The Lindisfarne Gospel, painted and lettered around 697 A.D., brings into sight the watershed that separates the oral from the descriptive mind. Opposite the beginning of each Gospel in the Lindisfarne Book stands a wordless ornamental page, decorated in the style of Irish and Saxon sword handles, silver cups, and fibulae, that balances the lettered page to the right. The initial letter of the text appears on the ornamental page, but it also both frames and penetrates the strings of uncial letters on the lettered page. It looks as if the calligraphic outpourings of one capital had the task of weaving the texture that supports the sentences. Occasionally the interwoven colored lines take the appearance of elongated dogs or birds, only to dissolve again into infinitely prolonged tongues, tails, and ears. Only the portraits of the four Evangelists rise from this painted warp and written woof: not symbols but strong individuals shown in the style of late antique coins rendered in sharp, northern lines.
In the Book of Kells, written one hundred years later, it is easier to speak separately of its lettering and drawings. The form of the letters reveals its date: no longer roman capitals and not yet medieval minuscules. Historians are still in disagreement about the place at which it was written and the origin of the stylistic elements it combines. Around 1183, Geraldus Cambrensis was still impressed by its beauty: The designs are “so deliberate and subtle, so exact and compact, so full of knots and links, with colors so fresh and vivid, that you might say that all this was the work of an angel and not of a man.”
Art historians have talked about barbaric instincts surfacing on these “Baroque” pages, which react against the reforms attempted by Charlemagne. We should say: The book talks as if literacy had not yet settled in. It talks through the style of its meandering threads. They challenge the reader to weave the one story of Christ’s life out of four tales, thereby fleshing out the “Word of God,” the Gospel Truth. Seen in this way, the Book of Kells is a kind of “Homeric page” in which, at an early date in England, oral storytelling has been for a moment visibly frozen in the cadence of knot and link that punctuates the series of letters—just as the strum of the lyre punc tuates the utterance of the singer. The Good News becomes visible. Like a stream of fibers that is drawn from the distaff, twisted between the fingers and turned into a yarn, so the Good News is embodied in the spinning out of a yarn, knitting up of a tale, weaving the tales into a story. The metaphors of narration are taken from yarn and spindle and loom, used by oral societies to embody and share their unspeakable perception. Even today the Navajos and Aymara women weave each tribe’s cosmography into one reality with its social geography. Both in the mesas and in the Andes the seeds must be brought to the field in kerchiefs that tell the unspoken story of the spot at which they will grow. During the final years of intense oral tradition in the north of the British Islands, the pages of the Book of Kells make a wordless tale of this kind visible, even to the unlettered. But for the reader, what is on the page is not the same as what is in the book. The letters and the lines tell the same story in dissymmetric, mutually untranslatable ways. The knotted lines that occasionally spawn figures are not yet illustrations to the text, for the texture of the lettered rows has not yet arranged itself to be perceived by the eyes as a visible “text.”
The idea of the “text” that is in the book could not come about without major changes in the elements that are visible on the page. By pointing to the arrangement of lines and colors on the page, the emergence of a “text” can be followed, even by a modern illiterate—one who cannot decipher the insular majuscule in which the Book of Kells is written, or who cannot understand a single sentence in Latin. The transformation of the manuscript page during the eight hundred years that precede Gutenberg illustrates the steps through which the mind of the West has come into being.
T WAS NOT until the Middle Ages that letters ushered in a new type of society. The role played by letters in the birth of this new kind of society can be studied on two levels. On one level, new ways of doing business, nourishing prayer life, and administering justice all became feasible through the written preservation of words. In the twelfth century neither the heresies nor the new orders, neither the new towns nor their universities could be understood without the new and broad spread of the word that was now not only said but read.
