INTRODUCTION
Interrelations, Transformations and Reception of Words and Images in
Medieval Manuscripts and Early Printed Books
The privileged role of the word in Western medieval culture, based on the centrality and authority of the divine logos, contributed to relegating images1 to an ancillary position. By its likeness to natural objects, the image could create the illusion of reality, a simian mockery of God’s creation. Moreover, it was regarded as dangerous for the unlearned who were not always able to distinguish between the image and its prototype.
During the eighth-century Byzantine iconoclastic controversy, icons representing Christ and the saints were condemned as lifeless pictures which were not and never could be the exact likeness of the prototype, since they did not share the same divine substance.2 Iconoclasts argued that carved and painted wood could only represent Christ’s human nature. To support their views, they quoted the biblical commandment which forbade the manufacture of graven images of God. Iconodules responded by asserting that through Christ’s incarnation the “Word of life” became visible (1 John 1:1-2) and the injunction of the Old Testament was superseded. They also emphasised the difference between latria (the adoration of God) and idolatria (the worshipping of graven idols), a distinction which had already been made by St. Augustine and St. Jerome three centuries earlier. The argument that images were tokens or signs of the prototype was employed to justify the use of Christian religious images. In the thirteenth century, this concept was further developed by Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas discusses the problematic issue of whether the image of Christ should be venerated with the adoration of latria or not, and he draws attention to the mechanism underlying the mental perception of a visual representation. According to Aristotle, whom Aquinas quotes, there is “a twofold movement of the mind towards an image: one indeed towards the image itself as a certain thing; another, towards the image in so far as it is the image of something else” (IIIa Q.25 a.3). Since reverence is due only to a rational creature, concludes Aquinas, when adoring the image of Christ, one does not venerate the carved or painted wood, but the divine, incorporeal thing it stands for.
The defence of religious images was also based on their instructive function. Pope Gregory the Great’s dictum that pictures were for the illiterate (idiotis) what writing was for the literate
1 In this study, the term ‘image’ is used to indicate a visual representation of a person, animal, or thing, painted, carved,
sculpted or photographed.
2 For an analysis of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy, see G. B. Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages.
became a commonplace argument in controversies concerning images throughout the late Middle Ages and continued to be used in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation and Counter-Reformation.3 As Duggan has pointed out, the use of the verb legere both for scriptura and pictura is problematic, since it is impossible to establish with any degree of certainty whether Gregory intended it in a literal or in a metaphorical sense (1989: 227). Did Gregory consider the visual and the verbal media as equivalent means of communication? Before him, St. Augustine certainly did not. In his sermon on Jesus’s multiplication of the fish and bread, Augustine distinguishes between seeing pictures and seeing words and he uses the verb legere only in the second case. If it happens to come upon a beautifully illuminated codex, he explains, one admires first the litteras pulchras, and praises the skill of the artist. Subsequently, the person reads and goes beyond the signifier in order to understand the signified.
Picturam cum videris, hoc est totum vidisse, laudasse: litteras cum videris, non hoc est totum; quoniam commoneris et legere. Etenim dicis, cum videris litteras, si forte non eas nosti legere: Quid putamus esse quod hic scriptum est? Interrogas quid sit, cum iam videas aliquid. Aliud tibi demonstraturus est, a quo quaeris agnoscere quod vidisti. Alios ille oculos habet, alios tu. Nonne similiter apices videtis? Sed non similiter signa cognoscitis. Tu ergo vides et laudas: ille videt, laudat, legit et intellegit. (In Evangelium
Ioannis 24. 2)4
The person who sees, reads and understands (intellegit) is implicitly the litteratus without whose help the illiterate remains on the level of the sensorial perception of the artefact. The subordination of the image to the word is once again reasserted. This does not come as a surprise, since the sermon is centred around the miracle as a visible manifestation of the Verbum Dei whose language (linguam suam) can be understood through the cognitive power of the intellect. Moreover, Augustine contrasts the bipartite nature of words, conceived as being divisible into signifier and signified,5 with the self-referential nature of pictures. His view did not prevail within medieval discussions about images, since it would have been difficult to reconcile it with the widely accepted notion that images were tokens of a higher, spiritual world.
In the twelfth century, a diametrically opposed view is expressed by Abbot Suger in his
Liber de Rebus in Administratione sua Gestis, a tract on the administration of the abbey of
3 Nam quod legentibus scriptura, hoc idiotis praestat pictura cernentibus, quia in ipsa ignorantes vident quod sequi
debeant, in ipsa legunt qui litteras nesciunt; unde praecipue gentibus pro lectione pictura est (Gregorius Magnus 1982: 874).
4
“When you have seen a picture, to have seen and praised it is the whole thing: when you see a writing this is not the whole, since you are reminded also to read it. Moreover, when you see a writing, if it happens that you can not read, you say: What do we think that to be which is here written? You ask what it is when you already see it to be something. He of whom you seek to be informed what it is that you have seen, will show you another thing. He has other eyes than you have. Do you not see the form of the letters as he does? But yet you do not understand the signs in the same way. You see and praise: he sees, praises, reads and understands.” (my translation)
5 I am using the Saussurian terms for the sake of conciseness. Augustine discusses the two components of words in the
following terms: “Aliter enim dicuntur verba quae spatia temporum syllabis tenent, sive pronuntientur, sive cogitentur; aliter omne quod notum est, verbum dicitur animo impressum, quamdiu de memoria proferri et definiri potest.” (De
Denis.6 According to Suger, the decorated panels of the main altar had an allegorical meaning which was understood only by the literate:
And because of the diversity of the materials such as gold, gems and pearls is not easily understood by the mute perception of sight without a description, we have seen to it that this work, which is intelligible only to the literate, which shines with the radiance of delightful allegories, be set down in writing. (1946: 63)
Composed by the abbot, the versicles affixed to the pictures help the literate understand more clearly the allegories. To Suger, pictures were far from being the ‘book’ of the illiterate.
