referential iconography of literary 

composition, commission, copying, and presentation; 

see, e.g., J.J.G. Alexander, Medieval 

Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (New 

Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 72-94. 

9 – The best known products of early medieval 

Iberian monastic scriptoria are undoubtedly the 

great codices containing the commentary on 

theApocalypsebyBeatusofLiebana studied 

most notably in the five volumes of John 

Williams, The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the 

Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse 

(London: Harvey Miller, 1994). For wellillustrated 

surveys of manuscript illumination in 

this period, see John Williams, Early Spanish 

Manuscript Illumination (New York: G. Braziller, 

1977) and Mireille Mentre, Illuminated 

Manuscripts of Medieval Spain (London and New 

York: Thames and Hudson, 1996). It would be 

wonderful to have an Iberian analogue to 

Richard Gameson’s The Scribe Speaks?: Colophons 

in Early English Manuscripts (Cambridge 

[England]: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse 

and Celtic, University of Cambridge, 2002). 

10 – El Escorial, Biblioteca del Monasterio MS 

d.I.2, f. XXIIv (the recto is blank). The manuscript 

is foliated in a modern hand. This page is 

preceded in the current binding of the codex by 

twenty-one pages of scholarly description written 

in the 16 th century by Juan Vásquez de 

Mármol and Ambrosio Morales. Those pages 

arenumberedinRomannumerals,asisthisone; 

the remainder of the codex is foliated in Arabic 

numerals. Whoever did the numbering seems to 

have thought of this page as more related to the 

16 th -century prefatory material than to the rest of 

the codex. Both Vásquez (f. Ir) and Morales (f. 

XIIIr) remark that this image was on the reverse 

of the codex’s first leaf when they examined it. 

The date ‘‘era 1014’’ (= 976 CE) is given on ff. 4r 

and 428r. On f. 428r Vigila will also tell us that he 

was assisted by ‘‘Sarracinus his associate’’ and 

‘‘García his student.’’ 

what pen they were written; but it would be ridiculous not to recognize the 

author and attend to the contents and to go on asking by just what sort of pen the 

words were pressed onto the page. 

[Ipse igitur haec scripsit, qui scribenda dictavit. Ipse scripsit, qui et in illius opere 

inspirator extitit, et per scribentis vocem imitanda ad nos ejus facta transmisit. Si 

magni cujusdam viris susceptis epistolis legeremus verba, sed quo calamo fuissent 

scripta, quaeremus; ridiculum profecto esset, epistolarum auctorem scire sensumque 

cognoscere, sed quali calamo earum verba impressa fuerint, indagare.] 4 

Gregory’s audience was presumably composed of readers well-trained enough 

not to wonder what kind of pen the Moralia were written with, or to spend much 

time thinking about whether Gregory dictated the text or wrote it with his own 

hand. They would be less likely still to wonder about who pushed the pen in the 

book of Job and what his name was, for, as Gregory concludes triumphantly, 

‘‘Since we know the substance of the story and know that the Holy Spirit is the 

author, if we go on asking who the scribe was what else are we doing than 

reading the text and asking about the pen?’’ [‘‘Cum ergo rem cognoscimus, eius 

que rei spiritum sanctum auctorem tenemus, quia scriptorem quaerimus, quid 

aliud agimus, nisi legentes litteras, de calamo percontamur?’’] 5 

In this insistence on the instrumentality of human signification and the 

accompanying stress on transcendent reference, readers of Word & Image will 

perhaps recognize the thinker who declared that ‘‘it is one thing to adore a 

picture and another to learn what is to be adored through the story represented 

in the picture’’ [‘‘Aliud est enim picturam adorare, aliud per picturae historiam 

quid sit adorandum addiscere.’’] 6 And they would not be deceived: ‘‘What, then, 

is the duty of the body but to be the instrument of the mind?’’ [‘‘Quid namque est 

officium corporis nisi organum cordis?’’], Gregory asks in the letter that introduces 

the Moralia. 7 

The epigrammatic confidence of this statement would seem to close the 

discussion. There is, however, much more to be said about the agency of the 

body in book production and use in the early Middle Ages. Not only is there 

much to be said, but, as we shall soon see, Gregory himself will do much of the 

talking. That is, not Gregory the author so much as Gregory the writer--together 

with the painters of words and images who transformed authoritative 

words like his into equally authoritative objects. For in a manuscript culture, of 

course, there is no access to auctor except through the scribe, and to read in a 

medieval manner is perforce to engage intimately with both. 8 What Gregory 

calls the ‘‘voice of the scribe’’ [‘‘vox scribentis’’] is never just a channel for the 

author’s; sometimes it has some things of its own to say. 

I propose here to pay attention to some of those things said by one 

particular group of silent voices of the page: the Iberian scribes of the early 

Latin Middle Ages. 9 In the books they copied, writers of Latin in both al- 

Andalus and in the monasteries of the Christian north in the tenth and 

eleventh centuries offer a great deal of information about themselves and 

their work. And not, as we shall see, just names and dates: these scribes say a 

great deal, and they go to great trouble to say it. 

Listen, for example, to this page, from the great Canon Law miscellany 

finished in 976 at the monastery of Albelda, now in the Biblioteca del 

Monasterio del Escorial as MS d.I. (Color Plate 1) The man who held the 

pen was named Vigila. He tells us this himself --- and a much more --- on the 

reverse of the very first page of the codex. 10 

263


At first glance we might take this for an evangelist portrait of the type that 

often introduces early medieval bibles. For here, framed by a sumptuous arch, 

is a writer, seated on an elaborate throne, pen in hand, the book before him on 

a copy desk, inkwells at the ready. There are, however, no symbolic animals to 

mark him as an evangelist, no angel or dove to represent the divine Author 

speaking through him, no halo to indicate his sanctity. Just a man, his pen, 

and the text, whose visual and etymological interlace is represented in three 

parallel braids framed in gold. And there is written as well as represented text, 

too --- lines of alternating red and black minuscule, spaced with increasing 

irregularity as they fill up the framing horseshoe arch. The last line of text 

surrounds the writer’s head and pen like a scribal halo. The text --- in 

awkwardly florid Latin --- reads like the beginning of a conversation: 

264 CATHERINE BROWN 

Color Plate 1. El Escorial, Biblioteca del 

Escorial MS d.I.2, f. XXIIv. The scribe Vigila 

begins his work. # Patrimonio Nacional


11 – Text in Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, Libros y 

librerías en la Rioja altomedieval (Logroño: 

Diputación Provincial, 1979), p. 288. Vigila’s 

inventive Latin is a challenge to the translator; 

the first lines might also be rendered ‘‘So, in 

the beginning of this book, the commission 

[uotum] to write was given to me. . .’’. Thanks 

to Donka Markus for advice on the 

translation. 

12 – In the passages from the Moralia quoted 

above, Gregory uses both res and sensum to 

refer to the meaning of a written text. 

13 – Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, 

MS. 29, f. 106r. The scribe must have been 

very skillful with his bad pen: there are deep 

black puddles on the descenders of some of his 

letters here, but if he had not pointed it out, I 

would not have noticed. For more on this 

manuscript and its scribal annotations, see 

Jean Vezin, ‘‘L’emploi du temps d’un copiste 

au XI e siècle,’’ in Scribi e colofoni: le sottoscrizioni 

di copisti dalle origini all’avvento della stampa, ed. 

