Writing on the world beyond the page: medieval inscriptions as facta and ficta

Abstract

From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries texts proliferated upon the surfaces of objects, monuments and architecture, ensuring that medieval people lived with texts, even if they never turned a page. Examining a series of inscribed objects, monuments, and buildings, this article focuses upon three constitutive features of this large-scale dynamic: epigraphic prosopopoeia, the use and effects of deixis in medieval inscriptions, and the device of the banderole. It concludes by examining the twelfth-century Bridekirk baptismal font: an epigraphic monument in which all three devices are skillfully deployed, to remarkably self-reflexive ends. The article aims to show how the design of epigraphic texts added not only new textual-material facts to the world, but also textual-visual ficta or fictions.

Zusammenfassung

Vom zwölften bis zum fünfzehnten Jahrhundert wucherten Texte auf den Oberflächen von Objekten, Denkmälern und Architekturen und sorgten dafür, dass die Menschen des Mittelalters mit Texten lebten, auch wenn sie nie eine Seite umblätterten. Der Beitrag konzentriert sich auf drei konstitutive Merkmale dieser groß angelegten Dynamik: die epigraphische Prosopopöie, die Verwendung und die Auswirkungen der Deixis in mittelalterlichen Inschriften und das Instrument der Banderole. Abschließend wird das Taufbecken von Bridekirk aus dem zwölften Jahrhundert untersucht: ein epigraphisches Monument, in dem alle drei Mittel geschickt und selbstreflexiv eingesetzt werden. Der Artikel soll zeigen, wie die Gestaltung epigraphischer Texte der Welt nicht nur neue textlich-materielle facta, sondern auch textlich-visuelle ficta hinzufügte.

Scholarly interest in the quite varied formats, materials, and media employed for textual purposes in the Middle Ages is not new: it can be distinctly detected in the nineteenth-century, and arguably reaches back into the medieval period.¹ Nonetheless, in the last half-century, medievalists playing leading roles in »the new philology«, »material philology«, »material text studies«, in the study of »material-textual cultures«, and, in the so-called »material turn«, have repeatedly rediscovered the salience of the physical forms and facture of medieval texts.² Even as medieval manuscripts rightly continue to be a major focal point for scholarship across the disciplines, a growing body of work has turned to texts existing beyond the manuscript page with new questions and energy.³

With few exceptions, the non-manuscript ›material texts‹ that have garnered the greatest notice from literary and art historians have been quite artfully composed works, rather than the realia of everyday life. Tituli, those brief texts, often composed in verse, that feature in church portals, mosaics, and wall paintings, as well as in manuscripts, have attracted considerable attention.⁴ Likewise, inscriptions found in high-status mortuary contexts – upon objects deposited in graves, upon tombs, memorial brasses, and epitaphs – have been explored from a range of disciplinary perspectives.⁵ Art historians have paid particular attention to the texts worked into the surfaces of reliquaries, vasa sacra, altar cloths, vestments, lamps, altarpieces, and other liturgical equipment. Indeed, the import and effects of texts visually integrated into medieval sacred spaces and their furnishings have long dominated art historical consideration of extra-manuscript word-image relations. Perhaps this explains why it has been the medieval dynamics of text as image – »the iconicity of script« in Jeffrey Hamburger’s turn of phrase – rather than ›material texts‹ or object-texts that has recently inspired new lines of art historical inquiry.⁶

Stepping back from the many specific contributions made by this flowering of interest in the making and experience of texts beyond the format of the codex, one could, in quite generalized terms, observe that literary historians and art historians have come to realize what medieval and modern epigraphers have known all along: namely, that the codex never enjoyed a textual monopoly in the Middle Ages.⁷ And, by turn, in the last half-century epigraphers have increasingly broadened their perspective and engaged other disciplines, with salutary results.⁸ In short, the last half-century has opened up a host of new perspectives on what, where, and how texts were integral to the medieval world.

Although reading remained a minority competence until the thirteenth century, when pragmatic literacy significantly expanded in Europe, encounters with texts were not restricted to the literate minority.⁹ Texts encountered outside of the codex or roll format – inscribed on the blade of a weapon or a brooch, chiseled upon the exterior of a building, minutely raised in relief upon the surface of coins, impressed upon the surface of Eucharistic hosts – were forms that could be seen, touched, and sometimes tasted, even when they were not read. No doubt, non- and semi-literate people could apprehend a great deal about a text’s status, authority, and (if less precisely) its semantic contents thanks to its material substance, the appearance of its letter forms, its size, and its spatial or functional context. Conversely, the visual, material and paleographic facture of numerous inscribed objects and monuments rendered reading difficult, if not impossible; some inscriptions were deliberately concealed from view, rendering their texts imperceptible.¹⁰ Despite a long-standing scholarly conception of epigraphy as a medium for communication, it is clear that many medieval epigraphic texts were made with other purposes and effects in mind.

Painted by hand, chiseled, woven, embroidered, stamped, and cast, poetry and prose visually punctuated the medieval built environment and material culture. The »image explosion« Michael Camille recognized in the Gothic Period was also an explosion of »texts-in-images« and »images of text« on and beyond the pages of manuscripts.¹¹ If one surveys the extant flotsam and jetsam of thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century European material culture, one encounters snippets of text, again and again: on combs; shoes; weapons; domestic cooking and serving vessels; coins; precious and cheap dress ornaments, jewelry, and numerous base metal badges, both religious and profane. Texts were carved into wooden furniture and storage containers, as well as into the facades of religious and non-religious buildings. They were inscribed into stone flagstones and spelled out in tiled pavements. And texts routinely appeared on the markers that formally organized the townscape and the landscape: cornerstones, market crosses and Sühnekreuze, boundary stones, and the inscribed trunks of trees defining property lines.¹² In short, medieval people continuously added texts to the world they lived in, and they lived in a world shaped, and reshaped by writing.¹³

To examine the presence and effects of text beyond the pages of manuscripts in the Middle Ages is, therefore, a massive undertaking. This essay proposes to do so in a focused fashion by examining a series of epigraphic objects and monuments from both worldly and sacred contexts, ranging in date from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, that intervened in and transformed the phenomenal world, through the conjunction of letterforms and iconic forms.

In what follows, I consider three overlapping features of this large-scale dynamic. The essay turns first to the phenomenon of epigraphic prosopopoeia: the imputation of an ›ego‹ subject position to inanimate objects and monuments. Secondly, I consider the use and effects of deixis in medieval inscriptions. The third section of the essay focuses upon the device of the banderole: a ubiquitous fictive textual ›support‹ invented in the Middle Ages.¹⁴ The fourth section of the essay is dedicated to a single monument: a twelfth-century English baptismal font whose carved surfaces conjoin pictorial representation, ›ego inscription‹, visual deixis, and the device of the banderole to remarkable, self-reflexive ends.

I.