In the thirteenth century, Gregory’s statement was also used by St. Bonaventure who insisted on the mnemonic function of images and emphasised their more direct emotional appeal, as well as the prevalence of sight over hearing in remembering the stories of the Bible (III, dist. IX, art. I, q. 2, concl.).7 In his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Libri Quatuor Sententiarum, Aquinas outlines the functions of religious images in similar terms: didactic, mnemonic, devotional.8 Within the medieval epistemological and cultural context, in which biblical stories and accounts of saints’ lives were the common stock of knowledge both for the literate and the illiterate, images were also considered to be a means of reminding simplices of what they already knew. One possible meaning of the verb ‘to read’ used in reference to pictures was probably that of remembering known stories through the visual exploration of the depicted images. The illiterate could comprehend the complex allegories Abbot Suger was referring to if they already knew the represented stories. Otherwise, they remained on a pre-iconographical level, where they identified natural objects without being able to connect them with concepts and themes, let alone understand their symbolic meaning.9
As Schapiro and other art historians have pointed out, medieval art was not mimetic and it did not attempt to create an illusion of reality. In the prevailing “hierarchical perspective”,10 the real sizes of objects were subject to a “conventional order of magnitudes that signified their power or spiritual rank” (1994: 25). The artists’ use of schemata and their indebtedness to a long iconographic tradition of biblical illustration contributed to creating a shared vocabulary of
6 The abbot dedicated most of his life to the embellishment of the church of St-Denis where the French Gothic style was
inaugurated and the architectural motif of the rose window was used for the first time. For Suger’s biography and a discussion of his contribution to the development of art in the High Middle Ages, see E. Panofsky, “Abbot Suger of St-Denis”, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955, pp. 108-45.
7 Hindman and Farquhar have shown that in medieval schoolbooks familiar visual imagery was used in order to teach
new words. Books like the anonymous Ars memorandi per figuras Evangelistarum provided a pictorial and written guide to memorising the Gospels. See Pen to Press: Illustrated Manuscripts and Printed Books in the First Century of
Printing, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977, pp. 163-67.
8 See T. Aquinas, Commentum in IV libros sententiarum, lib. III, dist. IX, art. 2, sol. 2 ad 3um, in Opera Omnia, Vol. 7,
Parma: tipis Petri Fiaccadori, 1857, p. 109.
9
Panofsky identifies three strata in the subject matter of a work of art: primary or natural (the pure forms); secondary or conventional (artistic motifs are combined with themes and concepts); the intrinsic meaning or content (the symbolic meaning). To these three strata correspond three levels of analysis (pre-iconographical, iconographical, iconological) and three levels of knowledge (practical experience, knowledge of literary sources, synthetic intuition) (1962: 5-16).
10
Segre calls it “semantic perspective” and discusses it in relationship to the Renaissance “geometrical perspective” (2003: 12).
conventional pictorial signs which literate and illiterate alike could easily identify.11 A man with a knife, argues Panofsky, is recognized as being St. Bartholomew by means of the conventional relationship established between the two signs (1962: 6).12 The shared vocabulary of pictorial signs, the knowledge about conventional relationships acquired through a lifetime’s exposure to images in churches, and the store of religious doctrine they were taught enabled the illiterate to ‘read’ such books as the Bible moralisée and the Biblia Pauperum. These picture bibles consisted of a series of captioned miniatures which emphasised the connections between Old and New Testament events through typological interpretation.
Although inscriptions sometimes accompanied pictures in church decorations, in the Middle Ages, the privileged site of the interplay between words and images remained the illuminated manuscripts. Schapiro has argued that medieval art was the art of the book par excellence both because its subjects were mostly taken from the Scriptures and because book illustration was the principal site of stylistic innovation (1996: 212). The idea of the book in the Early and High Middle Ages corresponded to a large extent to the conception of the Bible as a continuous and unitary totality whose meanings were understood through literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical readings (Gellrich 1986: 31-32).The human auctor was considered to be only the instrument whereby the divine auctor transmitted his knowledge. Produced initially in monastery scriptoria in the form of scrolls and codices, starting with the twelfth century, manuscripts were also copied and illuminated in university-supervised shops. Before the fourteenth-century development of a well-to-do literate middle-class, codices were the exclusive privilege of the clergy and the nobility whose tastes, thoughts and values they reflected.
The flourishing of vernacular literature, which claimed a place in the dominant culture by gradually displacing authoritative Latin texts, the growing literacy of the middle-class as well as Lollard opposition to images contributed to changing the panorama of book production in fourteenth-century England. New vernacular texts required original pictorial cycles. Manuscripts were no longer the privilege of the litteratus who could read and write Latin. A new type of literacy developed which involved reading and writing in vernacular.13 Lollards challenged the validity of Pope Gregory the Great’s statement and condemned sumptuous church decoration. One of the dangers Lollards warned against was the difficulty lay people seemed to encounter in perceiving
11 Gombrich also rejects the Western theory of mimetic art and he argues that “to the Middle Ages, the schema is the
image; to the post-medieval artist, it is the starting point for corrections, adjustments, adaptations, the means to probe reality and to wrestle with the particular” (1969: 143).
