One of the most famous of all medieval pronouncements on art, and yet onewhich has as yet stimulated little research, is Gregory the Great's dictum thatpictures are the books of the illiterate ' One of the many who subsequentlyrepeated Gregory's didactic explanation was the twelfth-century artist of thePsalter of Christina of Markyate, called the St Albans Psalter, that first greatproduct of English Romanesque manuscript illumination He copied it on onepage first in Latin then in Insular French (the two literate languages which theeducated class in England after 1066 were encouraged to prefer to the nativeEnglish), probably as textual justification for his forty, totally textless full-pagepictures of Christ's life:
For it is one thing to venerate a picture and another to learn the story itdepicts, which is to be venerated. The picture is for simple men [ignoranz inthe French version] what writing is for those who can read, for those whocannot read see and learn from the picture the model which they shouldfollow. Thus pictures are, above all, for the instruction of the people '^
The relationship between text and image has become something of afashionable form in contemporary art history, yet it has always been animportant metaphor for the medievalist, ever since Emile Male saw the Gothiccathedrals as 'first and foremost a sacred writing of which every artist mustlearn the characters' ^ Such analogies tend to take the actual processes ofreading and writing (as the medievals understood them) for granted. The StAlbans Psalter was written, illuminated and read in a culture whose patterns ofcommunication and expectation were primarily oral. The question of how thisorality functions in the twelfth-century image is addressed in the first part ofthis study. Looking at Gregory's statement in this context it is then possible toexplore whether pictures really could become 'text-substitutes' for the illiterateand also whether equivalences existed between different forms of visual art andthe varying reading skills of their audiences. Is there for example, as hasrecently been suggested, a parallel between the development of vernacularliteracy in the thirteenth century and the increasing naturalism of Gothic art?*
Some of the wide-ranging cultural consequences of reading and wnting areonly just beginning to be understood by historians,^ what follows is acontribution from the visual point of view, an examination of how twelfth- andthirteenth-century images, notably within the spaces of the read text itself, inmanuscript illuminations, can be crucial evidence for changing patterns oflinguistic experience
I VOX SIGNIFICANS REM SEEING AND SPEAKING
That much of the visual art of the twelfth century was not so much anexpression of the visible world, as of the spoken word in a still predominantlyoral society, is apparent in three of the four coloured drawings which are theonly pictorial material in the text of the Chronicle of Florence and John of Worcester,Oxford, Corpus Chnsti College, MS 157 (plate 1) ^ Although incorporatedinto what is a typical example of the commemorative written record, themonastic Chronicle, they are presented as information transmitted directly byword of mouth King Henry I had experienced three dreams in which he wasattacked by three orders of society, the laboratores, bellatores and oratorescomplaining of high taxes The chronicler, John of Worcester, had heard ofthese some years after the event (they appear under the year 1130) from theroyal physician Grimbald, as the text, squeezed around the illustrations hererelates' 'Erat ltaque lste medicinae artispentus, Grimbaldus nomine, qui apudWincelcumb, me presente et audiente, narravit' ^ This oral witness, so vitallypresent in telling the story, appears seated in the left margin of each of thethree scenes. Unlike the content of the three parts of the vision themselves,with their red and ochre backgrounds, he is placed agamst the bare vellum, inwhat IS the space reserved for scribal amendments in the rest of themanuscript, as a distinct commentator, separated by the text of his report
In this period there was still a general mistrust of texts As MichaelClanchy has demonstrated, when it came to legal matters people were exactlythe opposite of today's literates, who 'want it in writing' ^ Charters, forexample, were ur\d2Lt&A, post factum records of verbal transactions that recordedthe names of the witnesses who had observed, and moreover, heard thecovenanting words. There existed an interdependence of the oral with thewntten tradition which meant that the only way to secure the truth of astatement was by seeing and hearing. Clanchy associates the use of seals withthis continued desire for the physical tokens of bearing witness and even thewritten document itself was used to serve 'the ancient function of a symbolicobject'^ Such is the case with the individual source of John of Worcester'snarrative; Grimbald provides a useful set of conventions for making itimmediately clear to the reader (who still likes his history 'told') the oralorigins of the text in experience.
The most obvious visual convention in each of the first two appearances ofthe physician is the raised and elegantly curving index finger of his righthand.'° This, one of the most pervasive of all twelfth-century schemata, has itsroots in the classical tradition of picturing the rhetorical declamatio, which Early
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Christian artists had adapted from images of the pagan philosopher for God'sgestures of Benediction and Creation. In Old Testament illustration the'voice' of the Lord is often represented in this form as a pointing handemerging from the clouds The pointing index finger was a universal sign ofacoustical performance, the speaking subject, or as in the case of Grimbald inthe Chronicle (plate 1) a neat way of expressing the oral witness within thewritten text It is in this sense that we should see the aim of artists in thisperiod to evoke the sound of the voice (which relayed the matter of the word)rather than duplicate the look of the world Thus a twelfth-century Homilydescribing a painting of the Massacre of the Innocents states that 'although theartist was not able to imbue his figures with a voice, he signified the laments inhis drawings' '̂ Often when an image is praised for what we would call its'naturalistic qualities', these are measured by the expression of vocal utteranceand even those who condemned lllusionism in pictures, like the author of thetract Pictor in Carmine admitted that they could 'make the stones cry out and apainted wall declare the wonderful works of God, after a fashion' '̂ Of coursethis IS a common topos of ancient rhetoric based on the Philostratean tradition ofekphrasis as well as the Horatian ut pictura poesis theme which was known towriters of the Middle Ages '^ But right up to the visibile parlare of Dante'sPurgatorio X, the idea seems also to encompass what could be a real responseto images It was certainly always present in those of a more mystical trend,like St John Chrysostom in the very early period, who would have an icon of StPaul before him when reading the Gospels 'and when he looked at the pictureIt would seem to come to life and speak to him' '̂ We shall, however, have toseek further than these rhetorical descriptions or their formulaic representationin the speech gesture and attempt to understand how medieval images actuallybecame performative m themselves, indeed how they were 'spoken'
St Benedict's fear that monastic reading might endanger the rule of silenceshould be remembered as we tremulously turn the pages of medievalmanuscripts in the sterile hush of the modern library Retrieving the readinghabits of the twelfth century places the manuscript illumination, not in thevisual layout of a text, but m its demonstrative expression in the act of lectio.Reading was a matter of hearing and speaking, not of seeing As MichaelClanchy notes, 'the skill of eye and hand are associated primarily withcraftsmanship and the visual arts and the skills of language which dependupon the transmission of sound are identified with mouth and ear.''^ As well asreading aloud there was writing aloud, for according to the Psalmist 'Mytongue IS the pen of a ready writer'.'^ Often dictated to a scribe (plate 8)writing was only the process of making a fair copy and did not entitle a scribeto necessarily call himself a htteratus. To be termed literate meant one couldunderstand and enter into the discourse of Latin as a living language ratherthan merely copy the 'killing' letter.
This separation of visual writing from its verbal meaning has implicationsfor the decorated initials in the period which really served as a supportiveframework for the reader, being clues for starting and stopping. CarlNordenfalk has compared some book illuminations to 'musical notes andgramophone records, tools for musical performance'.'^ This parallel is
28
1 Gnmbald recounts the Dreams ofHenry I Chroracle of Florence and John ofWorcester, Oxford, Corpus ChnstiCollege, MS 157, p 382
2 A bear is taught its A B C Initial from StJerome's Commentary on the Old Testament,Cambndge, Tnnity College, MS 0 4 7,fol 75'
4 The Parable of the Unprepared Wedding Guest Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 120, fol 2'
5 The dove and the falcon from Hugh ofFouilloy's De Avibus MS sold at Sotheby'sDecember 1958, Ludwig Coll now Getty Coll
6 The Tree of Jesse and Old and New Testa-ment scenes New York, Pierpont MorganLibrary, M 724"
SEEIXG AND READING
underlined in Leo Treitler's recent work on the transmission of medievalmusic, which reveals how a written code was developed m order to supportolder modes of oral delivery For the chanter, whose musical forms were beingwntten down for the first time, 'the notation gets him started perhaps andkeeps him on the right track The idea of a control system is just the right wayto think about the role of notation in an oral performing tradition' "̂ This is auseful way too, to think of the decorated initial in the twelfth century whichmust also have functioned as a mnemonic trigger to regulate the readingperformance of the liturgy and the Opus Dei We should not forget private aswell as pubhc performance in this monastic context, since it was written mtothe Benedictine Order that each year every monk read a book from beginningto end This spiritual exercise oi meditatw laid emphasis on the directions, paceand concentration of individual worship in a way only possible with the codex,or book form As opposed to the roll of earlier times, the codex allowed thereader to recapitulate, skim, check text against picture and refer forwards inways not possible with the roll, which hke speech itself, unfolds in one lineardirection It is probably for this reason that 'speech' is signified in medieval artby scrolls held by the talkers in images (plate 9)
Meditatio would have been a noisy affair, involving a kind of vocal digestionof the text by the reader who mouthed each word, 'a mastication whichreleases its full flavour' to use Dom Leclercq's phrase "̂ It might be going toofar to link this active rumination of the word with the succulent and juicvforms, both animal and vegetable, which decorated letters assumed, yet thiswas exactlv the kind of psychological association the monastic artist mighthave made This was because the actual visible appearance of the letter needbear no relation to its signification. The letters, unlike in our modern alphabet,need not be clearlv recognisable, since they were not a uniform system of quicklyscanned units but were savoured as part of the slow and deliberate repetitionsin a daily digested diet Thus, without any dependence on the regularitv of thecoded message these cueing elements could become self-sufficient 'art' objects,transforming and zoomorphising with amazing freedom Such display formshad been hardlv readable at all in the labyrinthine patterns of Celto-Saxonillumination and even into the twelfth century they retain the status of'showpieces' rather than language, indices of exclusiveness rather thanrecognisable signs, exhibiting what were the sophisticated monastic 'house-styles' of Cluny or Winchester.
