I.2. Authors & Readers

Prior to the introduction of printing in the mid-fifteenth century, when title pages and printers’ subscriptions began to provide readers with an indication of authorship, title, and the place and date of publication on a more regular basis, anyone who took a manuscript book in hand would just as likely have identified the work according to its incipit, that is, the beginning words of the text as by a given author’s name. Medieval library catalogues, such as that from the Cistercian monastery of Morimondo (cat. no. 5, f. 227v), combine both methods. The celebrated commentary on the Apocalypse by Haimo of Auxerre (cat. no. 6) is listed under its author’s name (“Item Aimus super apocalypsis”), but others, for example, a book simply described as “de materiali claustro,” give no hint of their authorship. In the case of prominent church fathers, noted monastic authors or famous preachers and scholastics, an ascription of authorship (not always accurate) might be found, most often in a rubric (literally, a passage written in red, from the Latin rubeo, or a ruddy orange known as minium, whence the term illumination). Such rubrics were placed at the beginning of the book or a given section. Medieval attestations of authorship, however, are notoriously unreliable. The skill of accessing particular authors ( accessus ad auctores) was an art in itself. In some cases, confusion (or wishful thinking) reigned. In others, forged assignations of authorship (as in the case of the theological writings assigned to St. Denis, now known as the ps.-Dionysius, supposedly the disciple of Paul and the first bishop of Paris) served to lend a heterodox or unconventional work an authority it otherwise would not have possessed. To the extent that innovation was prized, it often had to be presented in the guise of reform: a return adfontes, to the sources, the root and origin of Christian tradition. Even the modern concept of a single-author work remained largely foreign to the medieval way of thinking. A manuscript combining chronicles by the church historian, Eusebius (c. 260-340) and Sigebert of Gembloux (1030-1112) (cat. no. 21) exemplifies the way in which medieval authors built on the accomplishments of their predecessors and appealed to the authority of the church fathers as part of a self-conscious appeal to tradition. Some “works” set identifiable authors aside altogether in favor of a tissue of quotations (sometimes known as a cento, or chain) or less literal paraphrases (in part the product of a monastic culture of reading that relied on memory to retain and reproduce certain texts, beginning with the liturgy, itself in large part a paraphrase of the Bible). A collection of choice passages took the form of aflorilegium (literally, a bunch of flowers or bouquet, a concept that referred to the texts that the compiler had plucked, like flowers, from their sources). The catalogue from Morimondo lists a work simply under the title Flores evangeliorum (“Flowers from the Gospels”). Within such a culture, the concept of copyright, let alone plagiarism, also made no sense. A work that was not excerpted or copied had no afterlife; imitation proved the most sincere form of flattery.

Medieval representations of authors provide a record of medieval conceptions of authorship. In works of scripture, most notably, the Gospels, their authors traditionally were depicted in the guise of philosophers or poets of antiquity, seated at writing desks surrounded by the tools of their trade. The addition of attributes of inspiration in the form of Evangelist symbols (the winged man for Matthew, the lion for Mark, the ox for Luke, and the high-flying eagle for the visionary Evangelist, John) undermined any clear-cut notion of authorship in so far as the images, like the prologues that often prefaced each individual Gospel, stressed the Evangelists’ role as divinely-inspired conduits for the word of God. Revelation could not be tainted by the contingencies of human invention. Such “author portraits,” as they are known, already mix two different tasks or personae, that of the author per se, who until well into the Middle Ages would most often have dictated his work, and the scribe or amanuensis, who recorded the dictation, first, in shorthand on wax tablets that could easily be erased and only later in full, formal fashion within a presentation copy. A portrait of the Evangelist Mark in an Armenian bible (cat. no. 25) represents an instance of a contemplative Gospel writer receiving divine inspiration from a hand above. A single eleventh-century leaf from Trier (cat. no. 24) represents Pope Gregory the Great writing. Entire genres of medieval illustration are dedicated, less to the celebration of authors, scribes or even the all-important patron than to the their subjugation to the saints to whose service the books were dedicated.

By the late Middle Ages, conceptions of authorship had already begun to change. In this context, an early fifteenth-century copy of Christine de Pizan’s Livre de trois vertus (cat. no. 182), a treatise of moral instruction for women and on their place in medieval society that included accounts (and sometimes images) not only of female authors, but also female artists of antiquity, represents a revolution. Women were rarely depicted as scribes, let alone as authors; de Pizan’s arrogation of these roles for herself marks the beginning of the modern notion of authorial self-consciousness.

Reading in the Middle Ages was an active, not a passive process. Especially in the earlier Middle Ages, reading was spoken or at least mumbled and at times even sung, rather than silent. Monastic manuals compared the process of reading to the mastication and rumination of animals, which sought to extract spiritual nourishment from the text. For physical evidence of active reading, one need only look to the manuscripts themselves. To begin with, readers needed to expand the numerous abbreviations that were introduced to save space and, with it, precious parchment. These abbreviations, most of which were standardized, take the form of the "Morse code” of dashes, loops, and squiggles placed, for the most part, above words in the interlinear space (see, e.g., cat. no. 21). Underlining in red, whether introduced by readers or (as in cat. no. 22) by the scribe, served to identify authorities in the form of quotations. Corrections (cat. no. 29), lemmata (marks Unking a gloss in the margin to a passage in the text that serve as the medieval equivalent of the footnote), as well as added, as opposed to integral, glosses all stand as traces of readerly interventions of a kind that modern librarians would frown on, but to which modern forms of electronic annotation have lent new life. Such glosses can either fill the margins or the space between lines, which sometimes was widened so as to accommodate them (hence the phrase “reading between the lines”). The fifteenth-century vovelle bookmark added to the twelfth-century copy of Gilbert de la Porrees Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul (cat. no. 30) represents but one of the many aids to readership that were invented over the course of the Middle Ages which left their mark on the book as a physical object and which, in due course, were passed on to modernity.