Numerous medieval inscribed texts employ the grammatical first person to varied effects; chief among those effects, is the imputation of a ›voice‹ to an inanimate entity. Such ›speaking objects‹ and ›speaking architecture‹ were made in every century of the medieval longue durée throughout Europe.¹⁵ Medieval bells are an obvious case in point. It was a wide-spread custom in medieval Europe to name bells and the liturgical benediction of bells included a moment in which the bell was formally named and dedicated to a holy helper.¹⁶ While numerous medieval bells epigraphically indicate their patrocinium on their surfaces, a smaller, but significant number of bells feature epigraphic statements of self-identification.¹⁷ In some medieval bells, this textual self-identification is developed at length. The Marienglocke in the Mindener Dom, sadly destroyed by bombing in 1945, was once a case in point:

+ ECCE · SUB · HOC · TYTULO · TUA · DICOR · S(AN)C(T)A · MARIA + ORA · P(RO) · P(O)P(U)LO · DUM · SONO · VIRGO · PIA /

+ · A · NATO · CHR(IST)O · FELIX · CREOR · ERE · SUB ISTO + MILLENIS · AN(N)IS · TRECE(N)TIS · SEX · NUMERA(N)DIS¹⁸

+Lo, under this titulus I am called yours, oh Holy Mary + Pray for the people while/when I sound, oh pious Virgin /

+ From the birth of Christ (when) I was created from this bronze + one thousand thirty and six years should be numbered¹⁹

Composed in the form of an elegiac distich with a leonine hexameter, the bell’s poetic statement is framed as the petition of a subject addressed to the Virgin Mary.²⁰ Calling upon Mary to pray for the people while the bell sounds, the inscription lends words to the bell’s otherwise wordless sound. Although the inscription would not have been seen by most people who heard the bell ringing, its presence in the bronze form of the bell implicitly made each ringing an imperative call upon Mary’s intercessory prayer.

The inscription of the Mindener Dom’s Marienglocke expressed a wide-held medieval Christian belief that the sound of church bells was a powerful defense against various dangers, both natural and supernatural.²¹ What sets this particular inscription apart from many other inscriptions on bells is its skillful concatenation of a number of customary practices – the naming of bells, the use of the first-person in their inscriptions, the invocation of holy helpers, the ringing of bells as a call to prayer and an appeal for supernatural protection – in a four-line poem that invokes the bell’s function and, in the same stroke, lyricizes it.

In other medieval objects and monuments, first-person texts give voice to even more intensely affective statements. The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century practice of inscribing first-person affirmations of love or fidelity on the hidden, inside circumference of rings and other jewelry items is well-attested.²² Such short pledge-like statements on behalf of the giver of a ring were materialized, proxy speech-acts, designed for discrete concealment and text-to-body contact. The mid fifteenth-century heart-shaped brooch from the Fishpool hoard offers a finely wrought example of this wide-spread late medieval phenomenon (Fig. 1).²³

Fig. 1

The Fishpool hoard brooch: front side. c. 1450 CE; Gold, with enamel; 41.1 x 34 x 3.7 mm. British Museum, 1967,1208.8; https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1967-1208‑8 (10.02.2023: last viewed). (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

When worn, the outward-facing surface of the brooch presented torquing white and blue enameled bands, each delimited by rows of gold pellets.²⁴ Golden lozenge-like ornaments set against the blue and white enamel bands lend further optical and haptic complexity and brilliance to the softly rounded surface of the brooch’s ›show‹ side. On the flat reverse surface of the brooch, the incised forms of flowers – once enameled – punctuate an engraved gothic ›black letter‹ inscription that was originally executed in white enamel: Je suy vostre sans de partier (I am yours forever/I am yours without parting) (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

The Fishpool hoard brooch: reverse side. c. 1450 CE; gold, with enamel; 41.1 x 34 x 3.7 mm. British Museum, 1967,1208.8, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1967-1208‑8 (10.02.2023: last viewed). (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

The words »sans de partier« and variants of the phrase appear on numerous medieval rings and other items of jewelry.²⁵ On the enameled Fishpool brooch, however, the integration of the phrase acquires added resonance, thanks to its specific verbal and physical facture. Hidden from view when the brooch was worn, the concise first-person inscription conveys a redoubled secret message. The »je« of the text is putatively the voice of the giver, who pledges their constancy with the gift of the brooch. At the same time, however, the inscribed »je« invests the brooch with a ›voice‹ pledging that it will never part from its wearer; a promise enacted in the object’s form and function. Securing a cloth garment upon the body, usually upon the breast in the vicinity of the physical heart, the heart-shaped brooch was also designed to secure its wearer’s favor and affection.²⁶

Not all affectively charged first-person object- and monument-inscriptions were so discrete. An inscription, dated 1435, once prominently displayed upon the streetside façade of the »Ghellerborch« house at Alte Waage 2 in Braunschweig,²⁷ aggressively interpellated passersby with its epigraphic address:

Du · droch · dit · is · de · gheller · borch · noch · here · va(n) · ghellere(n) · bi(n) · ek ·ghe·na(n)t ·ik · ruke · de(n) · brade(n) ·vake(n) · un·ghe·laden mcccc / xxxv²⁸

You rogue, this is the Ghellerborch, I am named after Herr von Ghelleren, uninvited, I often smell the roasted meats / 1435

The inscription was presented as a banderole unfurling across the building’s façade (Fig. 3). At its left edge a relief carving depicted a fool’s head and it has been suggested that the inscribed banderole was intended to be seen as the utterance of the depicted fool.²⁹ The text, however, left no doubt that it was the house itself that addressed the beholder with the pronoun »du«.

Fig. 3

Facade inscription of the »Ghellerborch« house at Alte Waage 2 in Braunschweig before 1944. 1435 CE, carved and polychromed wood. (Rudolf Fricke, Das Bürgerhaus in Braunschweig, Tübingen 1974, Tafel 106b; Photo: © Wasmuth & Zohlen Verlag, Berlin. www.wasmuth-verlag.de)

Although the initial use of the demonstrative pronoun »dit« would seem to couch the inscription in a third-person mode of designation, the introduction of the first-person indicative »bin« shifts the text into a startling mode of direct-address. Having called out the beholder as a »droch«, the house next names itself, identifies its human name-sake, and finally complains that it can smell the meats cooked in the nearby Ratsküche, situated within the building in which the Braunschweiger Küchenrat met, a locus of civic power and elite sociability from which the Ghellerborch house is excluded.³⁰

The inscription is a wonderfully ludic, profane instance of »speaking architecture« and a canny piece of prosopopoeia. The hailing of the passerby is predicated on the inscription’s placement on the street-side exterior of the building and its complaint registers the structure’s situation within the physical, sensory, and political topography of late medieval Braunschweig. Indeed, the Ghellerborch house lays claim to a highly specific plight: fixed in place, it cannot escape the smells of the meats prepared for Braunschweig’s powerbrokers, but it never gets to taste them. Its only recourse is to draw attention to itself and its architectural, spatial, and social-political situation.