The letter as a framework for utterance, a cue for audible repetition andyet also a locus for free interpretation is nicely conveyed in an early twelfth-century initial from Rochester (plate 2) A clambering figure actually chewsthe tendril of the sprouting 'A', reminding us of the ruminatto of the word in themonastic environment, while below another man teaches a bear to say itsA B C . These three letters issue from the man's mouth and the docile creaturerepeats the first. None of the comments on this superb initial places its imageryin the context of reading the book in which it appears, which is a text of StJerome on the Old Testament, using the etymological method of translatinglists of Hebrew names as a basis for spiritual interpretation This initial isplaced on f. 75'̂ preceding a long list of those beginning with 'A' and the rest of
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the alphabet follows in sequence Onomastica, or lists of names like this arestructured for memorisation As Walter J. Ong has shown, 'Still highly oralmanuscnpt culture feels that having written series of things readied for oralrecall was of itself, intellectually improving.'^' This initial then is not anirrational fantasy but a playful admonition to the monastic user of the text tolearn through repeating these interminable lists in their alphabetic order, notwith the bear's dumb animal mimicry but also with human understandingThere is even the possibility that the humorous treatment is a complaintagainst the tedium of such reading, an example of how it was possible in thisperiod to subvert the orthodoxy of the letter from within the letter itself
Latin had an aura as it was separated from the baser speech acts ofeveryday existence in the complex rituals of a clerical group, whose monopolywas the manipulation of this metalanguage Power was embodied in the verynaming of objects, for, according to medieval epistemology, vox sigmjkans rem;there existed a real relationship between the sound of a word and its referent ^̂According to St Augustine, God 'spoke' the universe during the Creation, partof a strong phonocentric bias through which commentators expressed the forceof the Logos in human society.^^ This is nowhere clearer in the art of the periodthan in the embellishment of the voice of the Logos itself in the illustration of theBible The opening of St John's Gospel in the late-twelfth-century Arnstein Bible(London, BL Harley MS. 2799) is a good example, showing the Evangelistslotted into the swirling trellis which makes up the words '/n principto' andwriting the same with his calamus on a small sheet of vellum on his desk (plate3). Despite the appearance of the gold book which the Christ-Logos holdsabove the Evangelist's head and although the latter does not seem to berepresented as 'talking', John's urgent gesture oideclamatw, which we have seenin other examples, indicates that it is the voice of the Logos that his writingconveys. Indeed, looking more closely, we can see that his own symbol, theeagle, acts like the dove of the Holy Spirit inspiring him with Holy Writ, whichis being dictated by God in the half-circle above That God is the dictatorunder whom holy men write, was first noted by Alcuin and it is significant thatin this image the relationship is specified in an oral context The spirit imparts'The Word' not to John's ear as was usual, but to his mouth In his letterprefacing the Commentary to St John's Gospel Alcuin distinguished him as theonly one of the Evangelists to teach not by writing, but through word ofmouth *̂ So, unlike the other three Gospel frontispieces in this Bible, John'sdepicts the Word in its true sense, not written (on the desk) or seen (visuallymagnified in the subtle artistry of the decorated letters of the whole) but asactively spoken in order to exemplify the Incarnation' In pnncipio erat verbum.
'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us' says St John only fourteenverses after the In principio and it is narrative events happening in human timewhich the twelfth-century artist was most often called upon to translate intovisual form. The didactic notion of images outlined by St Gregory is tied totheir capacity to 'tell' stories and considering the large amounts of direct andindirect speech contained in the Gospels the artist's problem becomes not somuch the naturalistic representation of scenes or action but how to embodynarrative speech vividly. Otto Pacht has been the only scholar to appreciate
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the role of the 'talking word' in his study of pictorial narrative '̂ ^ Describingtbe scene of Pilate wasbing bis bands m tbe St Albans Psalter, witb its open-moutbed cbaracters, as a 'dumb-show', be argued tbat tbis 'enactment ofspoken narrative in visual form' sbows tbe direct influence of contemporarydrama. Tbis still requires tbe artist to report mimetically speecb acts that hehas seen, whereas it is possible to show that the spoken word is visible and evenaudible in the twelfth-century image on an even more fundamental level thanPacht suggests
One example occurs in the Pembroke Gospel pictures which arestylistically related to the St Albans MS and may also once have prefaced aPsalter ^̂ A tiny isolated inscription is embedded in an otherwise totallypictorial set of forty pictures, in the rare illustration of Christ's Parable of theUnprepared Wedding Guest (plate 4) The whole scene illustrates thefollowing passage of Matthew 22, 11-12
And when the King came in to see the guests, he saw there a man whichhad not on a wedding garment And he saith to him. Friend, how camestthou in hither not having a wedding garment-" And he was speechless
The second tier of illustration on the page begins on the left with the King,whose long finger is enlarged in signification of his important question andwhich points accusingly at the tattily dressed guest at his table Hardly visiblebetween them is the Latin text of the question - amice quomodo hue intrastP Whyhas this artist suddenly resorted to writing? Is he unable to convey the fullmeaning of this parable without verbal clues' For tbe user of tbis sequence ofscenes, tbe words written against tbe bare vellum bave a very differentresonance and go far beyond wbat we tbink of as tbe 'cartoon bubble' Asdescribed in contemporary terms by Jobn of Salisbury, 'letters are sbapesindicating voices Hence tbey represent things which they bring to mmdthrough the windows of the eyes. Frequently they speak voicelessly theutterances of the absent' ^̂ The Pembroke scene is an example of the skilfulintegration of the semantic enclave into the action of the picture for people whowould literally read aloud the words emanating from the mouths of paintedfigures. In fact, the artist has pinpointed an acoustical response by writingdown the dramatic question To continue his dense and hteral illustration ofevery syntactic element in the Gospel text, it is the only way - through contrast- in which be is able to make visible 'And be was speecbless ' Also tbis detailmigbt be a way of distinguisbing tbe middle tier as a 'told' parable as separatefrom the subjects of Christ in action around it.
An important modern study of the phonocentric prejudice in Westernculture is Derrida's Of Grammatology which reveals how during the MiddleAges, when language communicated the ultimate and transcendent authorityof God, speech and writing were closer together, almost equivalents 'There ismuch to say about the fact that the native unity of the voice and writing isprescriptive. Arche-speech is writing because it is a law. A natural law. T'hebeginning word is understood, in the intimacy of self-presence, as the voice ofthe other and as commandment.'^^ This obsession with the charisma of theliving voice (what Derrida calls 'arche-speech') and a refusal to accept the
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'kilhng letter' (II Corinthians 3, 6) of the written signifier are both at the rootof the medieval mistrust of the visual sign It means that both text and imageare secondary representations, external to, but always referring back to, thespontaneous springs of speech Once we understand this, the possibilities oftheir working together as in the pictorial letter of the Bible (plate 3) or in thepictured statements of the Gospel scene (plate 4) become multiform andlimitless It was not the image, which in the twelfth century could be termed'natural' but the present and direct voice, of which both picture and script werethe conventional signata
II LITTERATURA LAICORUM SEEING AND READING
The relationship between spoken, written and pictorial language is aptl\explained by one commentator, Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster (1085-1117) in his Disputation between a Christian and a Jew Answering the Jew'saccusation that Christians practise idolatry in worshipping the horrible effigvof a tortured naked man on a cross, the Christian says that, 'Just as letters areshapes and symbols of spoken words, pictures exist as representations andsymbols of writing '"'* Gregory's dictum had by this time not only become acommon orthodox argument but the fact that images were the 'letters of thelaity' {htteratura lauorum) was embodied m Canon Law.^" The question is,whether statements hke Gilbert's actually reflect people's attitudes to pictorialart in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and if they do, how does theequivalence between reading texts and reading pictures work'*
Although a multiplicity of levels must have existed between, on the onehand, the clerical htteratus and, on the other, the totally illiterate peasant, itmay be useful to make a broader theoretical division mto three main groups
1 The fully literate2 The individual who must rely on the literacy of another for access to
written transmission3 The llhterate without means or needs of such reliance '̂
The second of these is a crucial but often overlooked category of medievalperception - the person who must have relied on the literacy of another foraccess to pictorial art. This group before the mosaic, wall pamting or stainedglass would have perceived these works of art, not in terms of individualresponse, but as a chonc or mass one. One example is the account of the fifth-century Bishop Paulinus of Nola which descnbes the eflect of the new wallpaintings adorning his new church on the peasants entering. He describes howthey are influenced by the 'coloured sketches which are explained byinscriptions over them, so that the script may make clear what the hand hasexhibited Maybe that when they all in turn show and reread to each other whathas been painted, their thoughts will turn more slowly to eating.'^^ Theseilhterati or rustici (often characterised m this early period as lechers or gluttons)are thus drawn away from their natural desires, by the pictures, which are, byimplication, not only a 'feast for the eyes' but because they include writteninscriptions, for the spirit also. Reading in the medieval world was often, as
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SEEING AND READING
Susan Noakes has shown, 'a community experience in which the interpretationof the text any single listener or reader developed was the product, not of hisunderstandmg of the text alone, but of a combination of questions and insightssupphed by others.'^^ Such collective appreciation would have been in actionbefore the monumental cycles of wall paintings, glass, sculpture and even insome cases with illuminated manuscripts, for which quasi-literate or illiterateaudiences demanded oral explanations
One case of the latter occurs in the manuscripts of Hugh of Fouilloy's DeAvibus, which have been shown to have been specially designed withillustrations for teaching the semi-literate lay brothers, who performed themore menial tasks in the monastic community *̂ The prologue picture (plate5) ostensibly represents the shared life (the perch) of the clericus, the authorhimself (represented as a dove) and the miles, the ex-knightly lay brother towhom the tract is addressed (the falcon) The image underscores their division,not only in the two separate species of bird but in the isolation of text frompicture, since they serve the specific needs of the clerical explainer and hisilliterate brothers The text below states this quite plainly in the ubiquitousGregorian 'Quod enim doctwribus innutt scnptura, hoc simplicibus pictura.' That thelearned grasp through the writing and the simple apprehend through thepictures IS here institutionally organised within the book design However,both this and the diagrammatic pictures which follow are meaningless withoutan explanation, that is, unless the text is expounded. The dove has to read theimages to the falcon just as the active clerical group had the power asexplainers over the illiterate and moreover passive audience of most medievalart
The audience before most twelfth-century images would have been 'dumb'since they were unable to read the tituh or inscriptions, which, like the text inHugh's manuscripts, are crucial in interpreting the meaning of the picture.There is a story in Gregory of Tours of a Ghristian slave 'qui htteras ignorabaf,who learned to read through looking often enough at picture inscriptions{htteras super iconas).^^ This seems wishful thinking when one considers theinaccessibility of most tituh to all but the advanced htteratus, able to understandthe contractions that transform DOMINUS into DNS or even more abstractsigns.^^ Nevertheless, the constantly repeated and ultimately limited liturgicallexicon of Latin might have assumed the mystery of half-understood symbolsfor the laity The very shapes of letters displayed in a Gospel Lectionary on thealtar might invite a response from an illiterate just as he or she might chantphrases from the Divine Service without understanding a word. There is alsothe very important fact that many of the wntten elements in medieval picturesare, because of their size, location or position, unreadable It is as if the verypresence of language served to authenticate the image Also, that there existeda well-defined purely visual code of representation, by which a saint could, forexample, be defined by his attributes, suggests that there was a need fornaming tituh even when these were functionally redundant.