12 The idea that images are natural signs while words are arbitrary, conventional signs, employed to argue both for and
against the superiority of words and language over image and pictorial representation, is undermined by Panofsky’s notion of secondary or conventional subject matter of the work of art.
images as tokens or signs of something that lay beyond their sheer materiality.14 Worshipping the image and not the spiritual world which lay beyond it was, in Lollards’ view, outright idolatry, encouraged by the practice of going on pilgrimages and praying as well as making offerings to relics, “blynde rodys”, “deue ymages of tre and of ston”.15 One of the Twelve Conclusions of the
Lollards posted on the doors of Westminster Hall and of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1395 denounced
imagery as “a bok of errour” for the “lewid puple”.16 Scott has argued that the scarcity of illustrated codices in vernacular may be partially explained by the controversy over the function and role of images in educating the laity which sometimes accompanied the debates between Lollards and the defenders of the established church in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (1996, 1: 44-45). An undeniable fact is the almost complete lack of illustration in Lollard manuscripts, an absence which is significant if considered in the context of the tradition of richly illuminated Bibles which characterised book production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Even such popular vernacular works as the Canterbury Tales contain few pictorial programmes.17 As Scott has pointed out, “it is inconceivable that Lollard ideas concerning images and unnecessary vain crafts had not been received and discussed by the members of the book trade” (1996, 1: 44).18 Moreover, she argues, the sudden disappearance of drolleries in the margins of manuscripts may be attributed to this reforming movement and to its effect on people’s approach to images (Scott 1996, 1: 45). As Camille has pointed out, in the process of distinguishing between latria and idolatria in order to justify the use of images, the established Church had given shape over the centuries to the idols of the Muslims and Jews which populate the pages of illuminated codices and represent “the projection of one’s own inability to deal with the other”. The same mechanism “constructs the female image in the words and pictures of the High Middle Ages” (Camille, Gothic Idol, 298).19
With the advent of print in the second half of the fifteenth century two important changes occurred in book production. The first consisted in the fact that many identical copies of the same text could be produced in a short span of time. The second was due to the lower cost of books. If
14 See M. Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion, London: Hambledon Press,
1984. For a recent study of medieval devotion in connection with the debate on the function of images, see R. Marks,
Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England, Sparkford: Sutton, 2004.
15 The quotations are from Hudson’s edition of Wycliffite writings (1978).
16 Wycliffe’s position was somewhat milder than that of his later followers. In De Mandatis Divinis, he quotes Gregory
the Great and states: “Et patet quod ymagines tam bene quam male possunt fieri: bene ad excitandum, facilitandum et accendendum mentes fidelium, ut colant devocius Deum suum; et male ut occasione ymaginum a veritate fidei aberretur, ut ymago illa vel latria vel dulia adoretur” (Aston 1984: 138).
17 Among these only six are illustrated with miniatures and/or historiated initials. 18
Cf. W. R. Jones, “Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England”, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 34 (1973): 50.
19 A significant example of the construction of the “Other” in the Late Middle Ages is provided by the iconographic
representation of the Wife of Bath in Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9 and Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27.
the illuminated manuscripts had been the privilege of rich patrons and wealthy members of the middle class, printed books became accessible to a wider public. The new methods of book production brought about changes in the way texts were illustrated. With the exception of hybrid editions in which the printed text was accompanied by painted miniatures, printed books were illustrated with stock figures. Since the same woodcuts could be used to illustrate different books, they often produced an effect of disjunction between text and image (Luborsky 1987: 82). Whether a picture illustrated one or several texts, its prevailing meaning was determined by the context in which it appeared.20 There were cases, however, in which original woodcuts were commissioned for specific literary works.21
Disconnections between words and images can also arise from the resources peculiar to each single medium. In twentieth-century criticism, the differences and similarities between verbal and visual text – intended as two semiotic systems – have often been the object of critical discussions by literary critics, art historians and semioticians. Lotman, for example, argues that the “discrete text” and the “iconic text” have different systems of narration:
Verbal narration is constructed, first and foremost, by the addition of new words, phrases, paragraphs, chapters. Such narration is always an increase in the size of the text. For the internally nondiscrete text-message of the iconic type, however, narration is a transformation, an internal transposition of elements. (1975: 335)
According to Lotman, the first type of text is made up of signs which combine in sign-series to create a verbal message, whereas the second type is a semiotic system without signs (i.e. words of the natural language). The latter has a code and it conveys a message, which is communicated by the text in its entirety, not by its single units. A similar view has been expressed by Langer who argues that although visual media (photography, painting, drawing) have lines, colours, shadings, shapes, proportions which can be combined, they have no vocabulary of units with independent meanings. Moreover, she emphasises the importance of not imposing linguistic models upon other media, since the laws that govern their articulation “are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language” (1951: 86-89).As Segre has pointed out, the combination of pictorial motifs in what Panofsky calls images, stories and allegoriesis already a matter of visual syntax based on perspective (2003: 10).22 Yet generic figures become specific characters only by means of the entire iconographic apparatus. Moreover, identification is sometimes reinforced through captions which restrict the semantic field of the pictorial sign.
20 Like words, pictorial signs may symbolise different things in different contexts. Gombrich offers the example of two
pictorial signs (grapes and corn) which symbolise the Eucharist only in the specific context of pictorial representations such as Botticelli’s Madonna of the Eucharist, a painting whose caption restricts their semantic field (1975: 16).
