'Word and Image’, in A Companion to British Literature, Volume I, Medieval Literature, 700–1450,...

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DeMaria—A Companion to British Literature

Image preempts word: the permanent record of human communication begins with images and, indeed, children learn to draw before they learn to write. Some of the earliest interpretable information comes from cave-paintings, like the extraordinary images at Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc in the Ardèche region of southern France. Here, early peoples used cave art to illustrate animals and birds, such as horses, panthers, owls, and lions, which are found alongside dots, handprints, and lines to create a whole system of paintings, the meanings of which might be representational, ritualistic, apotropaic, and mnemonic, or any combination of these. Created perhaps before 30,000 bce, these wonderful remnants of prehistoric civilization pre-date the origins of writing systems by some 27,000 years. When writing did emerge in the Eastern Mediterranean, it was developed primarily as a pictographic system, where syllables, words, or ideas were depicted as a visualized representation of the thing being con-veyed: Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics are among the first writing systems, testifying to the human necessity to find an enduring method of record-keeping, a permanent means of retaining essential commercial and administrative information. Memory, then, was no longer considered sufficient; orality, with its obvious transience and dependence on reliable recall, was subsequently to be sup-ported by a learned, and often exclusive, process of inscribing knowledge – a process that from that day to this is multimodal, comprised of images and writing and often both simultaneously.

Word and image are prolific in a multitude of contexts in the medieval period, and especially so in religious form. The variety of creative intention, substrate, and

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A Companion to British Literature: Volume I: Medieval Literature, 700–1450, First Edition. Edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Word and Image

Elaine Treharne

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Word and Image: Illuminations and Other Visual Media 385

function is staggering: from the late ninth-century Alfred Jewel,1 with its cloisonné enamel face gazing out surrounded by the claim that “aelfred het mec gewyr-can” (“Alfred ordered me to be made”) inscribed around the gold frame; to the fifteenth-century wall-painting of Christ dismembered in Broughton; the early fourteenth-century Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral; the late eleventh-century embellished initials of Ieuan ap Sulien’s manuscript of De Trinitate from Llanbadarn Fawr (Graham 1996: 241–256); and the twelfth-century Viking runic inscriptions at Maeshowe in Orkney. This chapter, then, scratches the surface of a world of litera-cies – both verbal and visual: of a world where the picture and the letter were more common than we imagine and where the responses of the reader-viewer are now as unpredictable as they presumably were then.

In principio erat verbum: In the Beginning Was the Word

From the arrival of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England at the very end of the sixth century, written text became one of the key ways in which the religion was spread among the Germanic settlers by the missionaries sent by Pope Gregory. The Celts had already been Christianized by the Romans, but the Anglo-Saxon invaders were originally pantheistic. With Christianity came the need for the written word – the Gospel and other liturgical materials – to convert pagans. The earliest Gospels to survive from the Anglo-Saxon period, the St. Augustine Gospels (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 286), though incomplete now, are themselves illustrated with sixth-century images, which will be discussed in the next section. This early use of pictures, however, demonstrates clearly how closely bound word and image were in teaching and learning in these early centuries. Indeed, a clear understanding of the symbiosis of the written and the artistic underpins the earliest efforts of the Anglo-Saxons’ mis-sionaries, as the church father and monk, Bede, reveals in the first book of his Eccle-siastical History of the English People, completed in 731 at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. Ethelbert, king of Kent, who had a Christian wife, Bertha, allowed Gregory the Great’s team of Augustine and his fellow missionaries to stay on the Isle of Thanet, off the coast of Kent. Bede continues:

Post dies ergo uenit ad insulam rex, et residens sub diuo iussit Augustinum cum sociis ad suum ibidem aduenire colloquium. Cauerat enim ne in aliquam domum ad se introirent, uetere usus augurio, ne superuentu sio, siquid maleficae artis habuissent, eum superano deciperent. At illi non daemonica sed diuina uirtute praediti ueniebant, crucem pro uexillo ferentes argenteam, et imaginem Domini Saluatoris in tabula depictam, laetaniasque canentes pro sua simul et eorum, propter quos et ad quos uenerant, salute aeterna Domino supplicabant.