Emma Condello and Giuseppe de Gregorio 

(Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto 

Medioevo, 1995), pp. 71-9; Manuel C. Díaz y 

Díaz, ‘‘Agustín entre los mozárabes: un testimonio,’’ 

Augustinus 25 (1980), pp. 157-80; Díaz 

yDíaz, Libros y librerías, pp. 147-54. 

14 – ‘‘Sunday, the beginning of Lent, era 1015’’ 

[‘‘Dominico in introytum quadragesime, era 

MXVa’’], (Madrid, Real Academia de la 

Historia, MS 29, f. 63v). All the scribes studied 

here render dates according to the ‘‘era hispana,’’ 

which is thirty-eight years ahead of dates 

figured by the common era (‘‘anno incarnationis’’). 

Thus, ‘‘era MXVa’’ = ‘‘era 1015’’ = 977 

CE. 

15 – Date figured with the assistance of Peter 

Binkley’s Medieval Calendar Calculator, 

http://www.wallandbinkley.com/mcc/ 

mcc_main.html (accessed 19 July 2010). 

So, in the beginning of this book, the wish to write arose in me, Vigila the scribe, but I 

greatly feared being a waster of parchment --- an appropriate fear. However, casting 

doubt aside, I began writing in the name of my Jesus Christ, and in this state of mind 

I earnestly began to copy, as the picture below shows. Laboring, I arrived at the end. 

Therefore thanks be to God who deigned to help me. At last, the course of this life 

being run, may He deign to give the eternal prize with the saints [the scribe’s head 

interrupts the line] in the kingdom [his pen interrupts the line] of heaven. Amen. 

[In exordio igitur huius libri oriebatur scribendi uotum mici Vigilani scribtori, 

sed fusorem pargamenum nimis uerebar. Tamen quid mici olim conueniret 

agere nisi duuietate post|posita ut in nomine mei Ihesu Xrisiti incoasse scribendum. 

Inito autem affectu certatim cepi edere ceu iconia subinpressa modo 

ostendit et ad ultimum nitens perueni. Idcirco grates ipsi domino qui mici 

dignatus est auxiliari. Demumque post peracto huius uite cursu dignetur largiri 

premia eterna cum celicolis in regno polorum. Amen.] 11 

In this codex, then, the inaugural place of authority is occupied not by the 

evangelist or the author, but by the pen-pusher, poised over his labor of copying 

as we are at our labor of reading. Before we even learn what book we will be 

reading, we learn who made it --- Vigila --- how he (says he) felt about making it 

and finishing it, his hopes for the future. We are given a glimpse into an affective 

world of fear, humility, and maybe even holy ambition. 

Building the City of God (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, MS 29) 

Like Cassiodorus, Vigila and his contemporaries call attention to scribal work 

and connect it to spiritual work; like Gregory, they expect us to read the text 

they have copied for its meaning. They are also and very explicitly aware, 

however, that reading for meaning nevertheless entails an intimate encounter 

with a material thing---a book, a page, letters. The Latin language in which 

they copied (and probably still thought) used the same word---res---to mean 

both ‘‘thing’’ and ‘‘meaning’’: 12 material and immaterial are as inseparable in 

the practice of reading as they were in the practice of writing. Meaning is not 

only made, but hand-made, and these scribes make sure that their readers do 

not forget either that artifactuality, or the hands that made it. They ask us to 

do several things at once: to understand the meaning of the texts transcribed, 

remember the hands that did the writing, remember the names attached to 

those hands, and where the writers lived, when they began work, when they 

ended it, and the conditions of their labor. 

Even---pace Gregory---what kind of pen they used: in the margin of f. 106r of a 

late tenth-century copy of Augustine’s City of God made in the monastery of San 

Millán de la Cogolla, for example, sits the following note, written in the same hand 

as the main body text: ‘‘Hic scripsi in dominico post ascensio et fuit illa pinna 

mala’’ [‘‘I wrote here on the Sunday after Ascension, and the pen was bad’’] 

(figure 1). 13 

If Gregory were to come across this in his own library, it is fair to assume 

that he would consider the scribes making such annotations to be guilty of 

foolishness and vanity, and consider more ridiculous still any reader attending 

more to them than to Augustine. And surely beneath his scorn would be a 

reader curious and ill-occupied enough to waste time figuring out that in 977--which 

is, as we learn on f. 63v, 14 the year in which that marginal note was 

written, the Sunday after Ascension fell on the 20 th of May. 15 How can such 

trivialities contribute to the City of God? 

265


In fact, they do, and to the letter: that note written with a bad pen records 

the copying process of this particular manuscript of De civitate Dei, which is in 

fact copiously annotated with milestones that track the construction of the 

text, column by column, and page by page. Alongside Augustine’s titanic 

theological chronology, Real Academia de la Historia MS. 29 offers the 

marginal story of its own production (table 1). 

The same hand that does not like its pen makes other entries, occasionally 

reassuring readers about the text’s reliability (f. 128v.: ‘‘I checked it, trust me, 

nothing’s missing’’ [‘‘Perexi, non dubites, nil minus habet’’]), sometimes 

commenting learnedly upon it (or transcribing someone else’s learned comments), 

often simply noting a date and even a time (f. 134v: ‘‘Vespera sanctarum 

Iuste et Rufine’’ = Eve of Saints Justa and Rufina, July 16). 

One writer who so marks his time is named Moterrafe, though to figure this 

out we have to crack the little puzzle he leaves in the margin of f. 170v 

(figure 2): two columns of tiny letters. Rotate figure 2 90 degrees counterclockwise. 

Begin with the capital E, bottom row, far left. Above it, F. 

Diagonally down to the right, bottom row: A. Above it, R. And so on: 

‘‘EFARRTOM MUNOCAID AIROMEM.’’ 

Read it backwards, and you will never forget him: MEMORIA DIACONUM 

MOTERRAFE: ‘‘Remember Moterrafe the deacon.’’ On f. 196r, the hand 

changes; 80 folios later, we get a name for the new hand and another 

reminder, this time laid out as a monogram (f. 273v): ALOITII PRESBITERI 

MEMORIA: ‘‘Remember Aloysius the presbyter’’ figure 3. 

And on f. 276v, we are told ‘‘Here Aloysius the presbyter stopped writing’’ 

[‘‘Hic cessavit Aloitius presbiter de scribere’’] (figure 4) and Moterrafe’s hand 

returns. 

In sum: sixteen dates and three scribes – one unnamed, one named twice 

and one three times. 16 So as we follow Augustine’s argument in City of God,we 

also follow the growth of the book that contains it. 17 We track the work that 

makes the Work. Read for the meaning, but remember the pen, the manuscripts 

tell us. 

Appropriately enough, the most spectacular invitation to ignore Gregory’s 

advice against reading the text but asking about the pen comes from the hand 

of a scribe who really, one would think, ought to know better. I say ‘‘ought to 

know better’’ because there is no doubt that the scribe in question had read 

Gregory’s warning. Not only did he read it, but he incorporated it in the most 

intimate medieval way possible: he copied it carefully on the recto of f. 18 of a 

spectacular manuscript of the Moralia---which, the scribe will also tell us on f. 

499r, he completed around 6 AM on April 11 th , 945. 

