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

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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).
272 CATHERINE BROWN
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.