Some days afterwards the king came to the island and, sitting in the open air, commanded Augustine and his comrades to come thither to talk with him. He took care that they should not meet in any building, for he held the traditional superstition that, if they practised any magic art, they might deceive him and get the better of him

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386 Volume I: Medieval Literature, 700–1450

as soon as he entered. But they came endowed with divine not devilish power and bearing as their standard a silver cross and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a panel. They chanted litanies and uttered prayers to the Lord for their own eternal salvation and the salvation of those for whom and to whom they had come. (Colgrave and Mynors 1969: 74–75)

Here, Bede vividly depicts a remarkable scene: the onlooking of a suspicious king and his courtiers as Christianity made its first impressions. What is particularly striking about this spectacle is not just the procession of Augustine and his companions, or the noise of the chanting and praying, but the integral role of the richly symbolic cross and the image of Christ painted on what was probably a large wooden tablet or panel. This image was, arguably, used to introduce Christ as a “real” person to Ethel-bert and his court, to bring his incarnation and his teachings to life in a visually memorable way for those who could not access the Latin of the litany and prayers, and to provide the focus for veneration. Such images were widely used in early medi-eval Rome both in the catacombs (such as that found in the Catacomb of Commodilla in Rome from the fourth century) (Finaldi 2000) and in the art of the early monaster-ies and churches, such as the famous icon of Christ from St. Catherine’s, Mount Sinai (Chatzidakis 1967: 197–208); and, as Bede tells us, in his own monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, where images on panels brought by Benedict Biscop from Rome were hung within the church and monastery “to stimulate the memory of the faithful” (Meyvaert 1979: 69).

While for Bede the use of the image in the conversion scene at Thanet is uncontro-versial and, to us, easily overlooked, even during the eighth century when Bede was writing, both in the Eastern Mediterranean and later in the West, debate accompanied the use of pictures within a Christian context, principally because of the anxiety that venerating an image was akin to idolatory: that, as commanded in Exodus 20.4, “Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth.” Argument about the precise consequences of this proscription led to the Byz-antine iconoclastic controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries, where objectors and supporters of the purposeful function of icons and images argued over the second commandment’s meaning, but even prior to this, the use of pictures and other iconic objects had clearly been of concern to church authorities.

Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) – the church father responsible for sending St. Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity – made one of the most impor-tant statements of the ways in which knowledge could be imparted to Christians. In a letter to Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, Gregory wrote about the use of images in teaching. This letter survives in many manuscript copies; it was widely known to religious teachers, preachers, and manuscript compilers throughout the medieval period; and it is one of the texts most cited by scholars today, who use it frequently to explain the role of art in early western culture. Two versions of the letter, one in Latin and one in French, are found in an exceptionally rich and significant manuscript

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which falls right in the middle of the period under discussion in this chapter: the twelfth-century St. Albans Psalter (Dombibliothek Hildesheim, Basilika St. Gode-hard, St. God. 1).2

At page 68 of the Psalter, in a quire added to the original book, known as the Alexis Quire because it contains a French Vie de St Alexis, the two versions of Gregory’s Letter to Serenus occur in succession, squeezed onto the lines left blank at the end of the saint’s life. The scribe overestimated how much space he required, such that five lines remain after the copying. This use of space demonstrates how important the scribe felt it would be to write the whole text in two languages, to compress the texts and ensure their full inclusion in the manuscript:

Este vus le respuns Saint Gregorie a Secundin le recluscum il demandout raison des paintures.

Altra cóse est aurier la painture e altra cose est par le historie de la painture aprendre quela cóse seit ad aurier. Kar ico que la scripture aprestet as lisanz, icó aprestet la painture as ignoranz, kar an icele veient les ignoranz quet il deivent sivre. An icele lisent icels ki letres ne sevent, ampur laquele cóse maismement la peinture est pur leceun as genz. Laquele cóse tu qui habites entra les genz deuses antendra, que tu n’angendrasses scan-dale de crueles curages dementiers que tu esbraseras nient cuintement par dreit amvidie. Geres nient ne deut aluiet estra fruissiet icó que nient ne parmaint ad aurier an eglises, mais ad anstruire sulement les penses des nient savanz, e ampur icó que l’ancienetiet nient senz raisun cumandat les hystories estra depaint es honurables lius des sainz. Se tu feisses amvidie par discrecion, senz dutance poeies salvablement purtenir les cóses que tu attendeies e nient deperdra la cuileita folc; mais maisment asemblier que le nient fraint num de pastur excellist, e nient an i oust la culpa del deperdethur.

Here is the reply of holy Gregory to Serenus the hermit who asked for a reason for pictures.