The Ghellerborch house’s playful inscription exploited the contingency that all monumental and object inscription involves. Any passerby who looked at and read the inscription’s first word was interpellated and characterized by the building’s address: »Du droch!« As the text continues, its sense is contingent upon its place within the urban, political and social topography of medieval Braunschweig. A beholder-turned-reader familiar with Braunschweig’s physical and political topography would have understood the inscription’s otherwise enigmatic claim. If, in the moment of reading the façade, meat was indeed being roasted in the nearby Ratsküche, a further phenomenal dynamic would have lent extra credibility to the house’s lament.

Although the Ghellerborch house’s epigraphic assertion of a kind of multi-sensory sentience is unusual, all objects and architecture inscribed with first-person forms of language are personified, to some degree, by the texts they bear. Such medieval ›ego-inscriptions‹ invested objects and monuments with grammatical subjectivity and often imputed to them a subjectivity that was not merely grammatical. The leveraging of contingency in the Ghellerborch inscription, which takes the house’s spatial situation as an occasion for rhetorical and semantic games, is likewise an unusually ludic instance of a potent device employed in numerous medieval inscriptions: deixis.

II.

Deixis has been defined as the discursive encoding of space, time, and subjective position or experience by means of specific words and expressions, most notably first- and second-person personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, adverbs of time (e.g., »now«, »then«, »before«, etc.) and of place (e.g., »here«, »there«, etc.).³¹ Construed more broadly, deixis is »that feature of language that delineates a relationship between the speaking subject and a given word, a relationship that may be defined along one of three axes: subjectivity, time, and space«.³²

One of the most obvious and wide-spread uses of deixis in medieval (and post-medieval) inscriptions is the copula preserved in countless grave markers: »Hic iacet« (here lies).³³Hic’s significance in this verbal formula is contingent and yet place-making; it designates meaningfully by indexing its own place in the world: here (where you read) is where a body lies. An epigraphic hic works this locative effect in each place it appears; were the grave marker moved, its inscription would continue to designate the place of decoding as ›here‹.³⁴ Considering such a scenario reveals a principal characteristic of epigraphic deixis: it is a phenomenal fact-making use of language. Every place in the world where hic is inscribed or displayed is transformed into the ›here‹ of the inscription.

Deixis has often been proposed as a limit case of the context-dependent character of all communication. Epigraphic deixis, however, poses something of a challenge to this account. When deictic »shifters«, in Jakobson’s parlance, are consubstantial with material-physical monuments and objects, their personal, locative, and temporal effects are context generating.³⁵ In epigraphic deixis, the inscribed monument or object is a semantic and a material origo or deictic center.³⁶ This dynamic is intensified in first-person inscriptions on objects and monuments, thanks to their »personal« deictic effects, but – as third-person mortuary hic iacet inscriptions exemplify – it is not limited to such inanimate ›ego inscriptions‹. Added to the fabric of the world, epigraphic deixis reorganizes the phenomenal world by virtue of its presence and its predication.

Numerous medieval epigraphic monuments enact deixis’s ancient Greek etymology (δεῖξις from the verb δείκνυμι – to show, point out, make known) quite literally.³⁷ A plaque, mounted at the corner of the Via di San Remigio and Via de’ Neri in Florence, features four lines of text above a disembodied hand whose index finger points to the upper limit of carved undulating lines filling the lower portion of the slab (Fig. 4).³⁸

Fig. 4

Plaque indicating the height of flood waters in Florence in 1333 CE. After 1333 CE, carved stone. (Photo: Sailko / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA‑3.0; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Via_don_giancarlo_setti_(via_san_remigio),_lapide_dell%27alluvione_del_1333,_01.jpg)

Together, the plaque’s inscription and pictorial elements indicate the height of the Arno’s waters in the devastating flood of 1333.

MCCCXXXIII

DI QUATRO DINOVEMBRE GIVOVEDI

LA NOCTE POI VENGNENDOL VENERDI

FU ALTA LACQUA DARNO I(N)FINO A QUI

Making contact with the surface of the depicted floodwaters, the carved index finger also underscores the last word of inscription’s concluding locative deixis, »A QUI«.³⁹ »Here«, where fingertip touches carved rippling relief, water lapped against walls in 1333, the plaque claims. Epigraphic text and image work together to render a devastating historical event concrete and palpable in an emphatically spatial and haptic mode of witness. That the plaque is today mounted upon a wall with ironwork brackets, raising the possibility that its current location is not its original location, does not diminish the monument’s performative effects. Even if it is no longer in its original location, the plaque’s visual and textual deixis retains its (possibly counterfactual) force.⁴⁰

The performative potential of depicted gesture combined with deictic verbal elements is likewise activated by a seemingly modest inscription integrated into the exterior of the church of St. Wolfgang in Bad Kreuznach. Carved into one of the flying buttresses of the choir of this former Franciscan church (consecrated in 1484), the form of a gesticulating right hand appears above the phrase »hic est / [locus · con]secr[a]tus« (Fig. 5).⁴¹

Fig. 5

St. Wolfgang in Bad Kreuznach: exterior inscription. c. 1484 CE, carved stone. (Photo: Thomas G. Tempel, Forschungsstelle »Die Deutschen Inschriften« bei der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz)

Noting that the epigraphic plaque likely once indicated the location of a cemetery situated between church’s choir and the southern wall of the claustral enclosure, Eberhard Nikitsch suggested that the depicted hand should not be interpreted as making a gesture of benediction, but instead as pointing out »einen realen Ort«.⁴² This analytic severing of benediction from designation misses the mark. The carved relief certainly shows a right hand, with extended thumb, index and middle finger, reaching out from a bulky segment of sleeve. The absence of a halo, combined with the exposed length of forearm and the prominent articulation of the sleeve, indicate that this is not a depiction of the manus dei, but rather a mortal hand making a gesture employed in benedictions and consecrations: two ritual actions that were consistently phrased and theorized as speech acts in the Middle Ages.⁴³

Like the paradigmatic consecration of the Eucharistic bread and wine, other consecrations – including the consecration of cemeteries – involved gestures and deictic utterances that were understood to cause what they expressed.⁴⁴ Conjoined with the phrase »hic est locus consecratus«, the gesturing hand effects what it designates in a durable continual-present-tense. Reifying a transformative action performed at a specific point in time, the conjunction of word and image in the plaque affirms both the legal and spiritual status of the plot of land it points out, and it shows how »this place« was made to be the distinct consecrated place that it is.