The often-voiced mistrust of the materiality of painted images was placatedby their being defined through language. The ridiculous results of this arepointed out in one passage of the Libri Carohni: 'The picture with the caption;
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SEEING \.ND READING
Mother of God, was elevated and kissed and the other, because it had acaption, Venus was maligned, scorned and cursed although both were equal inshape and colour and were made of identical material and differed only incaption '̂ ^ Thus on the very basic level of recognition, literacy meant beingable to distinguisb between true and false images If tbey rescued tbe imagefrom ambiguitv, tbev did so often in an allusive and complex Latin. Sucb aretbe inscriptions devised bv tbat typical esoteric litteratus of tbe twelftb century.Abbot Suger of St Dems, wbo in lavisbing images and words on bis newcburcb specifically excludes tbose unable to read
And because tbe diversity of tbe materials (sucb as) gold, gems andpearls is not easily understood by the mute perception of sight (tactta vtsus)without a descnption, we have seen to it that this work, which isintelligible only to tbe literate, - be set down in writing ^^
Many of tbe standard images of tbe penod would bave likewise been toodifficult for tbe 'dumb perception' alone Even in a relatively straigbtforwarddesign and one of the 'new' images of the period which appeared in stainedglass at Suger's St Denis and soon spread to England, the Tree of Jesse (plate6), such IS the case
This representation could never have functioned as a book for the illiteratein the self-contained form St Gregory outlined, since its whole referentialsystem was to the wntten signs from which the latter were excluded Itsmeaning emerges only in reference to the text of Isaiah 11, 1 or from aliterate's performance of this relevant text in speech or sermon As well as this.Its proper reading presupposes a scriptural order and mentality, not fullydeveloped in those unused to the left-right up-down sequence of the literate Ofcourse many medieval narratives radiate from different points and follow nostrictly regulated code of order, but nevertheless there existed what might betermed a visual literac\ which implied the systematic viewing of a series ofpictures ^̂ The structure of elements in the Bible Picture Leaf (plate 6),produced at Canterbury c 1140, directs the attention in dual directions fromthe bottom upwards in the Tree of Jesse and from the top left to the nght andthen down for the narrative panels. Both the symbolic image of the Tree andthe trajectory of the narrative scenes convey an identical message, that of thetransition between Old and New Testaments, from King David on the top left,whose Psalms this page might once have prefaced, to the New Dispensation ofChrist However, this design also contains elements which can be associatedwith the needs of an audience still imbued with oral patterns of thought Theclear and centralised compositions such as the almost symmetrical Visitationwith the two profile figures displayed by the parted curtains were aimed at thevisual memory of the viewers just as conventions of rhyme and repetition inliterary performance were aimed at their oral memory. The frontal prophetsalso, repeated up the two sides of the tree, have affinities with the verbalformulaic patterns employed by the 'singer of tales' in his oral recitation of thechansons de gestes. They represent filling elements, lacunae m the narrativewhich allow the performer to display his repertoire of conventions.*° In thisway, the constantly repeated schemata used by the Romanesque artist served a
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Similar purpose to the oral mnemonic formulae in literary composition For aless literate audience, unable to manipulate 'the word' but still able torecognise it and moreover memorise its images, the minimal schema is vitallynecessary Its radical simplification makes the transmission of meaning easier,both for the onlooker and for the next artist who will copy it The Nativityscene at the bottom right of the Bible Picture is a good example of this Thefour rigorously separated elements, Joseph, Child, Virgin and animals willtrigger the same recognition, though repeated in different contexts and media,juxtaposed typologically or as part of a narrative senes These will, in eachcase, be readable as 'Nativity'
This dependence upon oral systems of information storage and expressionwithm the evolving written tradition of twelfth-century culture graduallydiminishes as writing exerts its power and influence, not least on the visualarts. In this example, just above the Nativity, is the rarer scene of the namingof John the Baptist. This would have been more difficult to read as itrepresents the newer 'literate' iconography of naming through the writtendocument rather than by the speech gesture On one level of course it simplyillustrates the text of Luke 1 which relates how John the Baptist's father,Zachanas, had been struck dumb until the circumcision of his son The childwas about to be named after his father, but Zachanas asked for a writing tableand 'he wrote saying John is his name And immediately his mouth wasopened and his tongue loosened and he spoke ' Here literally, writing comesbefore and liberates speech.
What IS more significant regarding the tiny representation of John beingnamed is that also in Canterbury, at the same time as the Bible Leaf wasilluminated, the chapel of St Gabriel in the cathedral was decorated with acycle of wall paintings where this same subject appears ^̂ Both show thenaming through a written document rather than the testament of oral witness,just at the time when the practice was changing in legal contexts In the wallpamting the dumb Zachanas points with his pen to the already inscribedwords on his scroll 'fohannes est nomen etus' bearing the same scribal tools of penand scraper as he does in the Bible Picture (plate 6) These are the implementsalso held by the most famous scribe of the century, also working inCanterbury, Eadwine who is called 'prince of scribes' in the psalter he wroteand which now bears his name *̂ It is in this important centre that the subjectof the naming of the Baptist as an almost legal transaction is first depicted inEnglish art. Here too, as Cecily Clarke has demonstrated, the mingling ofAnglo-Saxon and Norman culture had its problematic beginnings From therecords of names, it appears that 75 per cent of children received non-Englishnames hke Richard or Robert. Such an acceptance of French and decline inAnglo-Saxon forms in Canterbury is reflected in the text of Eadwine PsalterItself, where, of the three vulgate Psalm texts, two vernacular interlineartranslations and two glosses, the most corrupt is the Anglo-Saxon translation,now half-forgotten by the literate.** There is a visual counterpart to this in theway that the feathery penwork and dynamic linear freedom of the Anglo-Saxondrawing tradition (still evident in the Eadwine Psalter illustrations) is overtakenby the metallic, opaque and heavily painted surfaces of the internationally
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fashionable Byzantinising style, most obviously in the later Canterbury copy ofthe Utrecht Psalter *̂
The written record as a visual symbol in itself was most evident in thepost-conquest period in the famous Domesday Book, made at the order ofWilliam the Conqueror in 1086 According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, noox, cow or pig in the land went unrecorded and Richard Fitz Neal laterrecounted how William's plan was 'to bring the subjected people under therule of written law' "̂̂ ^ In this sense the image of the Baptist's name beingrecorded in writing might not have seemed so alien to the Canterburycongregation as we might first suppose New iconographies have theirinstitutional counterparts Fitz Neal tells us that the natives called the censusDomesday, 'because it seemed to them hke the Last Judgement described inRevelation' *̂ The illiterate peasants, to whom Fitz Neal refers, might haveknown the text of Revelation 20, 12, describing how 'the books were openedand another book was opened which was the book of Life And the dead werejudged by those things that were written in the books ' However, they weremore likely to have understood the Judgement through images, particularly thesubject as it was represented on the sculpted doorways at Ely, Barfreston andRochester, under direct influence from the He de France.*** There must havebeen numerous wall paintings too, showing the Apocalyptic Judge with anopen book, just as menacing as the sword, like that in a Durham manuscript ofa Commentary on the Apocalypse (plate 7) *̂ In both painting and sculptureChnst judges with the book of Good and Bad deeds that would either save ordamn the soul forever and indeed, like the Domesday Book itself, these werenew laws, new images instigated by the ruling Normans to bnng Englandunder the visual as well as verbal conformity to a Latin culture which sanctifiedthe power of writing, for 'whosoever was not found written in the Book of Lifewas cast mto the pool of hre' (Revelation 20, 15)
Yet the twelfth century also witnessed a realm of visual expression at onceexcluded from, and therefore free from, textual tyranny. This was the dynamicworld of 'non-meaning' in the fantastic forms of the Romanesque capital Theproblem with oral as opposed to literate cultures of the past is theirirretnevability, and it is for this reason that we can no longer apprehend themeaning of 'those unclean apes, those half-men, those fighting knights, thosehunters blowing their horns' in any more explicit terms than St Bernard in hisfamous attack on such sculptures It is probably with some irony that such anarch-htteratus applies a scholarly metaphor to describe the lure of Romanesqueornament when he writes, 'we are more tempted to read m the marble than inour books' ^̂ Yet it is precisely because they cannot be systematically 'read', inreference to the written discourse of the church, that the contorted andconstantly transforming creations of the sculptor can provide an escape fromthe fixed world of textuality and are always marginalised in relation to it TheRomanesque capital has all the formal aspects that have been associated withwhat Walter J. Ong calls 'the psychodynamics of orality'. One need only lookat the terms he uses to describe the storage of information in this context-'additive rather than subordinative', 'aggregative rather than analytic','redundant or copious', 'close to the human lifeworld'.^' The upside-down
36
SEEING AND READING
world of the capital carvings often refers to obscene gestures and cultic paganpractices found in amulets and charms according to recent folklonsticinvestigation ^̂ Of course, just as there was no strict division between thosewho could not read and those who utilised the literacy of others in an effort tolearn the dogma of salvation, the htteratus could enjoy diversion from hiscloistered reading by averting his eyes to the richly erotic content of thecapitals above with full knowledge of their meanings in the vernacular oraltradition which he also shared It would be useless for the art historian toattempt to reconstruct the multiple meanings, the conversations and the ribaldlaughter which the mingling of men and monsters evoked and which couldmake even St Bernard, according to his own testimony, spend a whole day'gazing fascinated by these things one by one instead of meditating on the lawof God' These images, liberating the chatter of the marketplace, interwovethemselves within the exclusive confines of the Logos in twelfth-centurydecorated initials (plate 2) and even when tamed within the margins of laterthirteenth- and fourteenth-century books these subjects have been shown todepend upon the oral performance of the preacher's verbally transmittedexempla. The imbrication of word and image in the twelfth century, on theperformative 'oral' as well as the visual 'written' level, defined the orthodoxand authoritarian function of the picture and made it distant and diflicult formost of Its audience Indeed, before the advent of vernacular literacy on awider level at the end of the century most viewers of art, unaided by theexplanations of the oratores, the clerical literate group, were only really capableof'reading between the hnes' as it were, in the margins and at the edges of thegreat images complexes which were supposed to be their Hitteratura laicorum'
III 'THAT WHICH IS NOT WRITTEN IS FORGOTTEN'SEEING AND WRITING IN THE VERNACULAR
The Law is spoken still, even in the late-thirteenth-century vernacular of theFrench author Philippe de Beaumanoir (plate 8) He is pictured dictating hisbook on legal practices, the Coustumes et Usages de Beauvaisis, in the firstminiature of this Berlin manuscnpt. His scribe is represented smaller than themore important author, as a mere channel for his words and subservient to hisominous-looking club and yet just opposite Philippe's commanding figure wecan read just how important it was for his information to be correctlytranscribed. Man's life is short, it states, as is his memory, and 'Ce qui n'estescrit est tost oubliez\ that which is not written is soon forgotten As well as thetransition from primarily oral to written modes of communication, the twelfthand thirteenth centuries saw the growing use of written vernaculars Theplural is important here In conveying 'words' rather than 'the Word' wnterstook up new secular subjects like Philippe, recording and codifying thehistorical situation around him. As opposed to Latin discourse, these forms ofliterature embodied a different structure which, according to Franz Bauml,was 'unmetaphorical and concrete rather than metaphorical and abstract - aparadigm of perception distinct from that formed by the expenence of Latin
37
SEEING AND READING
narrative'.^' Gan we take this changed 'paradigm of perception' more literallyand see the role of images adapting in the course of the thirteenth century inresponse to this vernacularisation of culture'' Instead of being the mediatingsymbols of an eternal Logos do they begin to mirror, like Philippe'smonumental wntings, historical events and record human actions?