The second way letters changed a society—by their own symbolism getting under a culture’s skin and changing social perception in terms of the written word—has been much less studied and is much more difficult to talk about. The reason for this research lacuna is probably that all the categories by which we talk about past societies have been acquired by reading. By their very nature they serve to describe. They are directly suited to saying things about a society in which social relations are governed by a reliance on written language. Even as poets, we are men of letters. What we call science originates from description. Absurdly, we speak of the surviving body of oral traditions as “oral literature,” which literally means “oral writing.” Consequently, it is very difficult to convey how society was turned inside out by the spread of writing in the Middle Ages.
In the part of Europe lying north of the Alps, between the middle of the twelfth century and the end of the thirteenth, an unprecedented change occurred in the nature of social relations: Trust, power, possession, and everyday status were henceforth functions of the alphabet. The use of documents, together with a new way of shaping the written page, turned writing, which in the Early and High Middle Ages had been extolled and honored as a mysterious embodiment of the Word of God, into a constituent element in the mediation of mundane relations.
So long as literacy was confined to minorities, as was the case until the High Middle Ages, power was exercised in the form of foreign rule. Relying on his Calendarium, in 1186—scarcely four years after his election—Abbot Samson, a foreigner, knew every bushel owed on every hide of St. Edmund’s land. Even though the tenant knew no letters—the Abbot’s means of recollection was as foreign to him as the book of the Day of Judgement—writing had left an impression on his soul as if it were a whip. He was now under the coercion of writing to pay those debts that he did not care to remember.
As literacy became more general and, by the end of the medieval period, embraced large sections of society, changes began to seep into everyone’s everyday life. Without obliterating social relations based on orality in a uniform way, it engendered a growing tension between custom and legality.
In the committing of oaths to writing, we can trace the shift of trust from the validly given word to a document exerting legal force. An oath is a ceremonial giving of one’s word, a spoken promise. This kind of emphatic utterance seems to occur among all peoples. An oath swears to a given word. The truth or intention of the thing sworn to is reinforced by a ritual association between word and gesture, both traditional in form. The latter invests the former with a peculiar power. Oaths are among the forms of utterance most carefully guarded against change. Their formulation in terms of rhythm, alliteration, and repetition keeps them from falling into oblivion, like unforgettable fragments of a forgotten past. Often the form of the oath was recited to the person making it—in the Germanic world with the oath stick held out. While taking the oath, the swearer laid his hand on the temple stele, on a clod of earth, or on his sword, or he raised his weapon skyward and placed a foot on a stone. “By the ship’s side and the shield’s rim, by the sword’s edge and the horse’s thigh” was how the Danes swore fealty. The swearing of an oath took place in the open air—in eighteenth-century Polish courtrooms, oaths were still sworn by an open window—in order to make the oath manifest to the gods, the spirits, or the dead. While swearing to fulfill his oath, the swearer raised his sword or raised three fingers or laid them against his beard or testicles, and in many places he sullied himself with the blood of a sacrificed animal. Women swore with different gestures than men, laying a hand on their breast or braids or belly.
A man who makes an oath pronounces a conditional curse against himself; he asks to be maimed, withered, or blinded, if he is pronouncing a falsehood or should ever break his word. He swears his own body, his limbs, his eyes, his honor, even his descendents, by putting them up as a pledge. Through the medium of co-jurors, he physically makes his whole tribe a party to his oath, involving them all in his pledge. May lightning strike them, may the devil take them, may his wife bear him a crippled child if he is lying.
For the onlookers, the unity of word and gesture has something of the effect of a sacrament. The swearing of an oath makes the word visible—not on paper, but in the living body of the person concerned. It incarnates the veracity of what he is saying. In the context of orality, truth is inseparable from veracity. The oath reveals an epiphany of this unity of form and content that captures the essence of the oral mentality.
The oath survived tenaciously in written law despite being in fundamental contradiction to the nature of the letter. Written law seeks to legitimatize itself by controlling the oath, which it does by monopolizing it. When strict laws were passed against oath taking and cursing outside the courts, the oath’s function was reversed, as can be seen in medieval records.