Florentius’s Hand (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 80) 

He who does not write the earth with the plow must paint the page with his 

finger. (Ferreolus of Uzès, d. 581 CE) 

The sumptuously decorated copy of the Moralia that now resides in the 

Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid as MS 80 was executed at the Castilian 

monastery of Valeránica by one hand, text and image alike---no mean feat, 

since the codex runs to 501 folios and measures a massive 490 x 350 mm (19¼" 

x13 3 /4"). Making it must have taken him a very long time indeed. The scribe’s 

name was Florentius, and he is nothing if not engaged with his work. 18 


Figure 1. Madrid, Real Academia de la 

Historia, MS 29, f. 106r (detail). ‘‘I wrote here 

on the Sunday after Ascension, and the pen was 

bad’’ [Hic scripsi in dominico post ascensio et 

fuit illa pinna mala]. 

16 – The record of scribes and dates is only 

part of the copious annotation left in the 

manuscript by its copyists---also included are 

interpretive and critical notes. For a more 

detailed discussion, see Díaz y Díaz, Libros y 

librerías, pp. 147-54 and Díaz y Díaz, ‘‘El cultivo 

del latín en el siglo X,’’ Anuario de estudios 

filológicos 4 (1981), pp. 71-81. 

17 – The practice of multiple scribes noting their 

parts in the production of a single manuscript in 

this period is rare, but not undocumented---the 

most striking examples from the early period are 

the Augustine codices made by the nuns of 

Chelles in the tenth and eleventh centuries. On 

this and similar cases, see Jean Vezin, ‘‘La 

repartition du travail dans les scriptoria carolingiens,’’ 

Journal des Savants 3 (1973), pp. 212-37. 

Christopher De Hamel offers a late twelfthcentury 

English glossed Exodus (Lambeth 

Palace Library, MS 110) with notes by the scribe 

tracking a copying work week, beginning on 

‘‘lundi’’ and ending twelve leaves later on 

‘‘samadi’’ (A History Of Illuminated Manuscripts 

[London: Phaidon Press, 1997], p. 92). Closest to 

our Iberian case is a manuscript from St Vaast 

which bears names of nine scribes working in 

twelve stints; see Richard Gameson, ‘‘‘Signed’ 

Manuscripts From Early Romanesque 

Flanders: Saint-Bertin and Saint-Vaast,’’ in Pen 

in Hand: Medieval Scribal Portraits, Colophons and 

Tools, ed. Michael Gullick (Walkern, Herts.: 

Red Gull Press, 2006), pp. 31-73. 

18 – Key works on Valeránica in the period 

and Florentius in particular: Manuel C. Díaz 

yDíaz, ‘‘El escriptorio de Valeránica,’’ in 

Codex Biblicus Legionensis: Veinte estudios (León: 

Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, 1999), pp. 53- 

72; Barbara A. Shailor, ‘‘The Scriptorium of 

San Pedro de Berlangas’’ (PhD thesis, 

University of Cincinnati, 1975); X. Huidobro 

y Serna, ‘‘El monasterio de San Pedro de 

Berlangas en Tordómar y su celebre calígrafo 

el monje Florencio,’’ Boletín de la Comisión de 

Monumentos de Burgos 14 (1935), pp. 45-47; John 

Williams, ‘‘A Contribution to the History of 

the Castilian Monastery of Valeranica and 

the Scribe Florentius,’’ Madrider Mitteilungen 

11(1970), pp. 231-48.


19 – Borrowing the evocative title of Johanna 

Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth : The Letters in 

History and Imagination (New York, N.Y.: 

Thames and Hudson, 1995). 

Table 1. Building the City of God (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, MS 29). (Based on table in Vezin, 

‘‘L’emploi du temps d’un copiste,’’ pp. 73-74). 

Folio Text Translation Date 

63v Dominico in introytum 

quadragesime, era MXV a 

Sunday, the beginning of Lent, era 18 February 977 CE 

1015 

88v Hic inquoabit alius scriba ad Here another scribe began to write, Saturday, April 21 

scribere, sabbato post octabas 

pasce 

Saturday after the octave of Easter 

106r Hic scripsi in dominico post I wrote here on the Sunday after Sunday, May 20 

ascensio et fuit illa pinna mala Ascension, and the pen was bad 

109v IIII a feria post pentacosten Wednesday after Pentecost Wednesday , May 31 

112r Dominico post pentacosten Sunday after Pentecost Sunday, June 3 

118r II a feria, II idus junii Monday 2 days before the Ides of June Monday, June 12 

121v Vespera sancti Adriani Eve of Saint Hadrian June 15 

134v Vespera sanctarum Iuste et Rufine Eve of Saints Justa and Rufina July 16 

141r Vespera sancti 

Bartholomei apostoli 

Eve of Saint Bartholomew, Apostle August 23 

155 Vespera sancti Cipriani episcopi Eve of Saint Ciprian, Bishop Sept ember 13 

162v Vespera sancti Michaeli Eve of Saint Michael September 28 

170v acrostic: EFARRTOM MUNOCAID acrostic: Remember Moterrafe the 

AIROMEM 

deacon 

174v In diem sanctorum [Fausti], On the day of Saints Faustus, October 13 

Ianuarii et Martialis 

Ianuarius, and Martial 

176v In diem sancti Foce episcopi On the day of Saint Focus, bishop October 15 

184r In diem sanctorum Servandi et On the day of Saints Servandus and October 23 

Germani 

Germanus 

189r In diem sanctorum Vincentii, On the day of Saints Vincent, Sabina, October 28 

Savine, Christetis 

and Christetis 

195v Perexi, non dubites nil minus habet. I checked it, trust me, nothing’s Remember 

Moterrafe diaconi memoria missing. 

Moterrafe the 

deacon 

273v acrostic: ALOITII PRESBITERI acrostic: Remember Aloysius the 

MEMORIA 

presbyter 

276v Hic cessavit Aloitus presbiter de 

scribere 

Here Aloysius stopped writing 

283r In diem sancti Felicis On the day of Saint Felix January 14 

He frames this massive codex with reminders of his own activity and 

contingent presence, and if we pay attention and engage with his puzzle, we 

will learn his name on f. 3r---again, before we know what book we are reading 

(figure 5). 

Reading from the top row center to the right, a command emerges from the 

alphabetic labyrinth: 19 

FLORENTIUM INDIGNUM MEMORARE, remember 

unworthy Florentius. Like Moterrafe’s and Aloysius’s interventions in the 

City of God, this is a signature that is not one, that hides itself as it is revealed. 

It is both a request and a puzzle, and as we work out the puzzle, we fulfill the 

request, as it is written, over and over. FLORENTIUM INDIGNUM MEMORARE. 

Florentius’s copy of the Moralia brackets the auctorial text with an elaborate 

verbal and visual plan, schematically represented in table 2. 

As with Moterrafe’s City of God,toreadFlorentius’sMoralia sequentially is to be 

struck by the way the codex engages with its producers and its users---under our 

very fingers. One is also struck by the interpellative particularity with which those 

users and producers are evoked. Florentius’s opening section, for example, 

proleptically invokes the close, as the Alpha (f. 1v) requires Omega (f. 501r) to 

complete both alphabet and Biblical citation: ‘‘I am Alpha and Omega, the 

267


Figure 3. Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, MS 29, f. 273v. (detail). ‘‘Remember Aloysius the presbyter’’ 

[ALOITII PRESBITERI MEMORIA]. 

beginning and the end, saith the Lord God, who is, and who was, and who is to 

come’’. 20 Once our memory has thus glossed the Alpha with the Biblical passage, 

the codex is cast into Apocalyptic time, over which rules Christ in Majesty. There 

he is, opposite the Alpha, on the facing page’s apotheosis of the Book (f. 2r). Turn 

the page to 2v and there Christ is again---represented alphabetically by his 

monogram, the chrismon, from the arms of which dangle the alpha and omega 

that represent him metaphorically. Facing this page is the alphabetic labyrinth 

that evokes the unworthy scribe Florentius and interpellates his faithful reader. 