The answer must be, initially at least, negative The transition from Latinto vernacular modes of expression or from schematic to naturalisticrepresentational forms was by no means clear-cut Vernacular pictures, that ispictures illustrating vernacular texts or with non-Latin inscriptions, can donothing but adapt older conventions and, in doing so, gain from theconnotational authority of established Latin genres and tvpes Visual artfollowed exactly the pattern descnbed by one scholar of literarv history andwere part of a 'general tendency in twelfth-century vernacular culture as itslanguage assumed the status of wnting, or Grammatwa, to confer upon theselanguages the functions of "monumentahty" previously reserved for Latin '̂ "̂An excellent example of this process at work in the pictorial realm is theillustration of a Berlin manuscript of Heinrich von Veldeke's Middle-HighGerman version of Virgil's Aeneid, which is based on an earlier French verseEneas (plate 9). The complex distinctions between different categories of inscrip-tion which make the picture a tool to be used rather than a self-sufficient aestheticobject are here carried over from the Latin tradition of textual illustration On thispage Lavinia is seated writing a letter to Aeneas on a scroll, an emphatic motifwhich, lncidentallv, attests to the literacy of heroes and heroines in a number ofhistorical Romances ^̂ Directly beneath her on the honzontal frame, a titulusserves to signify her name both for the upper and lower scenes, identifying twodifferent configurations of the same character at different moments in thenarrative as both are placed adjacent to the frame at identical points In thebottom scene Lavinia hands the letter she has written and which she has tied upin an arrow, to an archer Her verbal instructions that he should shoot it from atower and the archer's reply are indicated on speech scrolls. How is thisinterlocution differentiated from wnting in this case**
Whatever characters utter throughout this whole series of illustrations isalways shown by one long trailing scroll, which in the case of the archer's replydips vertically outside the frame Figures usually hold their discourse, as here,but occasionally the band spurts directly from their mouths in a straight hneThis occurs only in moments of extreme emotion, when, for example, Annafinds Dido stabbed in the flames (fol. XIX) or for the exclamation of the angryDido as Aeneas departs (fol. XVII) Thus this artist can define the mood aswell as the content of an utterance through the visual form of writing Betweenthe words that are spoken by Lavinia here and those that she pens above thereIS an interesting divergence, despite the fact that she holds both in her hand(plate 9). Just having two lines of script on the wntten letter makes a distinctpoint that the visual script is ordered in a systematic way whereas thedepiction of verbal sound is dynamic and free-floating. This early thirteenth-century German illustrator has found a superb way of clarifying a linguisticdichotomy well known in Saussurian terms' 'the whole mechanism of spokenlanguage depends on its linear structure. Linguistic signs are purely linear; they
38
7 Christ as Apocalyptic Judge Initial A from Berengaudus,Commentary on the Apocalypse, Durham, Cathedral Library,MS A l 10, fol 170'
8 Philippe de Beaumanoir dictates his book Coustumes etUsages de Beauvatsts Berlin DDR State Library, HamiltonMS 193, fol r
fM i t
fmd Rvtmcr d
9 Lavinia wntes a letter and gives it to an archer Eneide,Berlin, Staatsbibhothek, MS germ fol 282 LXXF
10 A shepherd calls his sheep Bestiary, Cambridge,University Library, MS Kk 4 25, fol 58'
11 Theophilus makes his pact with the devilApocalypse, London, Lambeth Palace Librarv,MS 209, fol 46'̂
12 Initial to Psalm 97, Cantate Domino Psalterof Stephen of Derby, Oxford, Bodleian Librar\,MS. Rawl G 185, fol. 8 r
13 The Flight of Queen Emma The Estoire deSeint Aedward le Rei, Cambridge, UniversityLibrary, MS Ee HI 59, fol V
14 'I will tell you of the training of the lion'Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, Pans.Bibhotheque Nationale, MS fr 19093,p 24
SEEING AND READING
form chains and their spatial line of graphic marks can be substituted forsuccession in time In contrast to these, visual signifiers are infinitely morecomplex and offer several levels of simultaneous groupings '^^ The unsys-tematic play of the speech scrolls m this vernacular manuscript can be relatedto this fundamental linearity of speech as opposed to writing The unfurlingwords on Lavinia's trailing scroll do not follow the left to right conventions ofvisual script and remind us that such a representation does not, even in abook, locate the viewer upright and stationary before a pictonal worlds theobject Itself responds to the exigencies of being turned and read — oriented byIts user
To term Lavinia's words in this example 'speech' in the ordinary sense isto forget how even in the vernacular the elevated literary language of wnting isat one remove from utterance The profane words of evervday discourse wereconsidered totally superficial in meaning by Latin commentators ^' It istherefore an unusual surprise to come across a colloquial utterance, the verysound of the marketplace, in the pages of an early thirteenth-centurv LatinBestiary (plate 10) Within the very limited range of models and avenues ofexperiment open to this English illuminator, the wntten exclamation 'Ha Haware le corne' is the nearest he could ever come to 'naturalism' (if by this wemean the capacity of an image to evoke surface expenence) This piece ofrustic speech, written against the bare vellum and translatable as 'Ha Habeware the horn' is encased in a static formula of animal depiction manycenturies old ^̂ But it does not represent the language spoken b\ the bulk of theEnglish population It is not in fact English, but the Anglo-Norman French ofa ruhng Norman elite and quite as inaccessible as Latin to many people '̂'This draws our attention to the way language, hke pictonal representation, hasits own schemata and functions on different levels We should no more look fora 'real' language which will synchronise with what we consider the social'reality' of the time, than we should waste our time talking about 'naturalistic'images
Changes in literacy in the thirteenth century are more subtle than anygeneralisations concerning the laicisation of society In fact an important, ifoften overlooked, point about the emerging group of lay readers is theiradoption not only of the vernacular, but their willingness to use andunderstand Latin Despite Walter Map's contention that to put the Word ofGod before a layman was to cast pearls before swine, the very core of themonastic opus dei, the text of the Psalter, became the private prayerbook ofwealthy men and women in the thirteenth century The use of more elaboratevisual cues at Psalm divisions and the increasing appearance of two-tieredprefatory picture cycles, can be linked to the increasing role of illiterati inreadmg A typical English Psalter of c. 1200 with twenty-three pages ofpictures, now in Leiden, bears on its Beatus page a later inscription stating thatIt was from this book that St Louis, King of France, learned to read as achild.*'°
There were more pragmatic reasons why the nobility would seek someknowledge of Latin besides its function as an instrument for communicatingwith Divinity - namely its role in administration and law By the thirteenth
39
.SEEING AND READING
century the scribal process had been elevated as the validatory part of the legalprocess as opposed to the oral covenant of speech. Instead of being identifiedwith the visual symbols of gesture the charter itself assumes the official powerof decree **' One of the visual implications of this can be observed m thetransformation of the popular legend of Theophilus as it is illustrated in thePsalters and Apocalypses belonging to the Anglo-Norman nobility Whereasthe twelfth-century sculpted scene at Moissac had shown the lay figure ofTheophilus making his contract with the devil through the gesture of feudalhomage, the tmmixtio manuum, in the thirteenth-century representation of thescene this has to be verified by a legal document.''^ Visible words replace visualritual in the Theophilus legend illustrated in the Ingeborg Psalter at the turn ofthe century, in the earliest illustrated English Book of Hours by W de Brailes(c 1240) and in the Lambeth Apocalypse made for Eleanor de Quincey some twentyyears later (plate 11)." In the sermon by Fulbert of Chartres whichpopularised the legend, the Virgin tears from the devil's grip the document{chirographum) and returns it to the penitent Theophilus as a token of hisliberty *'̂ In the de Brailes miniature the traditional gesture of feudal allegianceIS stili used but more prominent is the charter, inscribed "Carta teofoli It bearsthe authentificating seal, as does the document in the Lambeth scene (plate11) All this reflects the growing importance of rudimentary Latin skills for thelaicus, for whom it could become a matter of life and death in certain legalsituations ^^ Yet the fact that most lay people were still ilhteratu since thev werenot able to construct and converse in Latin outside specific legal anddevotional requirements, meant that this language still retained its auraSomething which must have terrified those who saw it, is the small demonbelow the enthroned Lucifer, who makes a written record of the fiendish pactin the Lambeth picture (plate 11). This means the devils are litterati and can berepresented in the art of the period as the sinister scribes of documents, able toquote Latin authorities, even the Fathers, to damn the sinful soul Like thepopular image of the devil Tutivillus with his pen and parchment, carved inparish churches throughout Europe in order to scribble down the gossip heardduring the sermon, such imagery shows the clergy harnessing the ideologicalpower of writing as an instrument of domination and exclusion just as they hadin the twelfth-century Judgement Tympanum.^^
Vernacular reading was discouraged by the church, not only because itused degenerate forms outside the Latin lexicon and broke down barriersbetween sacred and profane literature, but also because it encouraged a newprivatisation in the reading experience This opposition between the communalperformance of the public liturgy and the isolated depravity of individualreading is visually expressed in the initial to Psalm 97 of the Psalter of Stephen ofDerby, prior of Holy Trinity, Dublin (plate 12).^' The space of the letter ' C ofCantate Domino is filled by the conventional chonc repetition of monks,performing at a lectern the very routine in which this book might have beenused The marginal utterances of profanity are squeezed between the letterframe and the liturgical text in the extra-textual territory of the page, in theform of two grotesque fools. One has devilish feet and both have their mouthsagape, clutching their slim volumes. Whether the artist intended these to be
