Abstract
The layout and production of the medieval illuminated manuscript reveals in part the way late medieval book producers constructed the act of reading. Reading was imagined as a process of interiorization, through which texts are translated into the mental threads that affect ethical action and learned response. In part this dual textual aspect was the result of the scholastic reading revolution that reached its apex in the thirteenth century. The rise of the university and the corresponding attention to reading and meditatio that accompanied it established reading as part of an official culture. This culture essentially institutionalized reading, establishing a set of rules and procedures that attempted to fix the associative processes that might overrun and make too pleasurable the act of private reading. Reading thus “became a practice that one could organize and determine in advance, having as its objective the cultural preparation and the didactic and scientific activities of the new professional intellectual.”1 Though the act of reading always “faces in two directions,” encompassing both a private response and a social or institutional context that controls the interplay of meanings available to it, in the scholastic tradition the institutional conditions dominate private response.2
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Notes
Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy, ed. and trans, by Charles M. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 138.
The quote is from J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 4.
Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–2.
Excellent scholarship on the glossed books has emerged in recent years. In addition to Irvine, cited above, see especially Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 156–69; Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991); Christopher de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Book Trade (Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1984); A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
M. B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 135; see also Martin Irvine’s chapter “The Semiology of the Page,” in The Making of Textual Culture, pp. 384–90.
Anselm, Monologion, in Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1974), pp. 74–75.
Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 88. See also Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 13.
Robert E. Lerner, “Writing and Resistance Among Beguins of Languedoc and Catalonia,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, eds. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 186–204.
Lerner, “Writing and Resistance,” p. 197; see also Malcolm Lambeth, Medieval Heresy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 207.
Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 11.
Minnis, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–1375 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 2.
Remarking on Paul’s observation that “Veritate quidam auditum auertent,” Bersuire writes, “Quod verbum ad hoc possum inducere que pleruque fabulis: enigmatibus & poematibus est extendum ut exinde aliquis moralis sensus extrahatur: ut etiam falsitas veritati famulari cogatur.” Pierre Bersuire, Metamorphosis Ovidiana Moraliter… Explanata. Intr. and ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1979), Book XV, Prologue (my translation).
Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 31–32.
Christine de Pizan, Christine de Pizan’s Letter of Othea to Hector, trans. and ed. Jane Chance (Massachusetts: Focus, 1990). On Christine’s allegoresis, see Judith L. Kellogg, “Christine de Pizan as Chivalric Mythographer,” in The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990), pp. 100–124.
Eleanor Hull, The Seven Psalms. EETS 307, ed. Alexandra Barratt (London: Oxford University Press, 1995).
See The Banquet, trans. Christopher Ryan (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1989), II.i. The “Letter to Can Grande” is reprinted in Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, trans. Robert S. Haller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), pp. 95–111.
Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, ed. Tommaso Casini (Firenze: Sansoni, 1962), I, 3: “In quella parte del libro della mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica, la qual dice: Incipit Vita Nova.” All further references are to this edition. Translations are from Mark Musa, trans., Vita Nuova (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Teodolinda Barolini, “Dante and the Lyric Past,” in Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 24.
Robert Pogue Harrison, “Approaching the Vita Nuova,” in Cambridge Companion to Dante, p. 34. See also Thomas Stillinger’s chapter on “Dante’s Divisions: Structures of Authority in the Vita Nuova,” in his The Song of Troilus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 44–72.
See especially Charles Singleton’s chapter “From Love to Caritas,” in An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 55–77.
Cf. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 58–59.
Petrarch’s quest for metamorphosis through the act of writing is well-documented. Sara Sturm-Maddox views Petrarch’s love for the elusive “Laura” as the quest for self-transformation not unlike Dante’s. In Petrarch’s case, however, Laura offers not spiritual transformation, but material: Her name, echoing the “laurel,” or sign of glory, signifies Petrarch’s own quest for glory through writing. Yet the Secretum offers a more introspective picture of the author. The persona of Augustine gently questions the author’s material pursuits and reminds him through a reminiscence on reading the great authors about the more intangible rewards that reading and writing may offer the solitary individual. See Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime Sparse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), p. 105; see also Maddox’s Petrarch’s Laurel’s (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Charles Trinkhaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 27–51 and 89.
Francesco Petrarca, Prose, eds. G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E Carrara, and E. Bianchi (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1955), I, 42. Translation is from William H. Draper, Petrarch’s Secret (Westport: Hyperion Press, 1978), p. 21.
Georges Poulet, “The Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1, no. i (1969): 53–68.
Victoria Kahn, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum,” PMLA 100 (1985): 154–66.
Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 90.
Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, X:4, in A.J. Minnis, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 413–15.
Donald Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Ballantine, 1987), p. 188; cf. Paul Ruggiers, “The Italian Influence on Chaucer,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 139–61.
See William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
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© 2000 Laurel Amtower
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Amtower, L. (2000). Authorized Readers, or, Reading Authority. In: Engaging Words. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62998-5_4
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