When the splendidly bound Book of the Gospels replaced the oath-taker’s own beard, the rim of his shield, or the pommel of his sword in solemnifying the oath, a new relationship began between the oath and writing: The book as object was incorporated into the gestures accompanying the self-curse, while its contents, oddly enough, remained outside the wording of the oath. What makes this even more peculiar is the fact that Matthew 5:33-36 contains an unqualified prohibition of oaths of any kind: “You have learned that they were told, ‘Do not break your oath,’ and ‘Oaths sworn to the Lord must be kept.’ But what I tell you is this: You are not to swear at all—not by heaven, for it is God’s throne, nor by earth, for it is His footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King, nor by your own head….” In spite of this unambiguous passage in the Sermon on the Mount, Emperor Justinian’s legal reforms require those taking oaths to place a hand on the Gospels.
This innovation is all the more instructive for the fact that the reform by the Christian Byzantine Emperor, in 528 A.D., first elevated the oath in Roman law to the status of a general obligation in legal proceedings. Missionaries then introduced the oath with the Gospels to traditional courts north of the Alps. Litigants in these courts were no longer to swear on a ring that had been dipped in the blood of a sacrificial animal, but on the cross, on relics, on the altar—and on the Gospels. This was required by the Lex Ribuaria in 803. The Church assumed the divine task of punishing the breaking of an oath.
The use of the book in the pantomime of legal gesture soon led to the form of words used in the ceremony being committed to writing. The traditional cursing of oneself was replaced by an ingenious formula. In England it had become so complicated and strange that the plaintiff preferred to grasp the red-hot iron of ordeal rather than take the Gospels in his hand. He knew that he could never repeat the formula without making a mistake, and that would have been tantamount to a breach of oath.
Not only the oath but also broad areas of everyday life that had previously been governed by oral usage were made subject to a new formal and legal kind of literacy in the Middle Ages. A large section of the population discovered in this period that, before objects could be owned or rights made use of, they first had to be described, and held on a parchment: trust shifted from the given word to a sealed document.
Objects could now properly be “held” rather than possessed. The world that the theologians had represented as a book, the Book of God that man must decipher, now through the document became an object that only description could appropriate. Thousands of topographical descriptions have come down to us from this period; boundaries became effective through these descriptions: “From the old oak tree along the stream as far as the big rock and thence in a straight line uphill to the wall….” This appropriative description of reality began as a jurisprudential method before it became the foundation of natural sciences.
M.T. Clanchy, on whose work we shall draw, estimates that in twelfth-century England, not more than thirty thousand charters were drawn up. In the period 1250–1350, by contrast, several million were made out in England alone—that amounts to almost five charters for each piece of describable property. Accompanying this change, writing materials increased ten-to twenty-fold in this period. The consumption of sealing wax at the royal chancery in England rose from three pounds per week in 1226, to thirteen pounds in 1256, and thirty-one pounds just ten years later in 1266. More sheep had to give up their skins as parchments for the purposes of documentation during a royal court hearing. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, it was a matter of a few dozen. For a perfectly ordinary session in Suffolk in 1283, over five hundred were skinned.
Not only the charters but also the breve, or brief, and the “letter” came into more common use. This can be shown by the number of such royal mandates that have come down to us from the period 1080–1180: For French kings this rose from 3 to 60; for English kings, from 25 to 115; and for popes, from 22 to 180. After 1180, the growth rate skyrocketed. From the reign of Innocent III (1198–1215), 280 survive; from that of Innocent IV (1243–54), 730; and from that of Boniface VIII (1294–1303), 50,000.