40
SEEING WD RE\DING
the readers of frowned-upon categories of text or simply the idwtae, the masseswith their bestial response to the word, it it, difficult to knov\ Their open-mouthed parodic recitation represents exactly the private use of books foroneself (and consequentlv the images therein) which were btill frowned uponby churchmen like Stephen when this book was made in the fourteenthcentury This was a response to the large numbers of the laitv who werereading and writing in their own tongue and it was heresv to read the Bible inany vernacular In 1210 the archbishop of Sens had ordered the confiscation ofall theological books written in French with only one exception - the Lives ofthe Saints •'**
This was a genre favoured bv the Enghsh monk of St Albans, MatthewPans, who wrote and illustrated his vernacular adaptations of Latin Saints'Lives which he circulated among his aristocratic clientele of eminent ladies '''Even in this thirteenth-centurv vernacular context, the role of Matthew'sillustrations is firmly descnbed in terms of the old Gregorian topos, as he writesin the Cambridge manuscript of The Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei (plate 13)
Now I pray you, gentle King Edward,To have regard to me a sinner.Who have translated from the Latin,According to my knowledge and genius.Your history into French,That memorv of thee may spread.And for lay people who lettersKnow not, in portraitureHav e I clearly figured itIn this present book '"
It may have been the peculiarly 'picture-book'-like qualitv of Matthew'shagiographical works which accounts for their predominantlv female reader-ship Women had been an important focus for vernacular writing in theprevious century in St Albans, most notablv m the Life oj St Alexis illustrated inChristina of Markyate's Psalter The question of whether women should betaught to read and write was a hotly debated one at this time, Philippe deNovare's discussion concluding that only nuns should be allowed access tobooks '̂ ' However, considering the growth of the lconographv of St Anneteaching the Virgin to read in Psalters and monumental painting and the factthat It was often the duty of well-born mothers to see to the education of theirchildren, it seems that there were a number of ladies in Anglo-NormanEngland who were avid readers, though not officiallv 'literate' Indeed, theirexclusion from the official Doxa of Latin was even more intense than that of theilliterate peasant and this meant that almost by compensation womenconstituted the most important group of vernacular lay readers in the MiddleAges.
Much of this centred on the court and the Life of St Edward (plate 13),probably designed but not actually executed by Matthew for Henry Il l 'sQueen Eleanor, some time before 1264, reveals a subtle apparatus which hasbeen constructed for a variety of roval readers For those wanting to read the
41
SEEING AND READING
Story through the pictures, red rubrics have been inserted at the top of thesecond column of text, like a short verse titulus, giving the basic content of thescene. For the more conscientious user, the alignment of text and picture isvery carefully planned, the division of the long picture-space mto threesegments is synchronised with the subject matter of the three columns of versebeneath This stnct text/picture alignment suggests that the owner might wantto look at the drawings while the underlying text was read aloud to her by aclerk ^̂ This is quite possible considering Matthew's call for 'those who haveears' to listen to his pictured narrative This, then, is a book designed fordifferent levels of literacy in performance. On fol 4r for example there arewritten inscriptions within the picture, alongside events and characters (plate13) such as Queen Emma's escape on the right, which is labelled Fugit Emma.Throughout the manuscript these red tituli fulfil their traditional function ofobjectifying with a name, in the language of Latin. Matthew's audience, 'wholetters know not', are thus expected to cope, not only with the vernacular text,but also to be htterati when examining the illustrations' The answer to why thisstrange admixture exists may be that, like the language proliferation in theEadwine Psalter (that great Canterbury production of the previous century withIts three Latin and three vernacular texts all running parallel) this included themore comprehensive category of reader
As regards the pictorial style of the Life of St Edward it would be wrong tosee this as heralding any new naturahsm according to Franz Bauml's definitionof vernacular style, 'the universal yielding to the particular' ^̂ An artist inMatthew Paris's position, illustrating a new type of vernacular narrative stilldepends heavily on the universal schemata and devises many of hiscompositions from earlier religious prototypes. Emma's escape with herchildren and the rustic Joseph-like figure with a hand under his chin following,clearly derives from the type of the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt. Theminimal schema - the most rudimentary basis for construction - is still vitallynecessary for the artist. Naturahsm as such develops precisely in those excesselements which are peripheral to the transmission of meaning like the flowers,trees and leaves of the settings in these illustrations.
For that famous early master of naturalistic observation, Villard deHonnecourt, nothing was so concrete as a clearly defined schema (plate 14)This image in his Sketchbook, taken, he tells us, from life ('al vif), isdependent on the same linear subordination of form to the geometricallytransmissible as his architectural cross-sections Villard also writes detaileddirectives in the vernacular which place his schemata in their propercategories, following the tradition of rescuing the image from ambiguitythrough the resources of the written word. On this page of his book whichdescribes the taming of the lion, the text, written vertically across the freelyspaced horizontal drawing, points to the different functions of word andpicture, like a model-kit and the instructions for putting it together.
I want to tell you of the training of the lion He who indoctrinates the lion,he has two dogs. When he wants the lion to do anything, he commandshim. If the lion growls, he beats the dogs; of this the lion bears great doubt
42
SEEING \ND READING
when he sees the dogs beaten, his courage wanes, he will do that which iscommanded Note well that this lion was drawn from life ^'
Only the syntactically complex and consecutive procedures of his semi-colloquial French can convey Villard's expenence with the lion Like thefrontal lion drawn full-length on the following page, this creature with humanteeth and the overall appearance of a piece of metalwork (cspecialK theisolated head in the corner) is still so much a schema that a residual tituluselegantly inscribes it with the Latin 'LEO' Moreover, the artist has not onKhad recourse to some visual formula, the very pattern and sequence of hisdescription are also conveyed through a conventional grid This hon-tamnis^story has been shown to stem from the Liber de naturis rerum h\ thecontemporary canon of Cambrai, Thomas of Cantipre, which itself was basedon Latin tracts by Egbert of Liege (Caeditur cams ut pavescat leo) "' What lookslike a naturalistic transcription of an event, and even tells us it is so, is just onemore vernacular transformation of a Latin protot\pe on both textual andvisual levels
Nevertheless Villard's Sketchbook does represent a good example of thenew vernacular matrix for the image His French inscriptions, althoughsometimes repeated by a second scribe in ver\ faulty Latin, suggest that hewas trained outside the schools, even though his geometrical and architecturalcalculations suggest he had some foundations m the artes liberales "' Theinventiveness and freedom of many of Villard's visual ideas is due to theirbeing models which were studied, used, copied and discussed outside theliturgical lexicon as mnemotechmcal aids in entirely artistic professionalpractice. 'How to do it' manuals are an extremely rare and late addition toliterate culture according to one expert, and Villard's is a ver\ importantexample ''' Only in the vernacular could Villard evolve his professional ja.gon.as m the advertismg-like assurance we get with the two lion drawings, assuringus that they are 'al vif Together with his writing, this artist's naturalisticschemata are products for consumption immediately accessible in ways onlypossible within the growing channels of vernacular literacy
If there has been one underlying theme in this study, it is that medieyalpictures cannot be separated from what is a total expenence of communicationinvolving sight, sound, action and physical expression Before any easyjudgements can be made about the relation between text and image we shouldnote Kenneth Goodman's remarks on the psychology of the reading process
Some cues are external to the reading process but they may be used by thereader Pictures are cues which may be decoded as a substitute orsupplement to language . These external cues get between reader andwritten language. In a sense they interfere with the vital recodingprocess. ̂ ^
Perhaps the special power of combining words and pictures resides in thisexcess or 'interference' which distorts the all-too-easy signification of language,forcing us to ask questions about categories, labels and relations between res etverba This examination of the ways in which language skills and acquisitions
43
SEEING AND READING
interact witb visual representation in tbe twelftb and tbirteentb centuries basonly opened up some of tbe questions that can be asked and explored ininterdisciplinary study Pictorial art becomes a statement or discourse ofgroups and individuals in history, especially when it is possible to establish itsrole within and alongside other systems of communication It is thereforeregrettable that in one classic of medieval studies, European Literature and theLatin Middle Ages E R Curtius makes the following statement, with an almostGregorian emphasis on the superficiality of images.