21 A significant example is Caxton’s 1483 edition of the Canterbury Tales. With the exception of the picture which
represents the group of pilgrims, the woodcuts were not reused to illustrate other works.
22
Panofsky defines ‘images’ as artistic motifs which are recognized as carriers of a secondary or conventional meanings. Moreover, ‘stories’ and ‘allegories’ result from the combinations of these images (1962: 6).
Lotman also distinguishes between texts which are displayed in space and texts whose existence is bound up with time. This distinction had already been discussed in the eighteenth century within a theoretical framework elaborated by Lessing. In the Laocoön, the German philosopher and art critic argues that painting and poetry employ completely different signs: the first uses forms and colours in space, the latter articulates sounds in time (2005: 91).23 Since painting can represent a single moment of an action, the artist must choose the one which is “most pregnant” and “suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow” (2005: 92). By contrast, poetry represents objects and actions which succeed each other in time. The limitation of the latter consists in its not being able to use more than one attribute of the body at a time. Therefore, the poet must choose the feature which “gives the most vivid picture of the body as exercised in a particular action” (2005: 92). Lessing admits that succession in time can be suggested in a picture by representing different moments of a story within the same frame, but he contends that this is “an encroachment” of the painter on the domain of the poet. By analogy, ekphrasis is an intrusion of the poet on the domain of the painter (2005: 109). Throughout the Laocoön, the examples of ‘proper’ type of poetry are taken from epic. Lessing presents Homer as the poet par excellence. He argues that whereas the Greek poet describes Achilles’s shield in the process of its creation, Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s shield encroaches upon the art of the painter in that it presents the finished product as if in a picture (2005: 116-17).24
Mukařovský has pointed out that Lessing’s interpretation of the limits of the visual arts does not take into account the real development of art, which shows that “every art sometime strives to overstep its boundaries by assimilating itself to another art” and it offers many instances of “permanent contacts”, as in the case of book illustration (1977: 207, 210). When the poet is also the illustrator of his own works, the interpenetration of word and image is “of the utmost urgency” (1977: 211). Mukařovský’s concept of the interrelation of the arts is based upon the contradiction between the commonality of aim and the difference in the material of the individual arts. Different arts attempt to produce the same aesthetic effect through their own specific means. A similar idea is
23 Lessing also distinguishes between natural pictorial signs and arbitrary verbal signs. Scholars like Panofsky,
Gombrich and Eco have demonstrated that pictorial signs do not function only on the basis of isomorphy. They have a symbolic meaning which is established through convention. Understanding a picture presupposes knowledge of the prevailing codes of pictorial representation.
24 It is worth noting that Lotman distinguishes between “non-poetical” and poetic texts. He argues that signs function in
the latter as in the iconic text: it is not the word that acts as a unit, but the text as a whole. As a consequence, in primary semiotic systems – natural language ad other non-artistic sign systems – two types of narration are possible (1975: 337). The hierarchy implied in the distinction between primary and secondary semiotic systems has been questioned by Sandra Moriarty who has attempted to elaborate “an initial theory of visual communication as a primary form of communication different from but as important as language-based communication”. See “Visual Communication as a Primary System”, Journal Of Visual Literacy, 14 (1994): 11-21.
expressed by Praz who argues that whilst the painter and the poet employ different media, they have in common “a taste and a message” (1970: 59). Both Mukařovský and Praz seem to be particularly interested in the aesthetic effect of the arts. Camille has drawn attention to the limits of a critical approach which, by concentrating exclusively on the aesthetic function, tends to ignore the power of images to shape ideology as well as their condition as products of a specific cultural and historical milieu. According to the art historian, “much image-making in the Middle Ages is not only about clearly articulated symbolic programs but rather about distortion, obfuscation, and misinterpretation” (The Gothic Idol 194). Camille’s objection can also be applied to the written word with its tradition of scriptural and patristic authority, and to literature with its canonical, universally acclaimed authors.
Mukařovský contends that the transposition of a theme from one art to another is a complex process which has elements in common with the transfer of themes between literary genres.
If we study the relation between literature and another art, the influence of this other art must not be evaluated as a mechanical transposition of an alien periodization into literature but as a complex transference of an external impulse into the immanent development of literature, as a reflection which can strike literature at the most varied angles of incidence and with the most diverse results (1977: 233).
In his study on the literary transformation of pictures, Lund divides the relationships between words and pictures into three categories: “combination”, “integration” and “transformation”. He defines combination as the coexistence of words and pictures in a bi-medial communication where they complement and comment on each other (illustrations, emblems). In the relationship of integration words and images merge completely (visual poetry, calligrammes).25 Transformation consists in the verbal description of a work of art ‒ ekphrasis (Lund 1992: 8-9). Although he includes book illustrations in the combination category, Lund chooses to discuss only the cases in which the writer illustrates his own works or there is a creative cooperation between author and artist. Kibédi also elaborates a system of classification. The scholar includes book illustration in “secondary or successive type” of word-image relations and he argues that these are different modes of interpretation which have a special narratological interest (1989: 44).26 Moreover, Kibédi suggests that every analysis of the secondary type of relations should start with two preliminary questions: Which moment in the action has the artist chosen to represent? What has he added to or omitted from the literary text he is illustrating?
25 A beautiful example is De laudibus sanctae crucis, a collection of highly sophisticated visual poems composed by
Rabanus Maurus (c. 780-856) in which the letters are evenly spaced on a grid so as to form words, and images in superposition.
