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

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Downloaded by [catherine brown] at 13:48 24 October 2011 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
Downloaded by [catherine brown] at 13:48 24 October 2011 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
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