The book is more real bv far than the picture Here we have a trulyontological relationship and real participation in an intellectual entity Tounderstand Pindar's poems requires severe mental effort - to understandthe Parthenon frieze does not The same relation obtains between Danteand the Cathedrals Knowing pictures is easy compared with knowingbooks '̂•'
In the above I have tned to present a case for the other sideMichael Camille
University of Cambridge
NOTES
First drafted in 1982 this studv has benefited from the 'seeing and reading' of George Henderson, JonathanAlexander, John Gage, Nicholas Webb, Norman Brvson, William Calm, Katherine O Kecfe, NicoletteZetman and Sharon Cather 1 am alio mdebted to Anna Abulafia and Michael Clanchv for suggestivedisrussions and to Sandv Heslop for e;lossme; mv own manuscnpt so carefully Another reader,C M Kaufimann, was also kind enough to refer to an earlier version of this article m the catalogue, EngltshRomanesque Art, 1066-1200, London 1984, when its title was slightly different
1 For the full text of Gregory's statement,contained in a letter to Serenus, Bishop ofMarseilles, see PL 77 1128 and the translation m\V Tatarkiewicz, Medieval Aesthetics, The Hague1970, vol 11, pp 104-5 Fhe many enumerationsof Gregory's idea are collected in L Gougaud,'Muta praedicatio'. Revue Benedictine, XLII, 1930,pp 168-71
2 Translation from Tatarkiewicz, op cit in n 1The page is reproduced in O Pacht, C RDodwell and F Wormald, The St Albans Psalter,London 1960, pi 37 and is discussed by Pachto n p 138E Male, The Gothic Image, Religious Art in Francein the Thirteenth Century (first published Pans1898), trans D Nussey, New York 1958, p 1This IS repeated in E Kitzinger's 'the cathedralproclaims the Gospel in stone' (EarlyMedieval Art, London 1940, pp 81-2) and evenunderlies E Panofsky's Gothic Architecture andScholasticism New York 1957F Bauml, 'Varieties and Consequences ofMedieval Literacy and Illiteracy', Speculum, 55,1980, pp 237-64, especially p 262 'It appears,therefore, more likely that the increasingtendency to formulate the illusion of an extra-
3
pictorial "reality" m pictorial art is one of theconsequences of the rise of vernacular literacy '
5 As well as Bauml's study, which contains anexcellent bibliography of recent work on literacy,other major contributions which will often becited here are M I Clanchy, From Memory toWrttUn Record England 1066-1307, London 1979,Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy TheTechrwlogtzing of the Word, London and New York1982, J Goody (ed ), Literacy in TraditionalSocieties, Cambndge 1968, and B Stock TheImplications of Literacy Written Language and Modelsof Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centunes,Pnnceton 1983 The latter volume introducesthe visual arts into the argument (pp 82-3) onlyto quote Kitzinger's statement cited above, n 3,and to generalise that the 'integration of thevisual with the idea of logical order could nothave been achieved without the underpinning oftexts' The only art historical study which hasattempted to use linguistic changes in theMiddle Ages as models for stvlistic developmentIS R Salvini, Medieval Sculpture, New York 1969,pp 20-1 which argues that the 'formativeprocesses of the Romance languages are entirelyanalogous to those of Romanesque sculpture'
SEEING AND READING
6 English Romanesque Art, London 1984, no 33, p102 and C M K.AMiimanr\, RomanesqueManuscnpts 1066-1190 London 1975, no 55, pp87-8 For the text seeJRH Weaver, TheChronicle of John of H orcester, AnecdotaOxonensid ser IV, no 13 pp 32-4 Theillustrations were probablv done before the text,a subordination rare in this period and the text issquashed in the spaces left bv the artist,sometimes stretched out visuallv and elsewherecontracted to make it svnchronise with therelevant picture The limits of the artist'sworking field have not been clearly defined, therustic's spade and the soldier's sword in the firsttwo scenes trespass mto the vellum area, ruledwith a stylus to receive the accompanying scriptThis interpretation of wntten and pictonalelements, especiallv the use of the same redpigment for the King's calligraphic bedclothes,the underhning of the text and the rubrication ofthe third iisio, suggests that scribe and artistwere one person
7 Page 383, right column Grimbald's role as adream interpreter is discussed in E J Kealv,Medieval Medicus A Social History of Anglo-NormanMedicine, Baltimore 1981, pp 70-4
8 Clanchv, op cit in n 5, pp 203-8 and V HGalbraith, 'The Literacy of the Medieval Kings',Proceedings of the British Academy, XXI, 1935, p 7
9 Clanchv, op cit . pp 207-810 This and the figure as a whole is close both in
colour and graphic notation, to a doctorillustrated in a South French medical miscellanydated 1132, Berlin Staatsbibhothek, Hs lat qu198, fol 4 \ reproduced in Zimelien, AbendlandischeHandschriften des Mittelalters aus den Sammlungen derSttftun^ Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 1975, p129
11 For a general work see M Kirigin, La mano dninanelViconografia cristiana, \ atican 1976, esp pp131-65, 'La mano div ma parlante', but see alsoJ J Tikkanen, 'Zwei Gebarden mit demZeigefinger', Helsingfors 1913 (Acta societatisscientarum fenmcae, 43, no 2) The speakinggesture has been traced from the classicaloratorical traditions of Quintilian by BParadiso, 'Rito e retorica in un gesto dellamano', Studi in onore di A C Jemolo, Milan 1962,pp 333-60 He disagrees (note 61) with E deBruyne, 'L'Imposition des mains de I'artChretien ancien' Riv Arch Cristtan , XX, 1932, p176, who states that this gesture is the meaningof God 'speaking' the universe in early depictionsof the Creation, but we also find evidence for thisassociation (see n 23 below) Another theory forthe development of the gesture relates it to thedepiction of ancient theatrical tradition, SDufresne, Les Illustrations du Psautter Utrechtsources et apport caroltngten. Pans 1972, p 83 andL W Jones and C R Morey, The Mtntatures of theManuscnpts of Terence prior to the Thirteenth Century,Pnnceton 1930-1, vol II, p 211
12 H Maguire,'Truth and Convention inBvzantine Descriptions of Works of Art',Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XVIII, 1964
13 M R James, 'Pictor in Carmine , Archeologta 941951,p 142
14 J Gage, 'Horatian Reminiscences in TwoTwelfth-Centurv Art Cntia', Journal of theWarburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36, 1973, pp359-60 The mute emptiness of the image was acriticism used since Hrabanus Maurus (776-856), see E de Bruvne, Etudes d'EsthetiqueMedtevale, Bruges 1942, pp 279-80 and repeatedby Abbot Suger (n 38 below) It becomes acommonplace in Renaissance artistic theorv, forexample in Guarino of Verona's 'The brushshows onlv the mute lineaments of the phvsicalbody while words portrav sounds and liv ingspeech' (quoted from M Baxandall, 'GuannoPisanello and Manuel Chr\soloras',yoarna/ of theWarburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 1965, p 183
15 Recounted bv John Damascene in his Delmagimbus, PG 94 1231 It was this author's Defide orthodoxa which brought the fuUv formulatedEastern mvstical approach to images to theWest
16 Clanchv, op cit , pp 214-18 Reading alouddeveloped from classical practices, as outlined inJ Balogh, '\'oces Paginarum', Philologus 821926-7, p 81̂ Other importa.it studies ofreading are H J Chavtor, trom Script to PrintCambridge 1945, pp 5-21 and R Crosbv 'OralDehvery in the Middle Ages', Speculum, 2 1936,pp 88-110
17 Psalm 45 (44) illustrated in an initial to the StAlbans Psalter, 2 The Initials, bv C R Dodwell,London 1960, p 221, where the phrase isliterally represented bv David holding both hispen and his tongue
18 C Nordenfalk,'The Beginnings of BookDecoration', Essays in Honour of Geore, Swarzensh,ed O Goetz, Berlin and Chicago 1951, pp9-20
19 L Treitler, 'Oral, Wntten and Literate Processin the Transmission of Medieval Music',Speculum, 56, 1981, p 475
20 J Leclercq, The Love of Leaming and the Desire forGod, New York 1961, p 80
21 Ong, Oraltty and Literacy, op c i t i n n 5 . p 1 2 4discusses word lists The initial is fromCambridge, Trinitv College MS 0 4 7, StJerome, Commentanes on Vanous Books of the OldTestament, for which, see Enghsh Romanesque Art1066-1200, London 1984, no 42, p 107 For thelectio dtvina see Leclercq. op cit , and B Smalle>,The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, NotreDame 1964, pp 26-36 Jerome's etymologicalmethod is discussed as a 'genetic code' withinother medieval sign systems by R HowardBloch, Etymologies and Genealogies A LiteraryAnthropology of the French Middle Ages, Chicago1983, pp 54-63
22 According to Richard of St Victor, 'In libris
45
SEEING AND READING
autcm ethicorum voces tantum mediantibusintellectibus res significant' (PL 177 375B) Aswell as the brilliant studv b\ F Ohiv, 'VonGeistigen Sinn des Wortes lm Mittelalter ,Zeitichnftfurdeutsches Altertum, S9, 1958 pp 1-23a useful account of medieval theories of languagecan be found in M L Cohsh The .Mirror oJLanguage A Study in the Medieval Theory ofKnowledge Ydle'l968, pp 3-9
23 \ugustine Enarratio in Psalmum XCIX, discussedbv E \ ance 'Roland and the Poetics ofMtmorv Textual Strategies, ed J V Harari,1979 pp 375-6 'I wo'speaking tubes'lssut fromGod's mouth as part of the apparatus ofCreation in the drawing of this subject in themid-eleventh-centurv PsaUer, London BLCotton Tibcnus C vi, fol 7 \ reproduced in GHendtrson, Earl) Medieial, London 1972 fig131
24 PL 100 741, see M Schapiro, 'Two RomanesqueDrawings from Auxerre', Romanesque Art Nev\^orkl977 p 310, n 34 for an account of John'sspecial relationship with language and examplesof him dictating to his secretarv Prochorus
25 O Pacht The Rise of Pictorial Narratue in Twelfth-Century England Oxford 1962, pp 56-9