Perhaps the unfolding harmonies of this invocation evoked the glorious spread of 

the peacock’s tail on f. 3v (facing an expensive blank page) as much as did the 

bird’s proverbial association with the beauties of scripture. 21 

Florentius’s Moralia begins with Alpha and ends 501 folios later with Omega 

(for the closing sequence, see table 3). 22 

Before that last letter can close the book, however, Florentius has some 

things to say. On f. 499r, Florentius begins his ending thus: 

Here ends the Moralia of Pope Gregory the Roman, era 983 [=945 CE], Friday, 

April [11 th ] in the Easter season, at prime. In the reigns of King Ramiro and 

count Fernando and bishop Basilio. Blessed be the kingdom of heaven which has 

permitted me to reach the end of this book safely. AMEN. 23 

[Explicit liber moralium Gregorii romensis pape era DCCCCLXXXIIIa [III] idus 

aprilis VI feria pasce hora prima. deo gratias. regnante rex Ranemiro et comite 

Fredenando necnon et Basilio episcopo. Benedicto caeli quoque regem me qui 

ad istius libri finem uenire permisit incolomem. AMEN.] 

This conclusion is followed by the shocking silence of two facing pages left 

expensively blank. Then you turn the page and encounter another two-page 

spread: a full-page colophon on the left (f 500v, Color Plate 2) and the Omega 

on the right (501r). 

This second colophon is very carefully lettered and laid out: a full-page 

composition (remember how big these pages are!) made up of two major text 

blocks, each written in alternating lines of black and red display uncials, 

framed with a border of interlace and trompe-l’oeil cubes and squares. The 



Historia, MS 29, f. 170v (detail). ‘‘Remember 

Moterrafe the deacon’’ [MEMORIA 

DIACONUM MOTERRAFE]. 


Historia, MS 29, 276v. (detail). ‘‘Here 

Aloysius the presbyter stopped writing’’ 

[‘‘Hic cessavit Aloitius presbiter de scribere’’]. 

20 – (Apoc 1.8, Douay). 

21 – Cassiodorus compares the Psalms to the 

peacock’s fanned tail in Institutiones I.iv.3. That 

early Iberian bookmakers were aware of this 

connection is attested by the peacocks accompanying 

Psalms 85 and 126 in a copy of 

Cassiodorus’s Commentary on the Psalms made 

at San Millán in the late tenth century 

(Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia MS 8). 

22 – On this common practice in Iberian 

luxury codices of the period, see Mentre, 

Illuminated Manuscripts, pp. 97-8. 

23 – Text from Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, ‘‘Los 

prólogos y colofones de los códices de 

Florencio,’’ in Códices visigóticos en la monarquía 

leonesa (León: Centro de Estudios de 

Investigación ‘San Isidoro,’ 1983), p. 516. 

Though Florentius’s two colophons from MS 

80 are often cited, the entire text has never, to 

my knowledge, been published in translation. 

I have supplied the date in April (the 11th) 

from Florentius’s second colophon, where he 

gives the date as ‘‘III idus aprilis’’ (f. 500v.). He 

omitted the ‘‘iii’’ here, perhaps misled by the 

three ‘‘I’’s at the end of the year 983.


Figure 5. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España MS 80, f. 3r. ‘‘Remember unworthy Florentius’’ [Florentium indignum memorare]. 

Table 2. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 80. Opening Sequence. 

2-page spread f. 1v Alpha 

f. 2r Christ in majesty, with angels, evangelist symbols, and book 

2-page spread f. 2v Chrismon with Alpha and Omega 

f. 3r labyrinth: ‘‘FLORENTIUM INDIGNUM MEMORARE’’ 

2-page spread f. 3v peacock 

f. 4 r blank 

269


Table 3. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 80. Closing sequence. 

499r Colophon 1 

2-page 499v blank 

spread 500r blank 

2-page 500v Colophon 2 

spread 501r Omega 

501v blank except for catchword ‘‘lxii’’ 


Color Plate 2. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 

de España, MS 80, f.500v. Florentius’s 

Second Colophon.


24 – Neither Latin nor arithmetic is Florentius’s 

strong point. Like other early medieval Iberian 

scribes, he likes to give dates in elaborately 

roundabout ways. Megan McNamee pointed 

outtomethatthisapparentobsessionwith 

rendering numbers as equations---shared by 

other early medieval Iberian copyists of Latin--isnotasperverseasitseemstoamoderneye. 

Florentius and his contemporaries related to 

number through Roman numerals, and to 

produce or interpret a date in Roman numerals 

you have to do sums. I cannot see any way to 

render the Latin to make it agree with the date 

of era 983 in Colophon 1 (f. 499r). Díaz y Díaz 

(‘‘El Escriptorio,’’ p. 72, note 89) suggests that 

Florentius was trying to render the number ‘‘80’’ 

as 4x2x10: bis quater dena or bis dena quater. 

25 – Text from Díaz y Díaz, ‘‘Prólogos,’’ pp. 

516-17. 

26 – For more information on all of these 

historical figures, see Agustín Millares Carlo, 

‘‘Un códice notable de los libros morales de 

San Gregorio Magno sobre Job,’’ in his 

Estudios paleográficos (Madrid: s/n, 1918), pp. 

27-63. 

27 – Giving his age is a tic of Florentius’s: it is 

not without what feels like boastfulness, especially 

when he identifies himself as seventeen 

years old in a charter that he wrote (literally 

‘‘painted’’ [depinxit]) on 1 March 937 CE; see 

Williams, ‘‘Contribution to the History,’’ pp. 

232-35 . 

28 – Ferreolus of Uzès, Regula ad monachos 

XXVIII; in J.P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus 

... Series latina (Paris: Garnier, 1844-1904), 

vol. 66:969C. Discovery of the proto-Italian 

riddle is reported in Pio Rajna, ‘‘Un indovinello 

volgare scritto alla fine del secolo VIII o 

al principio del IX,’’ Speculum 3:3 (1928), pp. 

291-313. Thanks to Pierluigi Erbaggio for the 

reference. 

first text block repeats information from f. 499r, but adds detail and precision 

about places, persons and emotions: 

I say that with the support of thundering celestial mercy this work is finished on 

the third day before the ides of April, during the era nine times one hundred, 

twice ten, and four tens plus three. 24 At Valeránica, in the honor, namely, of its 

patrons, saints Peter and Paul, great apostles and martyrs. I, Florentius, 

inscribed this book, at the command of the whole monastery represented in 

abbot Silvanus, when I had accomplished twice ten and two or nearly five and 

double ten years of my little life. These things certainly being done, I copiously 

pray and amply request that you who shall read this codex might direct your 

frequent prayer to the Lord for me, miserable Florentius, that we might deserve 

to please Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. 

And so, with the assent of the world and the world’s creator, may we be freed 

from outer or inner blemish in this uncertain age, even as received on high out of 

this miserable sojourn and gathered to the chorus of the bountiful blessed ones, 

for long happy ages rejoicing continually in heaven. May we be joined to our 

chief, Christ, who draws us unto himself. Amen. Indeed it may be that this work 

will snatch me out of the fire so that I may deserve to gain the blessed kingdoms 

of the sky. Amen. Which thing may he deign to bring to pass. 