A similarly deictic logic is at work in the embellishing of pontifical and abbatial gloves (chirothecae) with the phrases »dextera domini« or »dextera dei«.⁴⁵ On the so-called Glove of St. Liudger, the phrase »DEXTERA D(OMI)NI« appears as part of an embroidered medallion, likely made in the eleventh century, applied to the back of the hand (Fig. 6).⁴⁶

Fig. 6

So-called Glove of St. Liudger. 12th century CE (?), linen, silk and gold brocade. (Photo: © Schatzkammer Werden, Bildarchiv)

Stitched in gold majuscule letter forms upon a golden textile ground, the phrase encircles a representation of a right hand that makes the conventional gesture of blessing or consecration, set against three bars of a cross (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7

Detail of so-called Glove of St. Liudger. (Photo: © Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Arbeitsstelle »Inschriften« Foto: Gerda Hellmer)

Framing a visual representation of the right hand of God (more specifically, of Christ), the two-word phrase might be characterized as a modest nominalizing titulus: an alphabetic element identifying a visual referent. Such a characterization would, however, fail to capture the deictic force of the phrase and its image-complement in this instance. Whereas in the New Testament, the dextera domini was understood in a locative sense as a position of favor next to God, in the so-called Glove of St. Liudger, and other liturgical gloves featuring the phrase, it is given a new context and a new meaning.⁴⁷

In its identification of the bishop’s right hand with the »right hand of the Lord« the so-called Glove of St. Liudger participated in a tradition. As Estelle Ingrand-Varenne has shown, the dextera domini text appears on numerous twelfth- and thirteenth-century liturgical gloves, all of them made to fit the right hand of a prelate.⁴⁸ Applied to the surface of a glove made for the right hand of a bishop (or abbot), the inscription designates not simply the embroidered divine hand but also the bishop’s right hand covered by the glove. Gloved, the bishop’s right hand received the blessing pictured in the embroidered medallion and when the bishop performed a benediction wearing the glove, his hand visually and phenomenally reiterated the icon of the dextera domini and its blessing.⁴⁹

Many medieval inscriptions deploy textual and visual deixis to mark and thereby transform and reorganize the phenomenal world in relation to their presence, forms and facture. In such inscriptions, writing on the world amounted to a re-writing of the world, an act that takes the phenomenal world as an initial empirical and conceptual context for epigraphic predication only to re-articulate place, time, and other referents from the standpoint or origo of the epigraphic work. Certain medieval inscriptions employ visual and textual deixis to work this re-articulation of the world about them in the form of a question. Riddle-like inscriptions are a case in point. Equally contingent and even occasional, deliberately puzzling inscriptions often frame their relation to the world in the form of a question.⁵⁰

Hermeneutic uncertainty is certainly the name of the game played by a sandstone ashlar block situated just above eye-level at the northwest corner of the west façade of the Stadtkirche St. Nikolaus in Babenhausen (completed 1472) (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8

Stadtkirche St. Nikolaus in Babenhausen: exterior carving of fool with banderole. c. 1472 CE, carved stone. (Photo: Thomas G. Tempel, Forschungsstelle »Die Deutschen Inschriften« bei der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz)

The carved stone is inhabited by a half-length male figure who stares out into the world as the banderole unfurling from his left hand boldly asks: »wer bin ich«?⁵¹

Although the weathered condition of the relief carving frustrates attempts to discern fine details in the figure’s form, the remains of what was likely a fool’s hood can be made out to the right of the figure’s head, and it seems likely that he once held a short cudgel – another attribute of fools – against his breast with his left hand.⁵² Is then the answer to the figure’s riddling question obvious, for only a fool would think his identity was enigmatic?

Although the carved block might seem merely to tautologically present a fool being foolish, consideration of the position of the carved block within the church’s physical fabric suggests that the riddling banderole’s question is a pointed one (Fig. 9).⁵³

Fig. 9

View of the west façade of St. Nikolaus in Babenhausen, completed 1472 CE; with added indication of the carving of the fool and banderole. (Photo: Reinhard Dietrich / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 3.0; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:St._Nikolaus_(Babenhausen)?uselang=de#/media/File:Bh_Stadtkirche1.jpg. Photo modified by author)

Integrated into the north corner of the church’s west façade approximately at eye-level, the carving is positioned to confront anyone moving toward, away from, or simply passing by the church’s main entrance from the northwest. The short, simple, vernacular text inscribed into its banderole was certainly devised as a querulous address to all and sundry who stopped to look. A beholder standing before the carving mirrored the frontal figure of the fool. In such a situation of eye-to-eye parallelism, the fool’s question, couched in the language of the secular day-to-day, potentially becomes the beholder’s question. The specific siting of the relief carving and its question invited a spatially-conditioned response with moral-religious implications: you are a fool, as am I, standing in this place looking at your image, reading your banderole, and, like you, not inside the church.⁵⁴

III.

The carved fool at Babenhausen poses his question by means of a banderole, a ubiquitous device for the presentation of short texts in medieval manuscripts, works of art, objects, monuments, and architecture. Although depicted scrolls have not been neglected by scholars, discussion has primarily focused on their role as visualizations of speech.⁵⁵ The strangeness and elusive ontology of the banderole has yet to be fully confronted by modern commentators.

Whereas the English word banderole denotes both a kind of narrow flag or streamer and a »ribbon-like scroll bearing a device or inscription«, it is also sometimes employed as a synonym for the more pointed term »speech-scroll«.⁵⁶ The German terms Schriftband and Spruchband draw a dichotomous distinction between depicted text and depicted speech, whilst Schriftrolle and Buchrolle are employed to designate the rotulus as a textual artifact and its depiction in images in equal measure. The term preferred in much Francophone scholarship, phylactère, can denote pagan amulets, Jewish tefillin, and Christian reliquaries, as well as »[b]anderole[s], aux extrémités enroulées, portant les paroles prononcées par un personnage ou la légende du sujet représenté, surtout utilisée par les artistes du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance«.⁵⁷ Even this incomplete terminological survey reveals how scholars have variously perceived and attempted to characterize this ubiquitous element in European medieval visual culture.⁵⁸ Rather than lament this terminological diversity, I would instead suggest that in this case terminological precision is not a desideratum, but rather a distraction from confronting the ambiguity, flexibility, and real strangeness of the medieval banderole.

Indeed, two fundamental aspects of this pictorial-textual device have yet to be adequately apprehended and critically interrogated. First, that medieval banderoles – be they inscribed or uninscribed – do not depict or evoke medieval rotuli (roll artifacts). And second, that the banderole is a fictive object invented in the medieval period.