26 Cambndge, Pembroke College MS 120,Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts no 35 pp74-5 and English Romanesque Art no 21, pp96-7 As well as the speech inscription exploredbelow the word 'SOL' is written next to the sunin the Emmaus scene on fol 4̂ (Kauffmann, fig99) to communicate the conversation (Luke 24,29) 'But thev constrained him, saving. Abidewith us for It IS toward evening, and the dav isfar spetit' Otie of the figures points with thespeech gesture towards it
27 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, bk 1, chap 13, edJ Webb, London 1939, p 32 1 his idea wouldseem to be based upon Isidore, Etymologiarum(ed W M Lindsav, Oxford 1911) Lib I, m, 1-3'Litterae autem sunt indices rerum, signaverborum, quibus tanta vis est, ut nobis dictaabsentium sine voce loquantur' According toH J Chavtor, the medieval reader 'was in thestage of our muttering childhood learner, eachword was for him a separate entity and at timesa problem which he whispered to himself whenhe found the solution' (From Scnpt to Print, p 10)
28 J Dernda, O/Gramffiflto/o^, trans G C Spivak,Baltimore and London 1974, chap 1 'The Endof the Book and the Beginning of Writing', p 17
29 'Sicut enim littere quodam modo fiunt verborumfigure et note, lta et picture scnptarum rerumexistunt similitudines et note', Gilbert Crispin,Disputatio ludei et Christiani (1092-3), ed BBlumenthal, Stromata Patnstica et Medievalia, 3,Utrecht/Antwerp 1956. p 67 and see theforthcoming edition by A Sapir Abulafia,Auctores Britanmci Medit Aevi, section 157
30 Decretum Magtstn Grattani, ed AemiliusFnedburg, Leipzig 1879, 1360
31 This division follows BaumI, op rit inn i p246
32 'dumque omnes picta uitissum/ ustenduntreleguntque sibi, uel tardius escae/ sinlmemores, dum grate ocuhs lnunia pascunt' seeR C Goldschmidt, Paulinus Churihes at .SolaAmsterdam 1940, 11 584-6 p 65 For theassociation of food and the spiritual nourishmtntof mf̂ ?/(7̂ ?o through pictures s(( -V C> Esm<i]eiDivina Quaternitas, A Preliminary Study m the Methodand Application of Visual Exegesis, \mst( rdam1978, p 20, n 80
33 S Noakes 'The Fifteen Oes, tht Ihsticha (.atomsMarculfius and Dick, Jant, and Sallv TheLmvernty of Chicago Library Society Bulletin 11, II1977 pp 10-11
34 PL 177 15-16 The text, illustrations andmanuscript tradition ol this work is discussid bvW B Clark 'Tht Illustrated Meditval Aviarvand the Lav-Brotherhood' Gci/a, XXI, 198_' pp63-74 with further bibliographv In England ttittract was often lncorporattd into the LatinBestiary
25 PL 71 1003, cued in \ \ Deschamps and \1Thibout, La Pemture murale en trame Pans 1')T1p 20
36 For/(/«/; see E Stemmann, Die Tituti und dieKirchlichen H'andmalereien tm Abendlande Lom J-//Jahrhundert, Leipzig 1892, and itjr a recenttheoretical discussion, M Wallis Inscriptions inPaintings', iemzo/ira IX 1 1973 pp 1-29Increasinglv realistic pictorial rcprtsentationdoes not render the titulus superduiius assuggested by E De Bruvne E.sthettque du moyenage, Louvain 1947, p 291 sinct thi more lift-liktthe image became the more danger in mistakingIt for realitv The titulu! solves this problem loras Alcuin proposed, under tht picture of St Paulshould be written not 'St Paul', but 'image of StPaul' to avoid confusion (cited in De Bruvne, p271)
37 PL 97 999-1248, transl in Tatarkiewic^, op cuin n 1, p 100
38 E Panokky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of StDems and its Art Treasures, Princeton. 2nd edn1979, p 63
39 Directions for reading images are analysed in thtfundamental paper by M Schapiro, 'On .SomeProblems in the Semiotics of Visual Art Fieldand Vehicle in Image Signs', Semiotica, I, 1969,pp 223-42 For the unusual continuous left-right-left narrative order in wall paintings andstained glass, see F Deuchler, Le sens de lalecture a propos du Boustrophedon', Etudes dartmedieval ojfertes a Louis Grodecki, Strasbourg 1981,pp 250-8
40 Bauml, op cit , p 260, states that 'Clearoutlines, clearly marked boundaries betweenpictonal and non pictorial space, sizerelationships dictated by the relativ e significanceof the objects represented in a predommantlvnarrative context, heavy reliance on traditional
46
SEEING AND READING
formulae, all facilitate recognition of essentialelements of narrative themes ' On theconstruction of formulaic poetry, see thepioneering studv b\ E A Havelock, Preface toPlato, Harvard 1963 and Ong, op cit , in n 4,pp 16-77 For a critic of Ong's view of twelfth-centurv orality, see R C Cormier, The Problemof Anachronism Recent Scholarship on theFrench Medieval Romances of A.ntiquitv',Philological Quarterly, 53, 1974, p 154
41 The importance of the schema in thetransmission of visual information in the semi-oral culture of the twelfth centurv can becompared with what Goodv and Watt call 'thehomeostatic process of forgetting' where thoseelements that cease to be necessarv or relevant inthe direct act of communication are erased (JGoody and I Watt, 'The Consequences ofLiteracv', in Literacy and Traditional Societies,Cambndge 1968, p 67)
42 Reproduced in O Demus and M Hirmer,Romanesque Mural Painting, London 1970, plate235 The Bible Picture Leaf, New V ork, PierpontMorgan Library, M 724̂ is discussed inKauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, no 66, pp93-6 Here too there is a representation of theform as well as the act of writing, with'Johannes' inscribed diagonallv on Zachanas'writing desk But this, as in the curving scrollheld out m the wall painting, follows theconventions oi tituli and is neither oriented nordesigned to appear as lines of script penned aswntten language Compare the wnttendocument in plate 9 which by contrast, does takeinto account the structure of scribal messages
43 Cambridge, Tnnitv College MS R 17 1, f 283*reproduced in Kauffmann, RomanesqueManuscripts, fig 187 Eadwine's complex lavoutof the Psalter text is discussed by Clanchv, FromMemory to Written Record, pi XIV and appears ina full facsimile by M R James The EadwinePsalter, London 1935 The process of readingsuch a multiform text with three Latin and twointerlinear vernacular translations as well as aninterlinear and marginal gloss, would involve theconstant shifting of the gaze from text area to theright, left and above, where the half-pageillustrations in the literal tradition of Psalmdepiction following the Utrecht Psalter, providesa visual system of near parallel complexityIndeed, the earliest pages incorporate a kind of'interlinear illustration' in adding scenes basedupon the gloss directly above those literallyillustrating the Psalter text This is an earlyexample of what Malcom Parkes has shown tobe the more 'ratiocmative' analysis required bythe scholastic lectio as opposed to the monasticmedttatio, which altered the whole appearance ofthe book page into a visual rather than an oraltool during the course of the thirteenth centurySee M Parkes, 'The Influence of the ConceptsOrdmatto and Comptlatto on the Development of
the Book', Essays Presented to R H Hunt, Oxford1979, pp 115-41
44 C Clark, 'People and Languages in PostConquest Canterburv', Joarna/ of .Medieval Htstory,II, 1976, pp 1-7, 30-2
45 For the Psalter, Pans, Bibl Nationale, MS latin8846, which is the last of the three copies of theCarolingian Ltrecht Psalter made at Canterburyand dated c 1180-90 see English Romanesque Art,no 73, pp 126-7 and N Morgan, Early Gothic.Manuscripts 1190-1250, London 1983 no 1, pp47-9
46 Dialogus de Scaccario, ed C Johnston, London1950, p 63 Ihe following is much indebted toMichael Clanchy's discussion of'The uses of theDomesdav Book' in hrom .Memory to WrittenRecord, pp 18-21 and in England and its Rulers1066-1272 London 1983, pp 61-5
47 Dialogus de Scacctario p 6448 The influence of French sculpted doorwavs on
these monumental works is discussed in T S RBoase, English Art 1100-1216, Oxford 1953, pp205-7, reproducing the tympana of Rochesterand Barfreston, plate 68 See also G Zarnecki'1066 and Architectural Sculpture", Proceedings ofthe British Academy, lAl, 1966, pp 87-104
49 Durham, Cathedral Librarv, MS A 1 10, fol170^ an initial to Berengaudus Commentary on theApocalypse, which was immensel\ popular in thisand the following centurv and interpreted theevents of Revelation in terms that referred to theeverydav life of the Christian awaiting thecoming of Antichrist It refers both to those who
read or hear God's Commandments' ('quialegunt aut audiunt mandata Dei' PL 17 845) AtCanterbury the mid twelfth-century St Gabriel'schapel had a monumental mural, still prrtiallvvisible, of Chnst as Judge with the Book (seeBoase, op cit, plate 25)
50 'Ut magis legere libeat in marmonbus quam incodicibus' For the full text of the Apologia adGuMelmum Sancti Theoderici Abbatem, see PL 182915-16 and for a partial English translation anddiscussion, M Schapiro, 'On the AestheticAttitude in Romanesque Art', Romanesque .irt,London 1977, pp 6-7
51 Ong, Orahty and Literacy, op c i t i n n 4 , p p36-49
52 LJ A Lowenthal, 'Amulets in MedieyalSculpture', Folklore, 89, 1978, pp 3-12According to Mana Corti, 'Models andAntimodels in Medieyal Culture', New LiteraryHtstory, 10, 1979, p 350, 'Much transgressingmaterial of the twelfth century was lost becauseIt was never written down, but entrusted to oraltransmission' Many of the ludic, obscene andanti-clencal manifestations of the anti-culture,which she locates outside the hierarchy orofjktum, are carried through images For the laterdevelopment of play in the margins of books, seeL Randall, Images in the Margins of GothtcManuscnpts, Berkeley 1966
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SEEING \ND READING
53 Bduml op a t p 262J4 P Zumthor, cited in \ ancf, op cit in n 23, p
402 \lison Stonci has bhovvn for example howthirteenth-Cf ntur\ secular Romanct illustrationsare the v\ork of artists using models dirtctK IromLatin ecclesiastical books ('Sacred and Prolanc•^rt Secular and Liturgical Book Illumination inthe I hirtetnth Centur\" in The Epu m Medut alSociety Aesthetic and Moral \ alues lubingtn 1977,p 102)