In the twelfth century, the chancery was an exclusive attribute of the sovereign. Chancellor Becket already had an army of clerks to do his paperwork: Sixteen different hands can be distinguished under his control in the years 1155–1158. But then, beginning around 1200, individual bishops and princes began to join in. They could not manage any longer occasionally summoning a curate to read to them or to write for them. By 1350 the chancery was an essential element of spiritual and temporal dominion. Writing rooms multiplied even faster than mills, first widely used at this time for pumping, crushing, hammering, and darning. In the eleventh century, pieces of writing and articles of jewelry had been preserved in reliquaries as treasures next to the bones of saints. The overflow of charters, briefs, and copies thereof flushed these treasures out of their arks. What had been an heirloom was now an instrument of proof.
Into the twelfth century, the letter was often the visible indication of the importance, the weight, that attached to the news brought by the messenger. The letter became necessary only when the messenger was unworthy of the sender: When Jaufre Rubel sent a song to his lady by his own court jester, he insisted that he sing without handing her the piece of parchment. Some twelfth-century love letters are works of scholarship or works of art that refer the reader to the messenger for interpretation.
Only slowly did the missive become a memorial of a promise that the sender places in the hand of the recipient. In 1142, Heloise’s letter to Abbot Peter the Venerable clearly implies this. Abelard, her husband and castrated lover, had died as an exemplary monk in Cluny. Abbot Peter had him cooked and boned and the dry remains conveyed to the Paraclete for burial in a grave where Heloise could later join him. With the remains he sent Heloise a deeply moving letter of admiration for Abelard, and of praise for her. But she was not content. In her answer she requests from Abbot Peter a written promise that the monks at Cluny will forever honor and remember her dead husband. In addition to Peter’s note having the nature of a sign, she requests an instrument on which the future demands of the recipient are to be based.
This becomes quite clear in testaments. A person’s last will is no longer expressed through the presentation of a symbol, for example, a handful of heritable soil, a key, or a sword. A sealed document now takes the place of the thing. The inheritance is no longer determined by the witnesses of a person’s last words spoken from his deathbed, but by a charter. The document itself becomes an instrument of witness.
“In witness whereof” signified an action, a gesture accompanied by words, an oath, coupled with the transmission of an object, by which sovereignty, or title, or rights of property were ceded. Leaving a dagger or a goblet might serve as a sign for the bequest of a piece of land. Later, the object sometimes bore an inscription. On the pommel of a whip in the possession of St. Albans Abbey we find the words to the effect that “this is a gift of four mares by Gilbert of Novo Castello.” In this way the word, in conjunction with a tangible sign, was “witness.” In the thirteenth century, word and sign collapsed into a written statement. In an initial step it was a paper record of a past event. In a second step, the preparing of the parchment itself became the event described. Lawyers by 1180 insist that the instrument of witness should record a past agreement, in perfectum. One’s word, through the signature, constituted assent to a written text.
Good faith being committed to a written document in this way made it important for the person issuing it and the recipient to have a copy of it. Otherwise, the scriptorium of the monastery that the sovereign had endowed with a gift could turn out unlimited numbers of instruments, attributed to his predecessors, which the sovereign’s chancellor would have to honor. Nowadays if one attempted to acquire rights by producing written confirmation of fabricated promises, it would be understood as forgery. This was not so in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the legal way of conferring rights substantiated by instruments of witness—not just incidentally supported by a memorial—was too new a concept. “Documentation,” and the necessity for the issuer to keep a precise copy of the instrument, represent technical discoveries of the late twelfth century. The regest, the catalogue, the copy, the seal, the date, and the signature, are decisive elements of the new technique.
The making of regests, which are registers of the dictates of the sovereign, was already known to Roman lawyers. One or two popes had practiced it in the fourth century. From Innocent III on, it was the rule in the Roman Curia, but it was not until the fourteenth century that it became established in the chancellory of the Holy Roman Empire. Cataloguing techniques lagged behind the manufacture of copy instruments until well into the fifteenth century. Monastery libraries in the High Middle Ages had monks who remembered where to find manuscripts but as yet had no catalogues. Monks in the older monasteries in particular knew better than their patrons what the latter held in their archives and thus were able to produce forgeries easily.