[Suffragante tonanti inquam alti clementia perfectum est hoc opus III idus 

aprilis currente era centena nobies bis dena et quater decies terna. ob honorem 

scilicet sanctorum Petri et Pauli maximi apostolorum et martirum domum dicatum 

locum situm uel uocitatum Baleria. hic nempe liber ego Florentius exaraui 

imperante mihi uel uniuersa congeries sacra monasterii Silbani uidelicet abbati. 

quum iam meae etatulae annorum spatia peregissem bis deni bini aut circiter 

quini et bisdeni. His nempe explosis copiosissime uobis praecor et affatim rogo qui 

in hoc codice legeritis ut frequens uestra pro me Florentio misero ad dominum 

dirigatur oratio ita ut in hac uita placere mereamini domino Ihu Xpo. Amen. 

Et ita in hoc labili exemti euo fore queamini annuente arbe polique conditor ab 

interno externoque neuo qualiter ex hac sursum adsciti deflenda peregrinatio 

iucundemur almorum adglomerati beatorum coro longo felicique euo obantes 

iugiter in polo innecti capiti nostro traente Christo. Amen. Hoc opus hoc etenim 

forsan me subtraet ab igne ut merear adipisci regna beata poli. Amen. quod ipse 

prestare dignetur.] 25 

Obviously once was not enough. We already know that the book was finished 

on Friday, 11 April 945 CE at prime---that is, 6 AM. Now Florentius reckons 

the time by politics as well as calendar: Ramiro was king in León and Fernán 

González was count of Castile. We know that the book was made in the see of 

bishop Basilius at the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Valeránica, under 

the government of Abbot Silvanus. 26 We know that the book was made by 

someone named Florentius, and that by his reckoning he was 22 or 25 years 

old at the time. 27 He of course asks that we pray for him. 

‘‘I, Florentius, inscribed this book’’ [‘‘Hic nempe liber ego Florentius exaraui’’]: 

the verb he uses for his activity is worth our attention. Exarare does mean to write, 

but it is a buried metaphor, from arare, to plow. Of the words at his disposal to 

describe his work, Florentius has chosen the dirtiest, sweatiest one, and with good 

precedent: the sixth-century commentary on Benedict’s Rule by Ferreolus of 

Uzès, for example, commanded that one ‘‘who does not write the earth with the 

plow must embellish the page with his finger’’ [‘‘ut paginam pingat digito, qui 

terram non praescribit aratro’’], and the first surviving text in proto-Italian (ninthor 

tenth-century) is a riddle turning on this very identification of pen with plow. 28 

271


In the next text block of the second colophon, Florentius goes out of his way 

to make clear that painting a page with the fingers is labor as backbreaking as 

writing the soil with a plow. 

The labor of the scribe is the refreshment of the reader: one damages the body, 

the other benefits the mind. Whoever you are, therefore, who benefit from this 

work, do not neglect to remember the working laborer: and so may God, thus 

invoked, forget your faults. Amen. And for the voice of your prayers may you 

receive your reward in the time of judgment when the Lord will command that 

retribution be distributed to his saints. One who knows little of writing thinks it 

no labor at all. For if you want to know I will explain to you in detail how heavy is 

the burden of writing. It makes the eyes misty. It twists the back. It breaks the ribs 

and belly. It makes the kidneys ache and fills the whole body with every kind of 

annoyance. So, reader, turn the pages slowly, and keep your fingers far away 

from the letters, for just as hail damages crops, so a useless reader ruins both 

writing and book. For as homeport is sweet to the sailor, so is the final line sweet 

to the writer. Explicit. Thanks be to God always. 

[Labor scribentis refectio est legentis hic deficit corpore ille proficit mente 

quisquis ergo in hoc proficis opere operarii laborantis non dedignemini meminisse 

ut dominus inuocatus inmemor sit iniquitatibus tuis. Amen. Et pro uocem tuae 

orationis mercedem recipies in tempore iudicii quando dominus sanctis suis 

retribuere iusserit retributionem. quia qui nescit scribere laborem nullum extimat 

esse nam si uelis scire singulatim nuntio tibi quam grabe est scribturae pondus. 

oculis caliginem facit. dorsum incurbat. costas et uentrem frangit. renibus dolorem 

inmittit et omne corpus fastidium nutrit. ideo tu lector lente folias uersa. longe a 

litteris digitos tene quia sicut grando fecunditatem telluris tollit sic lector inutilis 

scribturam et librum euertit. Nam quam suauis est nauigantibus portum extremum 

ita et scribtori nobissimus uersus. Explicit. deo gratias semper.] 

Though Florentius surely did not compose every word of this, as a visual and 

verbal whole this is unique in the period, in Iberia or elsewhere. 29 It is a bravura 

performance, and his contemporaries knew it---only four years after the Moralia 

was finished, the scribe Endura incorporated great chunks of Florentius’s colophon 

into a copy of Cassiodorus made at the monastery of Cardeña, 30 and in 

1091 a scribe named Monnius copied it verbatim at the end of an Apocalypse 

commentary (the ‘‘Silos Beatus’’), while making the appropriate modifications to 

names and dates. Florentius himself used it again in the massive collection of 

Homilies by Smaragdus of Saint Mihiel that he copied before 953. 31 

This is no hasty afterthought, visually or verbally. It must have taken days 

to design and execute, much longer than, say, an unadorned folio or two of 

Gregory’s commentary. Ironically, however, Florentius’s letters are in fact 

quite worn by human touch; in the Middle Ages, even a beautiful page that 

says explicitly Hands Off! is an inviting surface for lovers of the graphic trace. 

In the wide left margin of Florentius’s farewell there is a braided doodle: 

someone is trying to imitate the trompe-l’oeil pattern of the page’s frame 

(figure 6). 

And at the bottom of the page, another early medieval writer answers 

Florentius’s call to attention with his own, writing in an unplanned and 

ungrammatical hand this gnomic statement: ‘‘For the purpose of desiring 

the kingdom, you lost the sense [or: your understanding]. Open the sense [or: 

your understanding] and you shall win the kingdom.’’ [‘‘ad concupiscendum 

regnum perdisti sensum. aperi sensum et adquires regnum’’] (figure 7). 


29 – Exact sources are not traceable, but some 

of the more striking phrases in Florentius’s 

colophon in MS 80 are found in contemporary 

or slightly older manuscripts; e.g., ‘‘Rogo 

te, lector, que et manus mudas in spatium 

teneas, ne littera deleas’’ (Madrid, Real 

Academia de la Historia MS 24, f. 149r). Cf. in 

Benectines of Bouveret, Colophons de manuscrits 

occidentaux des origines au XI e siècle (Fribourg: 

Éditions Universitaires, 1965), colophons 

4784 (Corbie, 9 th c.), 12368 (Tours, 10 th .); 

23108 (9 th c.). None, however, is quite as elaborate 

as Florentius’s. Aldred’s 10th-century 

colophon to the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of 

the most well-known of early colophons, is 

quite a different beast; cf. figure 1a in 

Lawrence Nees, ‘‘Reading Aldred’s 

Colophon for the Lindisfarne Gospels,’’ 

Speculum 78:2 (2003), pp. 333-77. Díaz y Díaz 

puts it best when he says ‘‘es necesario 

advertir que la acumulación de ellos [sc. 

tópicos de escriba] en estos prólogos de 

Florencio rebasa cuanto pueda uno imaginar’’ 

(‘‘El Escriptorio,’’ p. 70, note 57). 