55 Ihc heroine of the French \erse Eneas is htteratussincE est quist tost ancre et parchtmin/ si a ecristot as latin' (11 8776) cited in H H MillsLav man and Cleric' Cambridge PhD thesis1952 p 291 For a tacsimileoftht German MSproduced c 1210-20, now BerlinStaatsbibhothek MS germ fol 282, see ABoeckler Eneide, Leipzig 1939
56 Quoted from D \ \ llliams The Arms andHands with Special Relcrenct to the Anglo-Saxon Sign S\stem Semiottca, 21 1977 pp1-29 For an exciting anaKsis of tht difTtrentdiscourses held uithin scrolls and inscriptions inFrench Romanesque MSS set J F LvotardDtscotirs tigure Pans 1978 p 168
57 SeeOhK.op cit inn 22 p 458 Cambndge Lni\ersit\ Librar\ MS Kk 4 25,
fol 58' The words are written on the barevellum b\ the same scribal hand as the Latintext below and solid green pigment is paintedaround them It is translatable as anexclamation (ware = Ouaisl The Bestiarv was a'word book' ol etvmological and moral allegones(see OhK op cit p 17) as well as being avisual repository for conventional animalschemata N J Morgan calls this picture a genrescene' Early Gothic Manuscripts (I) 1190-1250,London 1982 no 53 pp 100-1
59 That Anglo-N'orman assumed the status as anotiicial language of culturt is shown bv I ShortOn Bihngualism m Anglo-Norman England',
Romance Philology, 33 1979-80 pp 467-79 Forafascinating account of one of the few pictureinscriptions in English in this period, see thestorv of the poor Norfolk bov who makes hisfortune in France with onlv a pig andcommemorates his success with a wall paintingwhich 'speaks his old native tongut, 'Wille Gris,Wille Gns-' Thinche wat vou was and qwat voues',J Stephenson, Chronicon der Lanercost,Edinburgh 1839, p 52 and J M Wilson'English and French in England, 1100-1300',History, XXX in, 1943, p 51
60 Leiden Bibliotheek der Ri)ksuniversiteit MS lat76A, fol 185' See Morgan, op cit , no 14 pp60-1 A later mid-fourteenth-centurv miniature,Pans BN MS n a lat 3145, reproduced inNoakes, op cit inn 33, p 4, has a picture of theboy Louis in exactly this situation He is seated,learning to read from a book on his knee betweenhis mother, Blanche of Castile, and his tutor,who wields a birch, like the personification of
Grammatua He also has ajestuca or pointer, topick out the individual letters, and probably aswell to point to significant illustrations, such asappear in the twentv-three pages of pictures inhis Psalter
61 See Clanchv, op cit . Trusting Writing', pp231-57 and BaumI, op cit , pp 239-41 for legallittracv and the idea of the signature M BParkes discusses what he calls 'pragmaticliteracv' in his useful survev. 'The Literacv of theLaitv', in The Medieval Uorld, ed D Daiches and\ Thorlbv. London 1973, pp 555-7
62 For the representation of the fheophilus Legendat Souillac see M Schapiro ' The Sculptures t)fSouillac , i?omanM^«cylrt, p 118 On theiconographic theme in general, A C Fryer,'Theophilus the Penitent as Represented in Art ,Archaeological Journal 92, 1935, pp 320-45 andP K Klein, 'Kunst und Feudalismus zur zeit\lfons des Weisen von Castihen und Leon,(1252-1284) Die IUustrationen der' Cantigas" ', in Bauwerk und Bildwerk inHochmittelalter Anschauliche Beitrage zur Kultur undSocialgeschichte 1981, pp 191-2 For the feudalgesture oi immixtw manuum itself, see M Bloch,/•>«</«/5o«fh, Chicago 1961 I pp 145-62 and JLe GofT, 'Les Gestes svmboliques dans la yiesociale les gestes de la vassalite', Simboli enmbologia, Spoleto 1976, II, p 679
63 In the Ingeborg Psalter, c 1200, the feudalgesture is shown on fol 35' but on the facingrecto the narrative continues with the Virginsaving the penitent through the return of thecharter which reads 'Ego sum homo tuus', see FDeuchler Der Ingeborgpmlter, Berlin 1967, plate99, p 68 The homage scene which is one of theten Theophilus initials in the De Brailes Hours,London BL 49999, as well as a prominentcharter has a French tituli (written probably forthe easier reference to its ladv owner) 'Theoflefet humage au deable et lui escrit charte de seupropre sane' (fol 34'). see Morgan, Early GothicManuscripts, pi 247 For the Apocalypse,Lambeth Palace Library, MS 209 see E Millar,'Les Pnncipaux MSS a peinture du LambethPalace a Londres', Bull de la S F R M P ,VU,1924 Contemporary charters of the same formas found in these miniatures are reproduced inClanchy, op cit , pis 5 and 7
64 For Fulbert of Chartres' sermon see PL 141 323In Its re-telhng bv the vernacular poet Rutebufm the thirteenth century the pact is clearlystressed as being in writingdeyil Quar maintez genz m'en ont sorpns
Por ce que lor lettres n'en prisPor ce que vueil ayoir bien dues
Theoph Vez les ci je les ecntes(E Faral and F Bastin, Oeuvres Completes deRutebuf, yol II, Pans I960, p 188, 11 252-5)
65 Any person charged with felony who was able toread a prescribed verse from the Bible wastheoretically entitled to benefit of clergy and thus
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SEEING AND READING
escaped the death penalty See Clanchy, op citp 185
66 For a late thirteenth-centurv miniature showinga scnbe-devil quoting Deuteronomy to damn adving woman, representing the sinful soul, seeCatalogue of Single Leaves and Miniatures fromWestem Illuminated MSS , Sotheby's Mondav 25April 1983, lot 31 (a) Images of lutivillus andthe popular theme of diabolic literacv arediscussed with examples in P Halm 'Derschreibende Teufel', Cristiantsmo Region dt Stato(extr Atti del II Congresso di Studi Umamstm)Rome 1952, pp 235-50, E Beitz, Caesanus vonHetsterbach und die Bildene Kunst Augsburg 1926,pp 55 pis 30-1 and M D Anderson, Drama andImagery in English Medieval Churches, Cambridge1963, pi 24d
67 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawl G 185,fol 81^ This IS a variation on a theme oftenfound in the illustration of the Psalm 97 openingwhere animals parodv the performance of theecclesiastical singers m the initial, onlv in themargins Such is the case in the thirteenth-centurv Oscott Psalter, London BL Add MS50000, fol 146' For liturgical parody of thistvpe, see R Hammerstein, Diabolus m Musica,Studien zur Ikonographie der Music im Mitteralter,Bern 1974 Abb 72-82
68 Chart Univ Pans I, 70 See Mills, op cit in n55, p 190
69 This IS evidenced in his Life ofStAlban which hasa note stating 'G send please to the LadvCountess of Arundel, Isabel that she is to sendvou the Book about St Thomas the Martvr andSt Edward which I translated and illustratedand which the Lady Countess of Cornwall maykeep until Whitsuntide ' See M R James.Illustrations to the Life ofSt Alban, Oxford 1924,pp 15-16 As another note tells us, Paris usedthe half-page picture format copied from Psalterpicture-cvcles, 'In the Countess of Winchester'sBook let there be a pair of images on each page,thus '
70 R Vaughan, Matthew Pans, Cambndge 1958, pp175-6, which follows the translation bv H RLuard, Lives of Edward the Confessor, Rolls Series,1858, I, p 290 See also the facsimile of thewhole MS by M R James, Roxburghe Club,1920 The text was translated from the earlierLatin life by Ailred
71 Les Quatre Ages de I'homme, cd M de Freville,Societe des Anciens Textes Frangais, Pans 1888, 25An interesting genera! studv of the problem is SGroag Bell, 'Medieval Women Book OwnersArbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors ofCulture', Signs The Journal of Women in Culture andSociety, VII, 4, 1982, pp 741-68
72 J W Thompson, The Literacy of the Latty tn theMtddleAges, Berkeley 1939, p 171, gives arelevant example of female readers being
involved with the visual effects of books whichalso suggest that thtse wert read aloud lo thtnobihtv by clerks In anothtr roval Saint s Liftthat of Queen Margartt of Scotland it is poinittlout that her daughter Matilda 'dtsirtd noi onlvto hear, but also to insptct Lontmuallv thiimpress of the letters in htr mothtr s Life' Sttalso CUnchv, op cit p 217dndParkes op cit,p 557 for the reading habits ol tht nobilitv
73 Bauml, op cit , p 261 1 his sthnlar s argumtntthat the 'lift-like' qualities ol post-Romanesqutart are due to 'equivalences which allow us to seereahtv in terms ol an image and in imagt interms of rtahtv' fails to takt mto actiiunt tht stillhighlv textual and semiotic struclurt of latermedieval art Depending too much on the'lllusionistic' as propoundtd bv Gombrich andArnheim, Bauml descnbts the relationshipbetween picture and framt in a twelfth-tt nturvBestiarv as if it were a modern 'framed painting(p 261, n 651 The violation of th( Iramt, whichIS here described as being so lnnovatorv is infact a common feature of twellth-ctnturv art, asSchapiro has shown (op cit in n 39 p 228)
74 'I ranslation in Architector The Lodge Books andSketchbooks of Medieval Architects hv F Bucher, I,New York 1979, p 138 but see alst) H RHahnloser, \ illard de Honnecourt \'ienna 1935,pp 145-6
75 Bucher op cit76 Education of architects is discussed in L R
Shelbv ' The Education of Mediev al EnglishMaster Masons', Medieval Studies 32 1170, pp1-26 According to F J Barnes Jr, \ lUard was ametalworker, which would still plact him high inthe hierarchy of medieval craltsmcn, amongstthose most often literate ('Thf DrapervRendering Technique ol \ illard de Honnecourt'Gw/a, XX, 1981, pp 199-206) See also PFrankl, The Gothic, Pnnceton, 1960, pp 35-55
77 'An oral culture has nothing corresponding tohow-to-do-it manuals for the trades (suchmanuals in fact are extremelv rare and alwavscrude in chirographic cultures coming intoeffective existence onlv after print has beenconsiderablv interiorized' (Ong, op cit , p 43and The Presence of the Word, London 1967, pp28-9)
78 K S Goodman (ed ), The Psycholinguistic Nature ofthe Reading Process, Detroit l9(iB,p 25 Forafuller and more theoretical analysis of this spaceor 'difference' between the verbal and the visualin medieval representation, see mv forthcomingarticle, 'The Book of Signs Writing and VisualDifference in Gothic Manuscript Illumination',iin Word and Image, 1/2, 1985
79 E R Curtius, European Literature and the LatinMtddleAges, trans W Trask, Princeton 1973, pp14-15