To take the first of these points first: to the best of my knowledge, medieval banderoles never exhibit the chief hallmark of artifactual rotuli; namely, the stitched or glued seams that conjoin one sheet of papyrus, parchment, or paper to another.⁵⁹ So too, the ordinatio of texts inscribed in medieval banderoles set them apart from medieval rotuli. Countless medieval banderoles display one or more lines of text extending the full length (rather than breadth) of their forms: this textual ordinatio was not employed in medieval artifactual rotuli.⁶⁰ In medieval banderoles with legible or simulated text inscribed perpendicular to the length of the roll – the textual ordinatio found in the vast majority of extant rotuli artifacts from the medieval period – the letter-forms are disproportionately large, in relation to their depicted support. In other words, the texts inscribed on medieval banderoles were often scaled to the situation of the flesh-and-blood beholder turned reader, rather than any reading or authorial figure within the space of the image.⁶¹ Considered together these features of medieval banderoles reveal that they were consistently and conventionally distinguished from the artifactual rolls that medieval people knew and used.⁶²

In this respect, the medieval banderole is different both to the tabula ansata and to the depicted rotulus of antiquity.⁶³ In antiquity and late antiquity, tabulae ansatae existed as textual artifacts made of wood, metal, or clay, in the form of a horizontally oriented rectangular tablet with two triangular handles at each of its short ends. Likely originating as votive plaques displaying text in archaic Greece, tabulae ansatae proliferated in the Roman world as a way of framing and displaying a wide range of texts: inscribed with vota they continued to be hung or placed in temples, but they also featured in triumphal military processions. Additionally, the tabula ansata appears as a framing device for dedicatory and mortuary inscriptions on sarcophagi and relief sculptures, in floor mosaics, and on the walls of buildings.

Like tabulae ansatae, the rotulus was both an object in regular use and an artifact encountered within images.⁶⁴ Before the fifth century, rotuli are depicted in various physical states.⁶⁵ Completely rolled up and held in the left hand, they are often attributes of law-givers. In scenes of reading or singing in which a rotulus is depicted in active use, figures customarily hold the roll horizontally before them, grasping its rolled-up ends on either side of an exposed segment of the rotulus. Also well attested are scenes of »interrupted reading« from rotuli in which a figure holds the still rolled-up cylindrical end of the object, paying no attention to the exposed length of the roll that drapes across their lap or dangles from their hand.⁶⁶

In consonance with extant antique and late antique artifacts, the rolls depicted in ancient and late antique art are presented as horizontally, rather than vertically oriented supports for writing. When text features upon the surfaces of pre-medieval depicted rolls, it is organized in paragraph-like blocks, whose lines parallel the depicted artifact’s long horizontal edges, a layout attested in ancient and late antique extant papyrus and parchment rotuli.⁶⁷

In sum then, the rolls that appear in antique and late antique works of art conform to the horizontal format and textual ordinatio of ancient and late antique artifactual rotuli. In a spirit of consistent medial realism, ancient and late antique artists depicted rotuli as they were encountered in lived experience: rolled up and unrolled, let fall from one hand, and held open horizontally in two hands in scenes of reading, singing, declaiming, teaching, and law-giving.

The depiction of rolls as realia, evident in so many antique and late antique depictions of rotuli did not persist in the Middle Ages.⁶⁸ Whereas a conservative tendency affecting depictions of Moses, Hebrew Bible Prophets, the Evangelists, Apostles, and Christ himself ensured that rotuli continued to appear in the hands or upon the writing desks of such figures, fictive books increasingly replaced rotuli as attributes of New Testament authority figures and the depicted roll acquired a more iconographically pointed signification. As Theodor Birt pithily observed, »[d]as Heilige liebt das Archaisieren«: the Buchrolle held by depictions of holy figures were already archaizing attributes in the sixth century.⁶⁹

Writing in the thirteenth century, William Durandus (c. 1230–1296 CE) understood the rotulus and the liber as well-established pictorial signifiers. In his Rationale divinorum officiorum, Durandus explains the differentiated use of these two iconographic attributes in the images and other ornaments encountered in churches:

[…] note that the Patriarchs and Prophets are painted with scrolls in their hands, and some of the Apostles are depicted with books and some with scrolls. This is clearly because before the coming of Christ, the faith was shown figuratively, and many things remained unclear; to represent this, the Patriarchs and Prophets are painted with scrolls, as if to denote this imperfect knowledge. But since the Apostles were instructed perfectly by Christ, they can be shown with books, by which is suitably depicted their perfect knowledge. But because some of them put down in writing what they had learned, for the instruction of others, they are fittingly depicted as if they were teachers, with books in their hands, such as Paul, the Evangelists, Peter, James and Jude. But others, who wrote nothing that has survived or has been approved by the Church, are not depicted with books but with scrolls, as a sign of their preaching.⁷⁰

Durandus identifies two logics at work in the iconographic attributes of roll and codex. First, he sketches a typological-hierarchical logic that starkly differentiates the imperfect, unclear religious knowledge possessed by Jewish authorities before the Incarnation from the superior, perfect knowledge the Apostles acquired, thanks to Christ’s teaching. Within this scheme, the motif of the scroll unequivocally connotes the imperfection, incompletion, and obscurity of the revelation given to the Patriarchs and Prophets. Cast as anti types to the rotulus-as-type, codices, in turn, signify the perfect, more complete and no longer »figurative« (i.e., obscure) knowledge given to the Apostles by Christ. On this account, the scroll and book define an iconographic binary, a two-term set organized by, and expressive of a triumphalist Christian typology. Turning to the depiction of Christian figures with scrolls, Durandus identifies a second iconographic logic at work; namely, the distinction of writers from preachers or speakers.

Durandus sketches a rather simple iconographic scheme, in which depicted codex and depicted roll have clearly differentiated statuses and significations. His binary understanding of what depicted rolls and books signify has, consciously and unconsciously, been adopted and maintained by much art historiography. Although Durandus’s Rationale is a magisterial work of liturgiological synthesis it is not a reliable field guide to medieval visual culture. In practice, medieval banderoles served numerous aims, ranging from the iconographic to the expressive, compositional, and ornamental.

Rather than acting as a pictorial surrogate for a class of extra-pictorial artifact, the medieval banderole was a pictorial device for the integration of actual or implied language within the space of images. In this respect, the medieval banderole is distinct from other textual artifacts frequently depicted in medieval images: books, pictured opened and closed; depictions of the two tablets of the Mosaic law; representations of wax tablets; depicted legal documents. By turn, banderoles are also distinct from the innumerable inscriptions that appear within or adjacent to pictorial space without any fictive support. Carved into the back planes of carvings, painted upon a ground, or disposed within framing elements, in medieval works of art texts are often juxtaposed with iconic representation without being pictorially justified as fictive objects or artifacts.

Already starting in the ninth century, the legacy of artifactual realism, inherited from antique and late antique pictorial traditions, registers less and less in the forms of depicted rolls. As banderoles proliferated in subsequent centuries, their anti-realistic qualities intensified. Medieval banderoles float in mid-air. They curl, loop, fold back on themselves. They thread and zig-zag through pictorial space. Freed from the laws of gravity and the task of referencing extra-pictorial realia, banderoles were routinely invested with considerable kinetic energy: they launch from the heads of figures, ripple and stretch between figures, and bend at acute angles, quite independent of the hands that hold them. The ›physics‹ of medieval banderoles reveal how radically medieval artists re-imagined the depicted rotulus of antiquity. Unbound from the constraints of artifactual realism, the banderole was (re)invented in the Middle Ages as a pictorial device.