The first known scrutinium of a monastery library, a catalogue intended to serve as the annual inventory, dates from around 1170. With this invention, the book became dislocated from the sacristy. The book repository became an archive, pure and simple—a library. A report by a Dominican in 1260 tells of books being set out on shelves so the brothers might consult them in promptu—in readiness. It became important to verify the quotation from a theological authority, much as the described border of a forest had to be authenticated by reference to written evidence. In the thirteenth century, the making of catalogues of books owned and the making of regests, or registers, or charters granted proceeded in parallel.
There was a fundamental difference, however, between making a copy of a book in a monastery scriptorium and making a copy of a charter in a chancellory. The original of the book stayed in the monastery, while the original of the charter left the chancellory. The chancellor was responsible for the copy that remained iden—that is, the same as, identical to the original.
Making exact copies called not only for twice as much writing work but also for correction of the copy. In 1283, Cambridge established the first beneficium for a paid corrector. His job was to check documents according to form (ratio), legibility (lettera), word order (dictio), and spelling (sillibo). Two documents being identical thus became a new criterion of their legal validity. Two hundred years before Gutenberg, archives gave rise to the intellectual prototype of printed matter: an original (that might not exist anymore) from which a number of identical copies had been produced and written. In fourteenth-century depictions of a law-court clerk, the corrector is often shown looking over the shoulder of a secretary and a copyist to verify and certify the identity of two documents. The issue of a notary’s certificate attesting to the identity of two texts became a flourishing business. Even people now required identification. As early as 1248, Goliards in Burgundy were obliged to carry written credentials: the first step toward the “identification” of a person as an “individual.”
To keep the individual charter identifiable forever, it must not only be vouched for by a copy, but also firmly placed in space and in a new kind of time. The place of issuance is already indicated on most eleventh-century documents. When the documents indicated time, this was usually related to events significant enough to stick in the memory of witnesses to the proceedings described. The document was drawn up on the Feast of St. Severinus, on a market day, at the vigil of a wedding, on the anniversary of the foundation of a monastery, or perhaps on the occasion of a visitation by the sovereign. It was not until some time in the thirteenth century that notaries ventured to place so trivial a proceeding as a change of ownership of a piece of farmland in direct relation to the birth of the Lord and thus to the course of the history of human salvation. Through this method, the history of salvation was chartered as the history of the world.
As a result of this dating, time through the text became something new: no more the subjective experience of a relative distance in the course of the world or the pilgrimage of the writer, but an axis for absolute reference on which charters could be nailed like labels. By the end of the fourteenth century, the date on a charter could even be tied to the mechanical tower-clock. “Circiter nona pulsatione horologi,” announced the contract, and at nine o’clock the document was signed. Memory grew a new dimension. Memories could now be shelved behind each other, not according to their importance or affinity, but according to the date from which they issue. And in the Dance of Death, the skeleton man begins to appear with an hourglass: By the fifteenth century, he insists that time is scarce.
The signature also changed its function in this transition from the description of an event to the production of an instrument that was essential to the event, because the signature helped render individual will “visible,” and thus helped fix it in a universal grid. The swearer’s resounding name no longer leaves an impression.
In the twelfth century, documents still spoke aloud: “The letters are symbols of things and have such power that they bring the speech of the person present to our ear without his voice.” So said John of Salisbury (d. 1180), sometime secretary to Thomas à Becket, a sarcastic and elegant writer who with this definition harks back to Isidore of Seville, whose letters “indicate figures speaking with sounds.” Until it had been promulgated (by a herald, “heard”), a legislative act had no legal validity. The written copy was as yet no more than a record of that oral promulgation.