26 Kibédi makes a further division within the primary or simultaneous relationships on the basis of the disposition of
words and images on the page: coexistence (words and image coexist within the same space); interreference (words and image are separated but they appear on the same page); coreference (words and image are not present on the same page but refer independently from each other to the same event); identity (word and image merge completely).
The first question concerns the limitations of painting which have already been alluded to when referring to Lessing’s essay. Scholars have shown that the old distinction between the arts of time (poetry and music) and the arts of space (painting and architecture) proves to be misleading. In La Pelle di San Bartolomeo, Segre identifies four types of temporality. He begins by distinguishing between a “short range” and a “long range temporality” (2003: 86-87). The first concerns the representation of a specific moment in the action (Lessing’s “pregnant moment”), which the artist isolates from a continuous movement. The second presupposes knowledge of the plans and structure of behaviour. The plans of action are those according to which the narrated or represented actions unfold in the real world. Every action is perceived together with the chain of actions which precede and succeed it. The temporality of a work of art can extend to the representation of different episodes of a story within a sequence of frames or within the same frame. Then, there is the temporality of perception. The eye explores the painting with horizontal, vertical, oblique movements, which are usually discontinuous and the mind formulates interpretive hypotheses. Last but not least, there is the temporality of writing when the viewer or the art critic organises his observations in a systematic order which is different from the discontinuous order in which he reads the picture.
Gombrich argued that if Lessing had profited from the lesson of St. Augustine’s reflections on the concept of time and temporality, he would have been more cautious about creating the dichotomy between space and time in art (1964: 298). In the eleventh book of the Confessiones, Augustine argues that time is measured in the mind, which not only retains the past impression but reaches out into the future:
Sed quomodo minuitur aut consumitur futurum, quod nondum est, aut quomodo crescit praeteritum, quod iam non est, nisi quia in animo, qui illud agit, tria sunt? Nam et exspectat et attendit et meminit, ut id quod exspectat per id quod attendit transeat in id quod meminerit. Quis igitur negat futura nondum esse? Sed tamen iam est in animo exspectatio futurorum. Et quis negat praeterita iam non esse? Sed tamen adhuc est in animo memoria praeteritorum. Et quis negat praesens tempus carere spatio, quia in puncto praeterit? Sed tamen perdurat attentio, per quam pergat abesse quod aderit. Non igitur longum tempus futurum, quod non est, sed longum futurum longa exspectatio futuri est, neque longum praeteritum tempus, quod non est, sed longum praeteritum longa memoria praeteriti est. (XI, 28.37)27
Schapiro and Segre, like Gombrich before them, contrast the material nature of a painting as well as its presentation as a simultaneous whole with the mental nature of the operations through
27
“But how is the future diminished or consumed, which as yet is not? or how that past increased, which is now no longer, save that in the mind which enacteth this, there be three things done? For it expects, it considers, it remembers; that so that what it expecteth, through that which it considereth, passeth in to that which it remembereth. Who therefore denieth, that things to come are not as yet? And yet, there is in the mind an expectation of things to come. And who denies past things to be now no longer? and yet is there still in the mind a memory of things past. And who denieth the present time hath no space, because it passeth away in a moment? And yet our consideration continueth, through which that which shall be present proceedeth to become absent. It is not then future time that is long, for as yet it is not: but a long future is ‘a long expectation of the future’, nor is it time past which now is not, that is long; but a long past is a ‘long memory of the past’.” The English translation is from The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. by E. B. Pusey, London: Chatto & Windus, 1921.
which it is perceived and the temporality of perception as experienced by the viewer. Thus, reading a verbal text and seeing a picture have in common the mental processes through which the viewer and the reader construct meanings. Yet, as Iser has pointed out, there is an important difference between the “perceptional image”, where objects have a higher degree of determinacy, and the “mental or ideational image” evoked by words.28 The structure of the verbal text sets off a sequence of mental images which are subject to the reader’s stock of experience (1980: 38). Since the act of reading presupposes the construction and reconstruction of meanings on the basis of new instructions provided by the literary text, formed images are continuously replaced by new ones (Iser 1980: 36). In the act of interpretation, each reader constructs his own private mental images. This explains the disappointment provoked by some screen adaptations of novels as well as the great differences between illustrations made for the same literary text. This brings us back to Kibédi’s second question concerning the addition or omission of textual elements in the process of transposition of literary texts into pictures.
When working on the illustrations of the manuscripts, limners were often conditioned by the stationer’s instructions as well as by the iconographic tradition. There was, however, a certain degree of interpretive freedom. They could add details, figures and settings which did not appear in the written source and represent metaphors as if they were simply descriptive terms.29 A particularly interesting case is that of the bas-de-page and marginal images of Gothic manuscripts. They challenged the authority of both the text and the miniatures which occupied the centre of the page in a confrontation between “centre” and “periphery” (Camille, Image on the Edge 18). Unlike miniatures, whose realization was instructions, in the marginal pictures the artist played games with representation.30 Camille argues that marginal images were “conscious usurpations, perhaps even political statements about diffusing the power of the text through its unravelling […], rather than repressed meanings” (Image on the Edge 42).31 However, drolleries never overstepped
28 Jakobson had also tackled the issue: “When the observer arrives at the simultaneous synthesis of a contemplated
painting, the painting as a whole remains before his eyes, it is still present; but when the listener reaches a synthesis of what he has heard, the phonemes have in fact already vanished. They survive as mere afterimages, somewhat abridged reminiscences, and this creates an essential difference between the two types of perception and precepts” (1964: 344).