The remains of a wall painting situated immediately behind and to the north of the altar in the apse of the church of St. Martini in Stadthagen exemplify the formal and semantic flexibility of the medieval banderole, those qualities that made the banderole an agile and compelling pictorial-textual device (Fig. 10).⁷¹

Fig. 10

St. Martini in Stadthagen; wall painting in apse. c. 1450–1500 CE. (Photo: © Inga Finck, Niedersächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Inschriftenkommission)

Below what was once a full-length figure and a lily vase – almost certainly a depiction of the Virgin Annunciate – a banderole frames a fragmentary inscription: »O d(omi)na · glorie · regi[. . . . . . . . .] fon [. . . . .]eta[ti]s // [. . . . . . .]«.⁷² The text can be reconstructed as »O domina gloriae, o regina laetitiae, o fons pietatis, o vena misericordiae« (Oh lady of glory, queen of joy, fount of piety, and vessel of mercy): verses from a Marian hymn attested in at least six fifteenth-century manuscripts.⁷³ The doubled black lines that frame the inscription could be mistaken for aniconic ruling, were it not for how they describe the folded, draped edge of a banderole at the far left.

The upper line of the horizontal inscription is interrupted by a small male figure, seated in profile on a bench; a text painted on the wall surface immediately below identifies him as ysayas. Gazing at the Marian inscription immediately to the right of his form, Isaiah raises his left hand into the space of the large banderole, making an open palmed gesture of acknowledgment. In his right hand he holds a closed book, from which a second, smaller banderole unfurls. Its arcing and looping form seems to hover before him, breaking into the space of the larger horizontal inscription above, intervening in the orderly march of its letterforms, and obscuring the black lines that demarcate the edges of that inscription’s banderole. Today only the indistinct traces of letterforms can be seen on the banderole that unfurls from the book held in the prophet’s hand; they may once have spelled out a quotation from Isaiah’s prophetic writing.⁷⁴

The overlapping of the horizontal banderole with its Marian hymn-verse by the smaller figure of Isaiah and the floating form of the banderole that springs from his book effectively positions the prophet in front of the Marian banderole and the representation of the Annunciation above it. Given Christian interpretation of Isaiah’s prophecy – as a prophecy of the Incarnation, the superimposition of prophetic figure and banderole upon the Marian banderole also figures a typological conjunction.

The figure of Isaiah and his ribbon-like banderole visually interrupt the Marian hymn inscribed on the monumental banderole above and putatively behind them. As prophet and prophecy intervene in that horizontally disposed banderole, they seem to occlude sections of its regular, ordered inscription. The overlapping of banderole by banderole, of Christian hymnody by prophetic figure and prophetic language stages a counterfactual chronology in pictorial terms, as if the event of the Annunciation and Incarnation preceded Jewish prophecy. This is, of course, the logic of Christian typology. According to Christian exegesis, Isaiah’s prophetic utterance, »Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel« (Isaiah 7:14), foretold the Annunciation and with it the Incarnation. From this soteriological and exegetical perspective, Jewish prophecy communicated Christian revelation obscurely. Often analogized to a shadow or veil by Christian exegetes, Hebrew Bible prophecy was understood as a divine communication of Christ’s future adventus and Mary’s crucial role in salvation history, albeit in a concealed form that awaited full disclosure with the adventus of the verbum incarnatum.

It is this Christian conception of Jewish prophecy as at once foretelling and obscuring Christian revelation that structures the spatial conceit of the wall painting in the choir of St. Martini and motivates the choreography of its two banderoles. Nominally instances of the same epigraphic device, the two banderoles are rendered as starkly different visual forms, whose pictured interaction articulates a typological, supercessionist claim. Overlapping the larger inscribed banderole, the figure of Isaiah blocks the beholder’s view of its praise of Mary and, by the same stroke, directs attention to the inscription and the figure of the Virgin above it. Positioned as if he too contemplates the Marian banderole, Isaiah’s gesture with his left hand indicates his awareness of its presence, perhaps even his participation in its praise of the Virgin as »lady of Glory«, »Queen of Joy«, »Fount of Piety«, and »Vessel of Mercy«. Depicted as if it were positioned spatially behind the figure of Isaiah, the large banderole serves as a titulus for the Annunciation scene above it and as the epigraphic object of Isaiah’s fictive gaze. The Hebrew prophet contemplates and responds to a Christian truth that, within the spatial conceit of the wall painting, is presented as existentially and soteriologically prior to his form and the smaller involuted banderole that unfurls from his book of prophecy.

Although medieval banderoles rarely depicted artifactual medieval rotuli, they were nonetheless deployed as fictive objects, whose surfaces exhibit or else signify the presence of language within the image or upon the surfaces of objects and architecture. When banderoles were legibly inscribed, they objectified language within pictorial space and integrated it into the forms of other artifacts and structures, inviting beholders to become readers. Encountered exclusively in works of art and on the surfaces of crafted objects and the built environment, the medieval banderole was a species of pictorial fiction, a counterfactual depiction of a kind of textual artifact that did not otherwise exist. At the same time, however, legibly inscribed banderoles added real, really material texts to the medieval world, no less than each libellus, codex, document, or medieval rotulus did. The legibly inscribed banderole is, in this respect, a remarkable medieval invention. A conventional and ubiquitous pictorial fiction in the high and later Middle Ages, the inscribed banderole was also a material support for actual writing and reading – a textual fact – in the phenomenal world.

IV.

From the mass of medieval objects, monuments, and images with inscriptions, a subset of works depict inscription as a process or act. The numerous scenes of writing, and less frequently of painting, depicted in medieval manuscripts constitute a rich corpus of such meta-images. The long medieval tradition of Evangelist portraits alone ensured that the manuscript page would be a privileged site for pictorial reflection on what it meant, both pragmatically and conceptually, to write. Although other ways of adding of language to the world were rarely represented with such self-reflexivity in the medieval period, a small number of epigraphic works survive in which inscription is visually thematized as an act within and upon the world.⁷⁵

In the richly carved twelfth-century baptismal font in the church of St. Bridget in Bridekirk (Cumbria) the transformation of stone into text is presented as one among a series of profound ontological transformations.⁷⁶ On its east face, the Bridekirk font preserves an early Middle English couplet carved into the surface of a sinuous banderole in a mixture of Scandinavian runes and Old English bookhand elements (Fig. 11).⁷⁷

Fig. 11

East face of the Bridekirk font; St. Bridget’s Church, Bridekirk. Twelfth century, carved stone. (Photo: Michael Garlick / CC BY-SA 2.0; https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/6232630)