So long as the document was conceived only as a reminder of something proclaimed, its sealing with a signet ring or a signature was an emphatic confirmation of the oral event it described; but not yet its authentication. Because he was not concerned with authentication, the same person arbitrarily used a different signature each time. This changed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when documents became legally effective instruments. Courts concerned themselves with the question of authenticity. Vellum (calfskin) was replaced by membranum (sheepskin), which was thinner, did not easily permit erasures, and prevented forgeries. Signed documents were now required to stand as a guarantee.
The old Frankish wera, the old French warandir, “guarantor,” slowly turned into a written warranty that drew its force from being signed. The seal became a mark of the power of writing. Even a man who could not himself write was empowered by the seal to take legally valid action on his own behalf by issuing documents. If his word was invalid, he could speak through the document, thus exercising his power by taking legal action. In the thirteenth century, even villeins, free peasants, occasionally carried their own seals and so could obtain a description of their property drawn up by a notary. In the twelfth century, the seal was still regarded by its owner much like any other object—a dagger, a chalice, or a whip. Like the St. Albans’ whip pommel that stood for four mares, the sealed wax was the object through which a piece of property might change hands. If a document was at all attached to the sealed wax, which sometimes weighed more than a pound, this parchment was mainly a further inscription on the seal, analogous to the inscription scratched on the pommel of the whip. Only slowly did the seal change from a thing (a res) into the substitute for a person’s handwritten signature. The text itself overshadowed its material vehicle, and threw this shadow deep into the daily life of everyone who purchased, inherited, sold, or lost property. Just as in the transition from orality to literacy, language became detached from the speaker, so the text was no longer viewed as an extension of the event but assumed its own authenticity separate from the event.
Representations of the Last Judgement appear at this time in the arched spaces above many church doors that show how the book has separated from its writer. The Archangel Michael weighs the soul to establish if it may ascend into Paradise or must be cast into Hell. And, on quite a few of these reliefs, the Judge Himself holds the book, in which every deed and desire, nay every word and thought of the dead has been written down. Without ever having touched a pen or held a book, without ever having dictated a line or sealed a charter, every time he enters the church door the faithful is reminded that, even with his most secret thought, he writes the text of his life, by which he will be judged on that ominous day.
To write, however, at the time when the Book of Life gained prominence in Christian preaching did not yet mean to clutch a pen and draw letters on a parchment. What it meant to write can be well documented from the manner in which Bernard’s scriptorium was organized. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux in the early twelfth century, does not write with his hand. Like Cicero, the Abbot spoke emphatically in the presence of a scribe. He spoke clearly, but slower than the Roman, because unlike the latter’s slave Tiro, Bernard’s amanuensis (his secretary: literally, he who lends him his hand) did not know how to take shorthand. Some of Bernard’s dictations survive in two versions that textual criticism is unable to reduce to a single original. These are undoubtedly two different secretaries’ notes of the same sermon of which different fair copies were made from a wax tablet. Many of the old texts were prepared by secretaries in this way from statements by their dictators. Once a fair copy had been made of his dictation, Bernard occasionally might have had it read back to him for checking. But there was no question as yet, for him, of a correction from a manuscript.
Some half dozen technical innovations in writing had to become commonplace before the author himself could become a writer. In this period the usual method of writing, both for copying and for originals, was and remained dictation.
In the Republican period of ancient Rome, to dictate meant to speak in the elevated, rhythmic manner of the ductus; scribere meant the physical act of writing as well as composing. In the Middle Ages the frontier between the two meanings was located quite differently. Dictate referred to the act of creating a text, and scribere simply to the work done with writing materials. It was suggested occasionally that, when he was alone in his cell, a monk could dictate. Up until the twelfth century, the ars dictaminis was the art of reading and composing rather than that of reading and writing. The art of writing was one of the many arts necessary for a manuscript to come into being. The skinner and the parchment maker, the beekeeper who produced the wax tablet, and the painter for the miniatures, were all as necessary as the bookbinder and the lector, or reader, in the copying room. This changed with the division of lines into words. When the copyist saw words in front of him, he was able to copy the original himself, word for word. There is some evidence that in the thirteenth century people who could not read were used for copying because they could copy more accurately.