29 An illustrative example is the pictorial representation of the scene of Abel’s murder perpetrated by Cain. Since no
weapon is mentioned in the book of Genesis, artists had to supply an instrument from their own imagination: a stone, the branch of a tree, a club, a scythe, a jawbone (Schapiro 1973: 11).
30 By the end of the thirteenth century, because of the greater specialisation of the craftsmen involved in manuscript
production, illumination, decoration and writing were no longer done by the same person. This explains how it was possible that scribal errors and omissions be mocked by limners in marginal pictures. Camille offers the example of a late thirteenth-century English Book of Hours, preserved in the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore), in which the omitted passages are hauled up, pointed out and pushed into proper position by tiny textual construction workers (Image on the
Edge 23).
31 Gombrich expresses a different, yet less convincing view. According to him, grotesques are “the product of an
irresponsible imagination on holiday” whose “dreamlike inconsequence of meaning” was enjoyed by the laity (1975: 20).
established boundaries and when, at the end of the fourteenth century, the system they were trying to subvert was seriously questioned they silently disappeared from the pages of manuscripts.
If one accepts the notion that the rendering of words into pictures is a translation from one semiotic system into another, one must also bear in mind that translatio and interpretatio were then, as are now, strongly interconnected. As Schapiro has pointed out, besides the disconnections between text and picture which may arise from the resources peculiar to each single medium, there are differences marked by historical factors. Among these factors two are particularly significant: the new meanings texts acquired for later illustrators and the new styles of representation, which being the products of a specific Weltanschauung, revealed how and to what extent ideas, thoughts and values changed in the course of time (1973: 12, 13). Given the fact that scribes, limners and stationers were often among the first readers of new literary works, illustrations offer an important insight into the reception of an author’s works in a specific historical and cultural context. Moreover, the early editors’ interpretations of given literary works were also reflected in their editorial choices. In The Image in Print, Driver argues for a radically new understanding of early printed book illustration and discusses woodcuts as a means of reconstructing social history, reading habits, and as a force of social and political change.
In this study I offer an insight into the fifteenth-century reception of the Wife of Bath’s, Prioress’s, Miller’s, Cook’s and Squire’s portrayals in the General Prologue and of their respective tales through the analysis of the relationships between text and image in the illuminated manuscripts and Caxton’s illustrated edition of the Canterbury Tales. It is an attempt to account both for the dialectic of production and reception, and for the historical continuities and discontinuities in the fifteenth-century response to Chaucer’s tales. The thesis of this study is that the images which illustrate the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and Caxton’s 1483 printed edition are not simply transpositions from one medium into another, from words into pictures, but are the result of an act of interpretation which is ideologically connoted. The illustrations are a means of reinforcing authority, power and the prevailing ideological system in fifteenth-century England. This study is based on three main methodological premises.
The first premise is that the reception of a literary work is always mediated by the form in which it is transmitted. In the case of handwritten or printed books the layout of the page, the type of decoration and the typographical conventions have an “expressive” function which help to shape the text’s meanings. As a consequence, each edition which characterises the history of the transmission of a text is an important testimony of the taste, thought and values of an editor in a specific cultural and historical context (McKenzie 1999: 22).
The second premise is that the relation between words and images, literary texts and their illustrations is that between two semiotic systems, each with its own syntax based on the nexus of signs, which have a common referent. This relation is not one of subordination but of interrelation and interdependence. Scholars have shown that, in the Middle Ages, the images in illuminated manuscripts functioned not only as decorative and organizing, index-like elements of the text, but also as visual comments which complemented the verbal glosses and helped to shape the text’s meanings.32
The third premise concerns the interpretation of non contemporary literary texts and the communicative function of literature.33 In interpreting medieval literary texts such as the
Canterbury Tales, the critic ought to take into account not only the geographical and
epistemological but also the historical distance. A literary text, unlike a real-life dialogue, integrates the communicational context. Its “repertoire” is made up of references to earlier literary works, social and historical norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged (Iser 1980: 69). The function of the repertoire is to create a meeting point between the reader and the text. Through a re-codification of social and historical norms it enables the readers contemporary to the text to see the deficiencies of the prevailing system and permits subsequent generations of readers to grasp a historically distant reality (Iser 1980: 75). This approach, though mindful of historical distance, does not encourage the arbitrary interpretation promoted by reader-oriented theories on the grounds of the historicity of each reader. The structure of a text contains guidelines which direct the reader in his/her interpretation, though the indeterminacies of a text allow a “spectrum of actualizations” (Iser 1980: 24). When interpreting a literary text it is important, however, to try and recuperate the whole communicative dimension represented by the sender, the message and the receiver. This is a great challenge for the scholar of Middle English literature who must take into account the fluidity of the form and content of medieval works in the vernacular, determined by the nature of manuscript production as well as by a different concept of textual authority. So when discussing medieval literary works it is more appropriate to speak of ‘texts’ containing variances, rather than of a single authoritative authorial ‘Text’, which is an anachronistic concept. As Zumthor, Cerquiglini and, more recently, Machan have shown, the author’s text was “mobile” and it could be modified as
32 See S. Hindman and J. D. Farquhar (1977: 160) and L. Lawton, “The Illustration of Late Medieval Secular Texts,
with Special Reference to Lydgate’s Troy Book”, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. by Derek Pearsall, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983, p. 41; See also M. Camille, Image on the Edge. The Margins of
Medieval Art, London: Reaktion Books, 1992, p. 10, and L. Battaglia Ricci, Parole e immagini nella letteratura italiana medievale, Pisa: GEI, 1994.
