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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

$(Die Maus u\250ber Liebe - \(Cartoon with children explaining love ...$

Downloaded by [catherine brown] at 13:48 24 October 2011 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
Downloaded by [catherine brown] at 13:48 24 October 2011 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
Page 1: This article was downloaded by: [ca
Page 5 and 6: Downloaded by [catherine brown] at

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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?