In Antiquity, even after the great grammarians such as Varro and Quintillian had mastered the word intellectually and were able to teach its forms and functions in the sentence, writing was still pure grammatika: a continuous series of letters. Words were strung together without any physical definition. Not until the sequence of letters was read aloud was it possible to grasp the words of the text. The author might in theory dictate a sequence of words; but for the scribe they became an unbroken series of letters. From that series of letters the ear had to extract not only the words but also the elevated rhythm of polished speech.
A very timid beginning at dividing up words was made by Jerome. He interrupted his sequence of letters with cola and commata in order to make legible some of his translations from the Hebrew that would otherwise have been almost meaningless in Latin. The first strict division of sentences into separate words occurs in the titles of an early manuscript of the Etymologiae of Isadore. Division into words first came into common use in the seventh century. It happened at the northern frontiers of the known world, where Celtic “ignoramuses” had to prepare for the priesthood and needed to be taught Latin. Division into words was thus introduced as a means of teaching Latin to barbarians as a foreign language. Like the new pronunciation of Latin, it came to the Continent by way of Tours through Alcuin in the late eighth century. Unlike the new pronunciation, however, which was quickly rejected, the innovation of the word as a visual unit in writing won general acceptance. The ninth century provides us with the first reports of schools beginning to observe distinctiones, the spaces between words.
The new graphics of the separated word had an immediate effect on the copying room. Until the eighth century, the writing room was depicted by artists as a dictating room. Then, from the early eighth century, we have a picture of a writing room for which there are no precedents. The scribe sits in front of long strips from which he is copying, although the most usual method of copying was still that of the copier dictating to himself. As early as the ninth century, artists occasionally represented the inspiration of an author—even that of the Evangelists—by showing an angel holding a tome before the writer at his desk; nonetheless, it was not until the thirteenth century that the really radical change occurred.
The writer depicted in early thirteenth-century miniatures no longer holds a knife in his left hand. Instead of writing on the hard leather membrane that had to be smoothed by scraping and sometimes even nailed to the desk with the point of a knife, he now writes on thin parchment and is even beginning to write on paper. His posture is much more relaxed. Writing is no longer strenuous work. His right hand, too, now has an easier job. The writing surface is smooth, the ductus flows, and at last the Middle Ages has produced its own cursive script—something that had been forgotten since late Antiquity. The master can now become a writer himself. He is shown with a quill in his hand and not, as he had been for centuries, as a dictator.
Thomas Aquinas, in the middle of the thirteenth century, already had newer writing materials—parchment, penknife, reed, and ink—at his disposal. Drafts in his own hand have come down to us, in the new Gothic cursive which, in its first generation of use, was insufficiently standardized: The master did not yet think that a secretary could copy from his notes. Copying from the master’s handwriting by pupils became possible only in the next generation. Thomas still had to dictate in class from his arranged notes, creating his lectures from his written sources. He did not need to limit his notes to a small number of wax tablets. Thomas used notes to assist his trained memory: he drew up a schema of the arguments he was going to deal with. And in many instances, he first dictated his schema and then the execution of it. Earlier teachers did not speak from notes, and they could not check most of their sources.
When Bernard referred to a source he did so from memory. Albertus Magnus and Thomas, two generations later, were the first to have reference books at hand. They quoted verbatim, and after their death, their own works lay chained to library desks, having become reference books in their turn. The new technique of “reference” enables the thirteenth-century author to check his quotations from sources. He can dictate while looking up a passage. The dictator began to have random access to a memory that was laid out before him. Chaucer obviously had before him the text of Boccaccio’s Il Teseide, as his source, his auctoritas, for “The Knight’s Tale.” The mnemonic devices the rhetorician taught the pupil to build up in his own imagination had taken shape, hundreds of years later, on the page. The Lindisfarne Gospel comes with sixteen pages of canon tables constructed under decorated arches. In the Book of Kells, the fourth-century Eusabian Tables stand at the beginning and suggest to the reader that Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John can be read as one story, since they provide an inkling of the parallels between the four tales. But only in the late twelfth century is this memory device externalized. Any reader can return to any book he has read whenever he wants to do so. And soon it was no longer the works of one’s own monastery that the students could reach: the first Union Catalogue came into being shortly after the foundation of the Sorbonne.