30 – Endura’s colophon: Manchester, 

Rylands lat. 99, text in Manuel C. Díaz y 

Díaz, ‘‘Testimonios de manuscritos leoneses,’’ 

in Códices visigóticos en la monarquía leonesa, 

p. 335; Monnius’s colophon: British Library 

Add. MS 11695, f. 277v. For more on the 

transmission of Florentius’s colophon, see 

John Williams, ‘‘Meyer Schapiro in Silos: 

Pursuing an Iconography of Style,’’ Art Bulletin 

85:3 (2003), 442-68, see p. 456, and Díaz y 

Díaz, ‘‘El Escriptorio.’’ 

31 – Córdoba, Archivo de la Catedral, MS 1, 

ff. 3r-4r; text in Díaz y Díaz, ‘‘Prólogos,’’ pp. 

514-16.


Figure 6. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de 

España, MS 80, f. 500v (detail). A reader 

imitates Florentius’s boxes. 

32 – It is also possible that the gloss is a 

quotation, perhaps echoing Wisdom 6:21: 

‘‘Therefore the desire of wisdom bringeth to 

the everlasting kingdom’’ [concupiscentia 

itaque sapientiae deducet ad regnum perpetuum 

(Vulgate)]. 

33 – Calligrapher Ewan Clayton surveys 

colophons and illustrations of scribes at work 

and finds many of the representations quite 

accurate. He could almost be quoting 

Florentius when he observes that ‘‘many calligraphers 

bend towards their work in order to 

see it better, but bending causes stresses and 

strains. . . Bending tightens the muscles of the 

back and therefore inhibits the free, relaxed 

movement of the arm. It also cramps the 

stomach, which moves up into the chest cavity 

forcing the scribe to breathe in a shallow 

way’’ (‘‘Workplaces for Writing,’’ in Pen in 

Hand, ed. Gullick, p. 10). 

34 – Much of the little man on the right of 

Biblioteca Nacional de España MS 80, f. 501r 

is missing, lost to a wide horizontal tear. 

Florentius would say: ‘‘Just as hail damages 

crops, so a useless reader ruins both writing 

and book.’’ 

In his own way, this cryptic annotator is participating in Florentius’s page, 

though the lived context that produced his intervention is absolutely irretrievable. 

32 A ‘‘you’’ is addressed, a kingdom desired, senses lost and opened. But who 

that ‘‘you’’ might be, what kind of kingdom (earthly? celestial?), what kind of 

sense (perceptual? hermeneutic?) might be at issue we will never know. 

Whatever the sense of his intervention might have been, as soon as the annotator 

lifted his pen from the page, his cryptic line has interpellated all future users of 

this book, tossing us a puzzle that writes senses (intellectual, hermeneutic, 

perceptual) into the codex as surely as did Florentius’s labyrinthine request 

that we remember him (on f. 3r) or Moterrafe’s coded injunction to keep him 

in mind (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, MS 29, f. 170v). 

Florentius’s page and our understanding now provide the context for this 

inscription, and if we take it as being about the relation between meaninghunting 

and the kingdom (of heaven?), we are negotiating the same materialimmaterial 

ratio that the colophon has already laid out for its future users. In 

Florentius’s colophon, reading and writing are linked by reverse analogy 

(labor:refreshment; damage:benefit), and scribe and reader are linked both 

immaterially, through the atemporal links of prayer and imagination (the 

scribe thinks of the reader; the reader remembers the scribe), and materially, 

with the codex---this very codex---as object correlative. The colophon reminds us 

that, in this book, we are not just reading Gregory’s words, we are reading 

Florentius’s, too. We are not just reading a book, a codex, or even a ‘‘text’’; we 

are reading human activity, and we are being told to pay as much attention to 

the ink as to what is ‘‘said’’ by the words it makes–and to pay as much 

attention to the invisible sweat the text teaches us to imagine on the page as 

we do to the visible ink. 33 

There remains one last letter, the last letter: Omega. As he began his Moralia 

with Alpha (f.1v), Florentius ends it with Omega (f. 501r). The page has been 

damaged, but it is clear that this letter has sprung all sorts of life: leaves and 

branches and, from the center axis, a compass-drawn flowering tree, watched 

over by birds nesting on the Omega’s upright horns. The whole structure is 

supported by two little men, their legs splayed for stability and their arms 

raised, palms open. 34 

273


Florentius ended the Bible he copied in 943 with a similar design. All but a 

dozen leaves of that codex have since disappeared, 35 but we know what it 

looked like because on 20 July, 960, Florentius’s student Sanctius completed a 

copy of it (León, Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, MS 2). On folio 514r of 

Sanctius’s 960 Bible there is another Omega (figure 8). 

Like the Omega at the end of the Moralia, this one is also supported by two little 

figures. Here, however, they hold out goblets, presumably of wine. Labels above 

their heads tell us who they are: On the right, ‘‘SANCTIUS PRESBITER’’ and on the 

left, ‘‘FLORENTIUS CONFESSOR.’’ In the text under their goblets they address each 

other: ‘‘O my dearest disciple Sanctius, presbyter, overflowing with joy. Let us 

bless the king of heaven who allowed us to come safely to the end of this book’’ 

[‘‘O Karissimo micique dilecti discipulo pregaudio retaxando Sanctioni presbitero. 

Benedicamus celi quoque regem nos qui ad istius libri finem venire permisit 

incolumnes. Amen’’]. Sanctius replies: ‘‘I say the same, Master: Let us praise our 

God Jesus Christ, that he might lead us to the kingdom of heaven. Amen.’’ [‘‘Et 

iterum dico Magister benedicamus Dominum nostrum Iesu Christum in secula 

seculorum que nos perducat ad regna celorum. Amen.’’] 36 

It is simpler in Florentius’s Moralia: on f. 501r, around the Omega and its 

supporting actors, a capital letter in each corner of the page, starting with the 

upper left and moving clockwise: F-I-N-IS. Finis. The End. 

Gregory’s Stomach 

Of making many books there is no end: and much study is an affliction of the 

flesh. (Eccles. 12.12) 

Read for the meaning, the scribes tell us, but remember the pen. Perhaps it is 

time to go back to Gregory, for, oddly enough, it may well be from him that 

Florentius and garrulous Iberian scribes like him learned to articulate themselves 

with their reading and their writing. 37 

Gregory’s works had been in wide circulation in the Peninsula since Taio, 

bishop of Zaragoza (d. 683) rediscovered the Moralia on a trip to Rome, and 

wrote that was he so entranced by them that he became a book-worker himself: 

So when I arrived in Rome I diligently sought those volumes which were lacking 

in Spain so that, having found them, I might transcribe them with my own hand, 

so much had the sweetness of the words delighted my soul with ineffable 

delicacy. 

[Igitur quum Rome positus eius que in Hispaniis deerant uolumina sedulus 

uestigator perquirerem iuentaque propria manu transcriberem tantaque dulcedo 

uerborum animum meum inextimabili suauitate mulceret.] 38 

From that transcription, Taio says he made an edition in six volumes [in sex 

codicibus], and brought it home to Zaragoza with him. And then began their 


Figure 7. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de 

España, MS 80, f 500v (bottom center detail). 

Below Florentius’s explicit (top), a reader adds: 

‘‘For the purpose of desiring the kingdom, you 

lost the sense [or : Your understanding]. Open 

the sense and you shall win the kingdom.’’ [‘‘ad 

concupiscendum regnum perdisti sensum. aperi 

sensum et adquires regnum’’]. 