Above the inscription, a rectangular field is dominated by two affronted griffin-like creatures, who gnaw upon the upper leaves of a stylized plant placed between them at the center of the register. The forelegs of the hybrid creatures rest upon a molding that divides the broader upper surface of the font’s face from the gently tapered lower zone below. Immediately beneath the horizontal molding, an exuberant, leafy vine-scroll is inhabited by two figures: a dog, running toward the left of the carved surface, and, on the extreme right, a splayed-leg male figure who energetically pulls a cluster of grapes to his mouth. Below the rippling banderole, more stylized vegetal scrollwork fills the right half of the lower register. Framed by two diminutive columns with scalloped capitals, this part of the font’s surface is presented as a work in progress: in the left half of the register, a male figure raises a mallet, ready to strike the chisel with which he is carving the stylized vine tendril immediately before him (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12

Detail of the east face of the Bridekirk font. (Photo: Michael Garlick / CC BY-SA 2.0; https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/6232632)

The sculptor depicted at work on the Bridekirk font from within its carved surface is named in the inscription situated directly above his form. To understand the inscription, however, takes some work: one must transform the carved marks of the inscription into a series of sounds, punctuated by silences; only then does the inscription reveal itself to be a Middle English couplet naming and praising the font’s maker:

+ rikarþ : he : mˆe : i{w}r(o)ktˆe : {7} : to : þis : me:r{Ð} : {3}er : – : mˆe : broktˆe

Ricarþ he me i{w}rocte. {And} to þis mer{ð} {3}er […] me brocte.

Ricarþ he made me. And to this splendour […] brought me.⁷⁸

Couched in the first-person, the verse inscription’s conjunction of prosopopoeia and auto-panegyric is not a unicum: numerous medieval objects with first-person inscriptions praise their makers, and by extension themselves.⁷⁹ Nonetheless, the specific facture of the Bridekirk font’s inscribed banderole further intensifies the self-reflexive character of the monument’s conjunction of text and image. The graphs composing the inscription were chiseled into the stone as negative, intaglio aniconic forms that contrast markedly with the positive, high-relief carvings that surround them. The banderole, by contrast, was invested with considerable plasticity by the carver. Bending in response to the pressure of the upraised mallet, the banderole is overlapped by the vine tendril’s spur-like leaves and petals, and its left and right edges rest upon the capitals of the miniature columns bracketing the lower register. The inscription is thus subtly presented as a fictive artifact, occupying the notional depth of the carved relief surface like the other carved mimetic forms that surround it. Invested with ›objecthood‹ in this way, the banderole and the graphs incised into it, resist characterization as a figuration of ›speech‹, foregrounding instead the inscribed font’s origin in stone transformed by skill into an epigraphic monument. As Judith Jesch has insightfully observed:

If the use of the verse implies a spoken performance, the first-person oblique pronoun me, the object of the verb of making, must indicate that any speaking is done by an inanimate object, the font itself, rather than any human voice. Or perhaps we should conceptualise the font as writing rather than speaking? The use of several bookhand characters from the English tradition […] suggests the literate world of written verse rather than the oral world of spoken verse […] If we take the text at its word, then what we have is a baptismal font speaking Middle English and writing both Scandinavian runes and English bookhand, telling us about the craftsman, who is mute, but who seems to have illustrated himself in the act of making.⁸⁰

Framed by the rhymed verb pair of »iwrocte« and »brocte«, the verbal facture of the couplet puts particular emphasis on skilled acts of making; the spatial disposition of the couplet within the banderole further intensifies this resonant rhyme. The careful ordinatio of the inscription within the space of the banderole positions the name »Ricarþ« directly above the figure of the male sculptor at work. The name of the carver in the inscription thus doubles as a titulus for the figure of the sculptor at work and identifies that figure as an artistic self-portrait.

The past-tense verb forms in the inscription assert that the font was skillfully brought to state of splendid completion by its maker, and yet the figure of the sculptor at work, raising his mallet to strike the chisel held against the stone surface of the font is represented in an uncanny present-tense. Unlike many other medieval depictions of artists, the carver is not shown laboring with materials scaled to his form. Ricarþ is dwarfed by the vegetal ornament he carves. The effect of this play with scale is startling, even audacious. Ricarþ has depicted himself not simply or generically at work, but rather in the process of working upon the very surface of the font before our eyes.

The artful conjunction of the inscription with the depiction of the artist carving the outsized vegetal ornament invests the small figure with an uncanny quality, as if the human carver has been transformed into an inhabitant of the relief surface. At the same time, however, in the inscribed banderole the font declares itself to be a product of Ricarþ’s skilled labor. And in a kind of referential feed-back loop, the diminutive figure’s fictive chisel, set against the vegetal ornament, acts like a pointing finger. An instance of visual deixis, it parallels the self-referential phrases »made me« and »brought me to this splendour« in the inscription, indicating precisely not only the font’s »splendour« but also how it was achieved.

The inscription has the font proclaim its splendid completion thanks to Ricarþ’s skill in the past tense, yet the completed carving of the font’s east face visually presents the artist still actively chiseling stylized vegetal forms out of the stone surface. There is, I would suggest, no unresolved contradiction in this juxtaposition of text and image. Indeed, the epigraphic and pictorial emphasis placed on the artist’s transformation of stone into splendid font is part of a larger exploration of transformations and transformative acts sustained across each of the Bridekirk font’s carved surfaces.

Profound transformations are the central theme of the font’s sculptural program.⁸¹ In the bodies of the affronted hybrid creatures in the top register of the font’s east side canine heads transition into curved necks with the curling locks of the lion’s mane, that lead, in turn, to prominent wings, whose bands of transverse beading anticipate the beaded segments of the creatures’ tails before they terminating in large, stylized leaves. So too, the vine-scroll vegetation immediately above and below the inscribed banderole shifts shape as it curls, sprouting diverse leaves and blooms.

Ricarþ’s skilled transformation of stone into a variety of vital shape-shifting forms is equally evident in the other faces of the font. It takes on overtly religious salience in the cross on the font’s south side, whose left and right arms sprout bifurcated beaded tendrils, that divide and curve back on themselves before they terminate in pairs of leafy palmettes and the curled, rippling forms of stylized acanthus (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13

South face of the Bridekirk font; St. Bridget’s Church, Bridekirk. Twelfth century, carved stone. (Photo: Michael Garlick / CC BY-SA 2.0; https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/6232668)

The upper register of the font’s west face presents a scene of hybrid struggle: a half human, half leonine figure at the center of the scene grasps, and is grasped by two monstrous creatures (Fig. 14).