Much more significant than the creation of accessible library shelves, however, was the new way of arranging written matter within the book. The art of going back to the exact location of a source of Divine Revelation was from the beginning a necessity that distinguished the Christian from the pagan author. This makes it surprising that the techniques to do so took hundreds of years to be shaped. For a thousand years Holy Scripture was not referred to indirectly, but always quoted directly. Saint Augustine had experimented with a device meant to help the readers of the City of God find their way about his vast treatise. For this purpose he prepared a brevicus as a summary to each of the books. Cassiodorus had experimented in the sixth century with the use of key words as glosses: He extracted them from the text and placed them into the margins as he dictated. Isidore of Seville, just before the Arabs established themselves in southern Spain, first provided his vast Etymologiae with chapter headings. But only very slowly did the division of the Bible into chapters become standardized; the division into verses came even more slowly. Gradually the New Testament began to be cited by chapter and verse. Such citation—without the need of quotation—became possible for the Old Testament only after 1200. And then, quite suddenly at the end of the twelfth century, the devices to use the book as a reference tool were there: a subject index to the whole of Holy Scripture. Thus, some 250 years before printing made it possible to refer to the text by page number, a network of grids was laid over the book—a method that had nothing at all to do with the content itself.
During the twelfth century, written texts were visibly fixed in spatial relations to each other. With this text certain elements were made to stand out: Quotations were now written in a different color. The reader’s eye, accustomed by the gloss to move from the body to the margin, had to be trained to move from the index to the page, and from one book to the other. Now the eye encompassed not simply the lines, but the entire text. Quite possibly, some of these techniques were developed under Arabic influence. The Moslems, who were not allowed to draw naturalistic pictures, sought to address the eye through the arrangement of letters alone. As a result, Arabic scribes developed a greater variety of colors and diversity of letter arrangements than contemporary Latin books. Certainly the influx of translations from the Arabic—often prepared by Jews from Toledo and Montpellier—inspired some of the new techniques used by the thirteenth-century monks. But Western bookmaking did not become iconoclastic. Precisely as the new methods allowed the text to take visible shape, this text entered into a new relationship to the painted margin and miniatures. Text and illumination are no longer interwoven in the ambiguous manner of Lindisfarne: the patterns do no more than intrude into the lines of the letters, as in the Book of Kells. To describe and to paint have come to be separate tasks often executed by different hands. And yet, the union of illustration and writing during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries gave rise to the great synthesis of the Western manuscript.
The world now lay described before the reader’s eye. The book is now arbitrarily accessible; the reader can enter at will, wherever the index refers him. He sees what is written, and the illustration assists him in this task of visualization. His authorities are perceived as writers rather than as teachers: The “ipse dixit” is replaced by the “ipse scripsit.” The pupils now sit in front of their teacher with their eyes fixed on his text, which lies on their knees. They are no more asked to recall the sound of their teacher’s words, but to grasp the architecture of his argument, which they must impress on their minds. By the end of the thirteenth century, students in Paris can borrow manuscripts from lending libraries to read with their teachers in class. Libraries become places of silence.
Now truly the reader can say what Hugh of St. Victor had said in 1128: “Trimodium est lectionis genus: docentis, discentis vel per se inspicientis” (I can read [aloud] to you, you can read [aloud] to me, and I can read contemplatively to myself). Now reading as an activity of the teacher—in other words, reading aloud—and reading as a listening activity are complemented by a third, silent type of reading: contemplative study of the book.