33
When applied to medieval texts, the term ‘literature’ often includes works which do not have a place in modern literary canons. As Boffey and Edwards have correctly noted, the notion of literature, “even if it is understood in the crudest possible terms as textual matter conceived or read for purposes not primarily connected with information, or with religious precept or devotion, is still an enormous field, comprehending many things both between and beyond the four lines of the lyric Western Wind and Thomas Malory’s extensive compilation of tales making up the Morte
well as expanded in the process of textual transmission, through oral or scribal interpolations and additions.34 That this mobility was a source of anxiety for some late-medieval authors who were preoccupied with the integrity of their works is testified by Chaucer’s admonition to his scribe Adam for his negligence in copying:
But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe; So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.35
Mobility characterised not only textual transmission, but also the English language as a medium for verse writing. As Burnley has correctly noted, at the time Chaucer was writing, ‘English’ was a collective term which included a number of distinct dialects and there was “no universally-accepted standard for writing English as such, merely a set of conventions for writing each scribe’s local dialect” (1994: 108). In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer expressed his concern for the integrity of his “litel bok” by drawing attention to the linguistic diversity and multiple writing conventions of the English language which, in addition to the scribe’s negligence, could contribute to distorting the content (“miswryte”) and altering the form (“mysmetre”) of his text.
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (V, 1793-798)
Within the field of Chaucerian studies the relationship between text and pictorial paratext in the Canterbury Tales has often been discussed in terms of the greater or lesser degree of faithfulness of the portraits of the pilgrims to the verbal descriptions in the General Prologue.36 In their analyses, scholars have usually concentrated on MS EL 26 C 9 (commonly referred to as the Ellesmere Chaucer), the only surviving manuscript which contains a complete pictorial
34 See P. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000 ; B. Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante:
histoire critique de la philologie, Paris: Seuil, 1989; T. W. Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts,
Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1994. See also H. R. Jauss “The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature”, New
Literary History, 10 (1979): 181-229.
35 The quotation is from G. Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by L. D. Benson, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988, p. 650.
All further quotations from Chaucer’s works are from this edition, unless otherwise mentioned.
36 For views which emphasise the faithful rendering of textual details in the representation of the pilgrims see M.
Stevens, “The Ellesmere Miniatures of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”, Studies in Iconography, 7-8 (1981): 113-34; M. B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval
Texts, London: The Hambledon Press, 1991, pp. 225-28. Cf. R. K. Emmerson, “Text and Image in the Ellesmere
Portraits of the Tale-tellers”, in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. by Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward, San Marino (CA): Huntington Library Press, 1997, pp. 143-70; M. C. Olson, “Marginal Portraits and the Fiction of Orality: The Ellesmere Manuscript”, in Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of Canterbury Tales in
Pictures, ed. by Joseph Rosenblum and William K. Finley, New Castle (DE) and London: Oak Knoll Press & The
programme.37 It should be borne in mind that the Canterbury Tales are preserved in eighty-two fragmentary or complete manuscripts none of which is an autograph. Among these only six are illustrated with miniatures or historiated initials: San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9 (c.1400-1410); Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.27 (c. 1400-1420);38 thirteen folios of the same codex known as the ‘Oxford fragments’ (John Rylands Library, MS English 63 and Philadelphia, Rosenbach Library MS 1084/2) which contain the miniatures of the Miller, the Cook and the Man of Law; British Library, MS Lansdowne 851 (c. 1410), Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 686 (c. 1430-1440); private collection, Devonshire MS (c. 1450-1460); Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poet. 223 (1450-1460). Three different pictorial formats were used to decorate the manuscripts: historiated initials, marginal miniatures in the Ellesmere manuscript, and miniatures within the text column in MS Gg.4.27 and in the ‘Oxford fragments’. The historiated initials in MS Bodley 686, MS Lansdowne 851 and in the Devonshire manuscript follow the traditional iconographic representation of the author-figure and it is quite unlikely that they depict the real-life Chaucer. In MS Rawlinson poet. 223 the image of a friar standing in a pulpit is depicted on folio 142r in the initial letter T of the Friar’s Prologue, and another author-figure (or maybe Melibee) on folio 183r in the initial letter “A” of The Tale of Melibee.39 The number of pictorial programmes for the Canterbury Tales is scarce in comparison with the numerous surviving manuscripts which testify to the diffusion of Chaucer’s works and the appreciation they met with among the poet’s contemporaries.
While acknowledging the importance of establishing to what extent the visual representations of the pilgrims contain conventional elements and in what degree they reflect original features present in the text, I analyse the relationship between text and image in the Wife of Bath’s, Prioress’s, Miller’s, Cook’s and Squire’s portrayals in the General Prologue and their respective tales from a perspective which takes into account a fundamental dimension of book history pointed out by such scholars as Donald McKenzie and Roger Chartier: the fact that the form in which a literary text is transmitted has an “expressive” function.
37 Beginning with W. W. Skeat’s edition (1894) the text of MS EL 26 C 9 became the basis of most of the subsequent
editions of the Canterbury Tales, a choice dictated by editorial convenience rather than made on the grounds of manuscript recension. In the past three decades scholarly attention has been mainly directed towards an earlier codex, Wales University Library, Peniarth 392 (Hengwrt).
38 There has been much debate about the dating of the manuscript. Margaret Rickert has argued that the technique and
style of the miniatures “cannot be earlier than 1420”. John Manly and Edith Rickert dated the script around 1420-1440. Parkes and Beadle have suggested that Gg.4.27 “was copied sometime in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and most probably in the second half of that quarter”. See J. M. Manly and E. Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales
Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols, Vol. 1, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1940, pp. 576, 173. See also G.