Fig. 14

West face of the Bridekirk font; St. Bridget’s Church, Bridekirk. Twelfth century, carved stone. (Engraving in George Stephens, Handbook of the Old-Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England, London 1884, 161)

The register below has eluded definitive iconographic interpretation.⁸² On the left, a full-length figure raises a sword and points toward a second male figure. This facing figure reaches forward with his right arm, whilst holding something (damaged beyond recognition) before his body with his left hand. In the right half of the composition, a veiled female figure kneels and embraces the trunk of a tree, whose branches, towering above her, sprout stylized acanthus leaves and bend under heavy clusters of fruit. The tree’s fantastical leaves, interlaced branches, and oversized clusters of fruit characterize it as a work of art rather than nature, or rather as the natural material of stone transformed by the artist’s skill.

On the west face of the font, the upper register is dominated by a massive hybrid with two heads, a bifurcated neck, and an over-sized vegetal tail that spirals in upon itself before bursting into flower. In the register below, the font’s development of the theme of transformation arguably culminates in the scene of the Baptism of Christ (Fig. 15).

Fig. 15

North face of the Bridekirk font; St. Bridget’s Church, Bridekirk. Twelfth century, carved stone. (Photo: Michael Garlick / CC BY-SA 2.0 / geograph.org.uk/p/6232650; https://www.geograph.org.uk/p/6232650)

Facing the beholder, Christ is half immersed in the rippling water of the river Jordan as the full-length figure of John the Baptist, in an unusual gesture, reaches out to embrace him by the shoulders. Descending from the right, the dove of the Holy Ghost joins in the sacramental action, its beak and head substituting for the upper vertical bar of Christ’s carved halo.

To either side of the figure group, thickets of interwoven vegetation span the height of the lower register, erupting in clusters of fruit whose forms recall the grape cluster grasped by the male figure in the vine-scroll on the parallel, east side of the font. The two densely interlaced trees that bracket the scene of John baptizing Christ cannot be attributed to the Gospels’ accounts of Christ’s baptism (Mt. 3; Mk. 1; Lk. 3). They belong instead to the fantastic world of flora-become-fauna, and fauna-become-flora that Ricarþ carved on each of the font’s sides. Framing Christ’s Baptism, this stylized, involuted, and interlaced vegetation also links that scene to the other vital transformations that fill each of the Bridekirk font’s surfaces. Collectively they resonate with the font’s role in the transformation of people into Christians. The grape-like fruit that hangs from the stylized trees on either side of John the Baptist and Christ gloss the rite of baptism’s generative power and links the sacrament of initiation to the sacrament of the Eucharist in a fashion that was well-established by the twelfth century.

Just as the preparation of the font and the rite of baptism itself involved words, material substances (the paschal candle, water, oil and chrism), and manual gestures, so too language and material substance were fashioned by the carver’s hand into a new, soteriologically transformative whole.⁸³ The exploration of form in the process of changing and of being changed that is sustained across each carved surface of the Bridekirk font resonates with the font’s role in transforming people into Christians. Within the sacramental, supernatural ecology of the font’s carvings, the figure of the carver of words and images makes and takes his place. And, as in the rite of Baptism, he receives a name, thanks to the inscribed banderole that shelters his labor within and upon the font’s surface.

V.

The rite of baptism combines prepared materials, spoken words and gestures to transform people into Christians. Indeed, many of the sacraments and most of the sacramentals recognized by medieval Christians conjoined words with material substances: not only baptism, but also the Eucharist, extreme unction, ordination, the blessing of palm fronds and the imposition of ashes, the burial rite, the dedication of Churches and the consecration of bells.⁸⁴ By prescription and in practice, the adding of words to the world – voiced aloud, but also sometimes manifested in visual form – was a central feature of many medieval Christian rites of transformation.

The import of inscription cannot, however, be understood in exclusively sacred or religious terms in the medieval context. Epigraphic texts, seen and unseen, also worked worldly transformations: redoubling an amorous pledge in words and the functional form of brooch; durably and palpably fixing the ephemeral reach of floodwaters; recasting the spatial situation of a building as a social-political predicament. The use of the grammatical first-person singular in inscriptions invested inanimate objects and monuments with a fictive capacity for language, and by extension sentience. The deployment of deixis in inscribed monuments and objects also granted them the power of (re)organizing relations of time and space. Pointing out, indexing, and marking the situation of »here« and »now«, self-singularizing the inscribed work’s presence and address through demonstrative pronouns (e.g., »this«), deictic inscriptions staked out a substantial, semantic, and sometimes subjective standpoint within and upon the world.

Many of these epigraphic devices and their effects invite comparison with the devices and effects of literary fiction. The investing of inanimate objects with grammatical subjecthood by means of inscription extends the personifying gambit of prosopopoeia from the planar surface of the page to the volumetric form of artifacts and monuments. So too, the epigraphic imputation of language, sentience, and affect to certain medieval buildings and objects participates in the fiction of subjectivity we have come to associate with lyric.⁸⁵ In the patterned language of verse inscriptions employing deixis and/or the first-person, the distinction of artful literary fiction from artifactual epigraphic fiction would seem difficult, if not impossible to maintain.

If the inscriptions worked into the surfaces of objects and monuments sometimes worked in the mode of fiction to create as if effects – as if the object spoke, as if the building sensed, thought and commented – the texts themselves were empirical facts in the world: really existing instances of written language available to the senses. The conjunction of epigraphic fact with pictorial fiction amounts to a long-lived tradition that acquired a particularly pointed form in the medieval banderole.

Consistently distinguished from artifactual rotuli, banderoles were fictive textual artifacts. At the same time, however, legibly inscribed banderoles acted as formats and material supports for words no less real than those written upon the pages of manuscripts. As Vincent Debiais has observed, »[l]e rapport à la matière ajoute cependant à la pratique épigraphique du support de l’écriture une dimension particulière dans le sens où le rouleau … employé dans la sculpture ou l’orfèvrerie pour porter la parole est réellement un objet, et non plus sa représentation comme dans le monde.«⁸⁶ And, unlike the inscribed pages of codices, the vast majority of banderoles were continually visible presences. Unfurled upon a dizzying range of surfaces, they could not be rolled up and stored away from view; only acts of effacement, of iconoclasm, or the cumulative erosive effects of environment and time could remove their words from the world.

The texts worked into the surface of buildings, worn on the body, and that punctuated the cityscape and the landscape ensured that medieval people lived with texts, even if they had never turned the leaves of a manuscript. It is, perhaps, the brevity of so many of these inscriptions that has led modern scholars – epigones of bookishness – to underestimate how visibly and materially the lived environment was also a textual, even a fictionalized environment in the Middle Ages.⁸⁷ If numerous epigraphic texts communicated the facts of dates, names, toponyms, and events, the medieval tradition of artfully conjoining text and image, text and object, and text and architecture ensured that the »Verschriftlichung der Welt« in the Middle Ages was never merely a project of transcribing.⁸⁸ Epigraphic verba facta were always works of textual and material artifice. And numerous medieval inscribed objects, monuments and buildings were also ficta: works that reworked the phenomenal world, in the mode of as if.