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

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Downloaded by [catherine brown] at 13:48 24 October 2011 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 276 CATHERINE BROWN 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 online at http://www9.georgetown.edu/ 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.
Downloaded by [catherine brown] at 13:48 24 October 2011 45 – Moralia XXXV.20.49; ed. Adriaen, vol. 143B, pp. 1810-11; trans. O’Donnell, available online at http://www9.georgetown.edu/ 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
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