Chaucer, The Poetical Works: A Facsimile of Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27, 3 vols, ed. by Malcolm B.
Parkes and Richard Beadle, Vol. 3, Cambridge: Brewer, 1980, p. 7.
39 For a detailed description of these historiated initials see P. Hardman, “Presenting the Text: Pictorial Tradition in
Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales”, in Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of The
In the first two chapters, the Wife of Bath’s and the Prioress’s tales are considered within the framework of medieval discourses on marriage, widowhood and virginity and Chaucer’s original contribution to the topic is examined. In chapters three and four, the pictorial representation of the Cook and the Miller, as well as Chaucer’s use of the words ‘fool’ and ‘folye’ in the Canterbury
Tales are discussed within the context of medieval discourses on fools and folly. In chapter five, the
Squire’s portrait is analysed in connection with medieval medical theories about amor hereos and the description of the Great Khan’s court is discussed as part of Chaucer’s attempt to offer an encomiastic representation of royalty.
In chapter one, I argue that in Huntington Library, MS El 26 C 9 the scribal glosses to the
Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Wife of Bath’s miniature contribute to constructing her
identity in accordance with the precepts of an ideological system which at the beginning of the fifteenth century continued to perceive women as the dangerous “Other”, not as intellectually and morally equal human beings. By extending the analysis of the Wife of Bath’s iconographic representation to Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.27 and to Caxton’s 1483 edition of the
Tales, I also demonstrate that her representation has undergone important changes during the first
century of textual transmission, which reflect the editors’ attempts to recast Chaucer’s text to meet new interests and values.
In chapter two, I argue that the picture of the Prioress in the Ellesmere functions both as a threshold to the text and as a visual gloss, which reflects the commissioner’s and/or stationer’s biased reading of her General Prologue portrayal as well as of her prologue and tale. I also demonstrate that in Caxton’s illustrated edition of the Canterbury Tales (1483), the Prioress’s two contrasting portraits (in the woodcut which precedes her tale as well as her portrayal in the General
Prologue, and in the woodcut representing the group of pilgrims) are important examples of how
images were shaped by and contributed to promoting specific ideologies in the fifteenth century. Moreover, I argue that Caxton’s choice of having a fool depicted in the woodcut representing the group of pilgrims bears important consequences on the reception of the Prioress’s portrayal in the
General Prologue and the Canterbury Tales as a whole.
In chapter three, I offer an insight into the fifteenth-century reception of the Cook’s and Miller’s portrayals and of their respective tales through the analysis of scribal interpolations as well as of the relationships between text and image in the illuminated manuscripts and Caxton’s 1483 edition of the tales. The miniatures representing the Cook and the Miller are discussed as conscious efforts to deflect Chaucer’s satire of the upper-middle classes and of most of the religious figures while emphasising the negative aspects of the lower classes.
In the Canterbury Tales, the words “fool” and “folye” (with its variant spelling “folie”) appear 34 and 42 times, respectively (Oizumi 1991, 1: 618, 622, 623). In chapter four, I make a survey of the contexts in which these words appear in the Tales and discuss the range of meanings they acquire in the different contexts. The analysis serves to establish to what extent Chaucer’s use of these words influenced Caxton’s decision to include a fool, with his traditional ass’s ears and coxcomb, in the woodcut of the Pilgrims at table which appears in the second edition of the
Canterbury Tales (sig. c4r). In the St. John’s College, Oxford copy of the 1483 Tales, the fool’s hood and tunic were painted yellow, a colour which often had negative connotations in medieval iconography being associated with folly and disorder. I discuss the implications of the fool’s presence in the woodcut and enquire into the consequences it had for the late fifteenth-century reception of the Canterbury Tales. Moreover, I show that the woodcut shares several pictorial motifs with two engravings, known as Luxuria and the Fool and the Large love garden, by Master E. S. (active between 1450-1467) as well as with a design for a stained-glass quatrefoil (c. 1475) attributed to an artist in the workshop of the Housebook Master. In these pictures, the courtly love ideal is mocked and the folly of mundane love condemned through the depiction of court fools who are characterised by their exuberant, blatant sexuality. While I do not argue that these images are direct sources for Caxton’s woodcut, I do suggest that they are based on the iconographic tradition of the late-medieval fool whose presence provides a key to the kind of message being transmitted.
The flower of chivalry, Chaucer’s Squire seems to be depicted in opposition to the type of fool embodied by the Miller and the Cook. But what does the Squire’s account of the Great Khan and his court reveal about the teller of the tale? From the earliest times the Orient was perceived in the West as something more than what was known through the firsthand experience of travellers, something which inspired both awe and fear. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the accounts of missionaries like the Franciscan friars John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck and Odoric of Pordenone, as well as the experiences of merchants like the Polo brothers contributed to consolidating what Said calls an “imaginative geography” which drew boundaries between West and Orient, and established a fixed vocabulary and imagery through which the latter could be represented. In chapter five, I enquire into the ideological reasons underlying the late-medieval perception of the Great Khan and his court as they can be evinced from the Squire’s Tale and the text-image relationships in fifteenth-century manuscripts of The Book of John Mandeville (one of Chaucer’s sources in the description of the Great Khan’s court). I also focus on issues of direct relevance to contemporary society such as the perception of the “Other”, tolerance, and fanaticism in the late Middle Ages.