35 – On this lost Bible, see Teófilo Ayuso 

Marazuela, La Biblia de Oña: Notable fragmento 

casi desconocido de un códice visigótico homogeneo de 

la Biblia de San Isidoro de León (Zaragoza: 

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones 

Científicas, 1945) and John Williams, ‘‘A 

Model for the León Bibles,’’ Madrider 

Mitteilungen 8 (1967), pp. 281-86. 

36 – Transcription silently resolves 

abbreviations. 

37 – Elizabeth Sears’s elegant study of a 

manuscript of Isidore’s Etymologies copied in 

Germany in the early 1160s explores, in a 

different chronological and geographical 

context, the mutual articulation of scribal self, 

scribal labor, codex, and readers that concern 

us here (‘‘The Afterlife of Scribes: Swicher’s 

Prayer in the Prüfening Isidore,’’ in Pen in 

Hand, ed. Gullick, pp. 75-96). 

38 – Text from Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, 

‘‘Gregorio Magno y Tajón de Zaragoza,’’ in 

Libros y librerías en la Rioja altomedieval (Logroño: 

Diputación Provincial, 1979), pp. 344-45.


Figure 8. León, Real Colegiata de San 

Isidoro, MS 2, f. 514r. Florentius and Sanctius 

toast each other. Photo courtesy of John 

Williams. 

39 – Agustín Millares Carlo, Corpus de códices 

visigóticos; eds Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, A. M. 

Mundó, J. M. Ruiz Asencio, B. Casado 

Quintanilla and E. Lecuona Ribot. 2 vols. 

(Las Palmas: Universidad de Educación a 

Distancia, 1999). For manuscripts of the 

Moralia, see the codices in this collection 

numbered 4, 10, 39, 42, 89, 95, 131, 137, 152, 

176, 196, 219, 288, 309, 314. On the Moralia in 

the Peninsula, see Millares Carlo, Contribución 

al corpus de códices visigóticos, Publicaciones de la 

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de 

Madrid (Madrid: Tipografía de Archivos, 

1931), vol. 1, pp. 177-99; Luciano Serrano, ‘‘La 

obra Morales de San Gregorio en la literatura 

hispano goda,’’ Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas, y 

Museos 25 (1911), pp. 482-97. 

diffusion: hugely popular in monastic communities, they account for fifteen of 

the 352 codices in the Corpus de códices visigóticos. 39 

Under Florentius’s hands, the Moralia are not just thirty-five books of 

commentary on Job. They supply a veritable bookishness machine, that, 

like the marginal glosses of Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia MS 29, 

ties the exegetical Work to the human work that produced it, and makes the 

meanings of both intimately interdependent. Florentius’s paratext to the 

Moralia includes, in order: Saint Jerome’s prefaces to Job, the Biblical text, 

the letter by Taio to Eugenius, bishop of Toledo, an account of Taio’s 

miraculous discovery of the autograph manuscript of the Moralia, an index 

of the works of Gregory the Great, and a profile of the sainted pope by Isidore 

275


of Seville. 40 Only after this elaborate framing does Gregory’s own introduction 

begin (f. 16v), and once we have paged through Gregory’s prefaces, the 

elaborate framing of MS 80 opens up its fullest sense. 

In the opening Letter to Leander of Seville, Gregory describes the circumstances---and 

mechanics---of the Moralia’s production, from oral commentary 

to a writing-attentive revision, based on notes taken by hearers and dictated to 

a waiting scribe, ending, finally, with the thirty-five-book commentary that 

the letter purports to present as a gift to the Sevillian bishop. 

I expounded the first parts of the book in talks for the assembled brethren and 

then, because I found my time a little freer, I dictated my exposition of the rest of 

the book. Later, when there was more time, I went back revising all that had 

been taken down in my presence as I spoke into books, adding much new 

material, taking away a little, and leaving a fair amount as it was. 

[eisdem coram positis fratribus priora libri sub oculis dixi et, quia tempus 

paulo uacantius repperi, posteriora tractando dictaui, cum que mihi spatia 

largiora suppeterent, multa augens pauca subtrahens atque ita, ut inuenta 

sunt, nonnulla derelinquens ea, quae me loquente excepta sub oculis fuerant, 

per libros emendando composui] 41 

As Florentius’s prefatory material grounds his codex of the Moralia in its 

editorial and scribal transmission (Taio’s letter, the story of how he found 

the autograph Moralia, Florentius’s labyrinth and colophons), so Gregory’s 

introductions ground the Moralia in the circumstances of its own composition, 

and in the very particular and bodily experience of the ‘‘I’’ who composed it. 

Though by his own account, Gregory made books by dictation and not by 

hand, his engagement with text was anything but disembodied. 42 Early in the 

letter to Leander of Seville that introduces the Moralia, Gregory explains: 

‘‘Many years have now run their course while I have been troubled by 

frequent disorders of the stomach. I am bothered at all hours by weakness 

from the enfeebling of my digestion, and I struggle to draw breath in the midst 

of mild but constant fevers’’ [‘‘Multa quippe annorum iam curricula deuoluuntur, 

quod crebris uiscerum doloribus crucior, horis momentis que omnibus 

fracta stomachi uirtute lassesco, lentis quidem, sed tamen continuis 

febribus anhelo’’]. 43 Lest his reader take this statement as mere confession 

or complaint, Gregory moralizes: ‘‘perhaps this was the divine plan, that in 

my trials I should tell of the trials of Job and that I would better understand the 

mind of one so scourged if I felt the lash myself.’’ [‘‘fortasse hoc diuinae 

prouidentiae consilium fuit, ut percussum iob percussus exponerem, et flagellati 

mentem melius per flagella sentirem’’]. 44 So the vivid description of 

Gregory’s physical distress has as much of hermeneutics as it does of confession. 

So too, in the closing bracket of the Moralia, where, after thirty-five 

books’ worth of intimate engagement with the book of Job, Gregory turns in 

once again to represent the effect of that engagement on this (very 

Augustinian) reading and writing self: 

Now that this work is finished, I see that I must return to myself. For, even when 

it attempts to speak rightly, our mind is scattered outside itself. For words are 

thought of and expressed, they diminish the integrity of the soul because they 

draw it out of itself . . . Therefore I beg that anyone who reads this lay out the 

solace of his prayer for me before the strict judge, and that all he finds sordid in 

me might be cleansed by his tears. When I compare the virtue of his prayer with 


40 – For details of the contents of Biblioteca 

Nacional de España MS 80, see the entry in 

Martín de la Torre and Pedro Longás, 

Catálogo de códices latinos. I. Bíblicos (Madrid: 

Patronato de la Biblioteca Nacional, 1935). 

Díaz y Díaz (‘‘Gregorio Magno y Tajón de 

Zaragoza’’) offers a fuller discussion of this 

paratextual dossier in early medieval Iberian 

manuscripts of the Moralia. 

41 – Moralia, Ad Leandrum 2, ed. Adriaen, 

vol. 143: p. 3; trans. O’Donnell, available 

online at http://www9.georgetown.edu/ 

faculty/jod/texts/moralia1.html (accessed 14 

January 2011). This characteristic preoccupation 

with textual transmission receives visual 

and narrative form in the iconographic tradition 

of ‘‘The Inspiration of Gregory,’’ in 

which Gregory’s scribe peeks through the 

curtain separating him from his dictating 

master, and sees the saintly Pope receiving his 

dictation from the Holy Spirit. The most 

striking image---also 10 th c.---is perhaps in 

Hartker’s Antiphoner (c. 990-1000 CE), St 

Gall Stiftsbibl. 390, p. 13, now available online 

at http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/csg/ 

0390/13 (accessed 2 September 2010). For 

more, see Camille, ‘‘Gregorian Definition 

Revised,’’ p. 92; Andrea Budgey and Randall 

A. Rosenfeld, ‘‘The Portrait of the Music 

Scribe in Hartker’s Antiphoner’’ in Pen in 

Hand, ed. Gullick, pp. 19-30. 

42 – The visual tradition flouts Gregory’s 

warning as much as the scribal tradition 

does---Conrad Rudolph notes that the 

Cîteaux Moralia (Dijon, Bibliothèque 

Municipale MSS 168, 169, 170, 173) contains 

an initial painting of Job writing the book of 

‘‘Job’’ (Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and 

Polemics in the Cîteaux ‘‘Moralia In Job’’ 

[Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 

1997], fig. 7). A manuscript of Moralia c. 1170- 

75 from Frankendahl shows Gregory himself 

as the initial I in ‘‘igitur,’’ pen in hand, at work 

on the following letter G (Michael Gullick, 

‘‘Self-Referential Artist and Scribe Portraits 

in Romanesque Manuscripts,’’ in Pen in Hand, 

ed. Gullick, fig. 13). 

43 – Moralia, Ad Leandrum V; ed. Adriaen, 

vol. 143, p. 6; trans. O’Donnell, available 


faculty/jod/texts/moralia1.html (accessed 14 

January 2011). 

44 – Moralia, Ad Leandrum V; ed. Adriaen, 

vol. 143, p. 6; trans. James J. O’Donnell, 

available online at http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/texts/moralia1.html 

(accessed 14 January 2011). For Gregory’s 

explicit identification with suffering in Job 

and Ezekiel, see Carole Ellen Straw, Gregory 

the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, (Berkeley, 

Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), 

184-85.


45 – Moralia XXXV.20.49; ed. Adriaen, vol. 

143B, pp. 1810-11; trans. O’Donnell, available 


faculty/jod/texts/moralia5 (accessed 14 

January 2011). 

46 – ‘‘That scribes came to feel an intimate 

bond with the authors whose work they copied 

is attested in scribal colophons: together 

author and scribe ‘write’ the book that the 

reader reads’’ (Sears, ‘‘ The Afterlife of 

Scribes,’’ p. 90). 

47 – Gregory himself does not seem to use the 

term tropologia in the Moralia, preferring its 

synonym moralitas. Whatever term we use for 

it, this kind of reading that turns the reader’s 

thought to a newly-estranged self and its processes 

is the engine of the Moralia. ‘‘Holy 

scripture is set before the eyes of the mind like 

a kind of mirror, that we may see in it our 

inner face. For there we learn about our 

foulness and our beauty’’ (Moralia II.1.1; ed. 

Adriaen, vol. 143, p. 59). 

48 – Saint Jerome, Homiliae in Marcum IV; text 

from St Jerome: Homelies sur Marc, ed. Germain 

Morin, Sources chretiennes 494, (Paris: Cerf, 

2005), pp 132-34. 

49 – Conrad Rudolph makes a similar suggestion 

for the Cîteaux Moralia of 1111 (Violence 

and Daily Life, pp. 86-7), though his focus is on 

the spiritual and physical struggle of monastic 

life rather than, as here, on book production 

and use. 

50 – Cassiodorus, Institutiones I.30.1; ed. 

Mynors, p. 75; trans. Jones, p. 133. 

that of my commentary, [I see that] my reader will repay me well if, for the 

words he receives from me offers his tears in return. 

[Expleto itaque hoc opere, ad me mihi uideo esse redeundum. Multum 

quippe mens nostra etiam cum recte loqui conatur, extra semetipsam 

spargitur. Integritatem namque animi, dum cogitantur uerba qualiter proferantur, 

quia eum trahunt extrinsecus, minuunt. . . . Igitur quaeso ut quisquis haec 

legerit, apud districtum iudicem solatium mihi suae orationis impendat, et omne 

quod in me sordidum deprehendit fletibus diluat. Orationis autem atque expositionis 

uirtute collata, lector meus in recompensatione me superat, si cum per 

me uerba accipit, pro me lacrimas reddit.] 45 

Both Gregory and these Hispano-Latin scribes cast their textual interventions in 

a first person precisely articulated with the contingent conditions of book 

production and the contingent particulars of time and place. For Gregory, as 

for Florentius, Vigila, and the scribes of Real Academia de la Historia MS 29, 

the book, the book user, and the book maker are engaged in relations of mutual 

analogy. Gregory’s first-person framing of the Moralia makes plain the painful 

and extended intimacy with scriptural text that produced the commentary, the 

methods and activity of which are, in turn, predicated upon such intimacy. 46 

The goal of the reading method modeled in the Moralia is that this pattern will be 

repeated as readers encounter both the Moralia and the biblical text from which 

it grows. There is a technical term for such difficult yet urgent intimacy: 

tropology, the inward turning of the person engaged with scripture to see the 

image of the text within her/his own soul, and vice-versa. And Gregory in the 

Moralia is both master and model of it. 47 

In short, to engage with books like Gregory’s Moralia and Augustine’s City of 

God---especially in their manuscript form---is to enter a world in which the health 

of both body and soul is at stake, for author, writer, painter, and reader alike. In 

the world constructed by these codices, engaging with authoritative writing is a 

high-stakes undertaking of the most intimate kind. The multiplication, distribution, 

and consumption of meaningful text is not as easy a matter for these 

writers as, say, the miraculous distribution of loaves and fishes in Mark, to 

which such textual engagement was often compared. In a sermon on that 

gospel story, Saint Jerome wrote that ‘‘We must know even the veins and 

flesh of scripture, so that once we have understood that scripture, we might 

be able to see its meaning’’ [‘‘Debemus enim scire venas ipsas carnesque 

scripturarum, ut cum intellexerimus ipsam scripturam, postea sensum uidere 

possimus’’]. 48 To know the veins and flesh of writing, you have to get your 

hands dirty. 

I would like to suggest that, mutatis mutandis, a tropological intensity akin to 

Gregory’s is found in the scribal interventions under study here. 49 Even though, 

as Cassiodorus says, ‘‘Every word of the Lord written by the scribe is a wound 

inflicted on Satan’’ [‘‘tot enim vulnera Satanas accipit, quot antiquarius Domini 

verba describit’’], 50 scribes still had their worries and weaknesses, and the slow, 

hard work of transcription offered plenty of time to think about them, should 

they have been so disposed. Even if they were not particularly introspective, 

scribes were engaged, willy – nilly, in an intense and long-term relationship with 

both their copy-texts and the gatherings that filled day after slow day with their 

handwriting. This relationship was always corporeal; in some cases, depending 

on the inclinations and gifts of the scribe, and the importance of the project, it 

was a creative, intellectual, and spiritual engagement as well. 

277


‘‘You, (t)here: remember me,’’ the scribes say. So the net of vectors is 

thrown out to include the time of reading as well as the time of writing. 

Thus the time-marking annotations in the manuscript of City of God with 

which we began only make explicit the performative unspooling of embodied 

time that is implicit in every text written by hand and that performs itself, over 

and over again, with every reading of the manuscript. 

278 CATHERINE BROWN

Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval ...

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