It is one thing to adore a picture and another to learn from the story of a picture what thing is be adored. For that which writing makes available to a reader, a picture shows to the unaware, for in a picture the unaware can see what they have to follow. In that, those who do not know letters are able to read and because of that a picture is like a lesson for the people. This is something that you who live among the people should have understood lest while you are heedlessly inflamed by righteous zeal you create a stumbling block through headstrong spirits. Scarcely anything should be destroyed so that nothing remains to be adored in churches, but rather for instructing the minds of the ignorant, also because the ancients, not without good reason, directed that stories should be depicted in the venerable places of the saints. If you exercised your zeal with discretion, without doubt you could obtain advantageously those things which you were intent upon and yet not scatter the collected flock; but rather you might gather them together so that the undefiled name of shepherd may flourish, and the guilt of the destroyer should have no part in that. (Geddes 2003: 68, with modifications)

In relation to this famous letter, as Richard K. Emmerson has recently pointed out, “[p]erhaps the Gregorian dictum that pictures are the books of the illiterate has helped devalue images among textual scholars” of the Middle Ages (Emmerson 2012: 13).

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Gregory seems to be saying that the “ignoranz,” those who do not know writing (usually translated or interpreted as “the ignorant,” “the illiterate”) can have access to learning only through the image, as if the image were secondary to the written text, but this dramatically oversimplifies the vexed issue of literacies in this period. Indeed, Gregory might well have meant a whole range of levels of learning, with “writing” in particular indicating Latin texts, to which few had genuine access. The dictum seems to imply that the learned can access the words, but the unlearned only have the images, and this in turn has often been taken to mean that the images directly parallel the written text: that pictures literally illustrate meaning supplied by the words they accompany. This, as all viewers of medieval art already know, is seldom the case. The relationship of word and image, though, was confirmed by Gregory’s defense, and as the medieval period progressed, these words were often used to give authority to the widespread use of artistic aids in learning and contemplation. After the eighth century, this dictum was called upon in defiance of the iconoclasm of those who wanted to see images banned completely. In the case of the lavishly illuminated twelfth-century St. Albans Psalter itself, the self-conscious inclusion of Gregory’s Letter may have been preemptive: to offset criticism of a contemporary rejection of images that emerged from the Cistercian order, in particular (Rudolph 1988). Utiliz-ing Gregory’s dictum to defend the use of images, though, was as disingenuous in the twelfth century as it had been earlier, in the sense that illustrations had always been much more significant and infinitely more complex than Gregory implied and than has subsequently been inferred by many scholars. Any picture, whether accom-panying text or standing alone, has a multitude of potential responses depending on the inclination and level of interpretative ability of the viewer. Peter Brown’s discus-sion of the multifunctionality of icons is a useful analogue here (1973: 7), and can be broadened to apply to all images, secular or religious: “If pictures can move the beholder, can record, can narrate, can bring faces and deeds to [their] memory, then they can communicate the Christian message.”

In the St. Albans Psalter, adapted for the holy woman Christina of Markyate in the 1120s or 1130s, the reasons for the inclusion of Gregory’s Letter at page 68 in both Latin and French have not been clear to scholars, other than in its use, perhaps, to try and justify the expense of the manuscript’s lavish illustrations. The Letters occur in a quire containing the French Vie de St Alexis, which was added to the manuscript a short while after the original Psalter’s completion. As well as the Vie de St Alexis and the Letter, the quire contains the story of Christ’s appearance to his apostles on the way to Emmaus from Luke 24.13–31, which, it has been suggested by numerous writers (in Fanous and Leyser 2005) relates closely to events in Christina of Markyate’s own life. Thus, for example, the Vie contains a chaste wedding night scene, like Christina’s own; and the saint leaves his family to live a life of religious devotion, as does Christina. The Letters’ inclusion might also, however, have been prompted by the closing lines of the Vie de St Alexis at pages 67–68, where the emphasis for the audience of that text is on seeing, that is, the visual. Thus, the ante- and penultimate stanzas read:

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Cum bone peine deus e si boen servise · fist cel saint homo en cesta mortel vide · quer or est s’aname de glorie replenithe · có ad ques volt nient n’est a dire · ensor tut e si veit deu medisme ·

Las malfeuz cum esmes avoglez · quer có veduns que tuit sumes desvez · de noz pechez sumes si ancumbrez · la dreite vide nus funt tresoblier · par cest saint home doussum ralumer ·

What good suffering, Oh God, and what good serviceDid that holy man undertake in this mortal life!For now is his soul filled with glory.He has what he wishes, there is nothing more to say;Above all he sees God himself.

Alas! Unfortunate mortals! How blind we are!For we must see that we have lost our senses.We are so burdened by our sins,They make us completely forget the right way to live,Through this holy man we must recover our sight.

(Geddes 2003: 67)

These stanzas, closing the narration of Alexis’s life, place significant emphasis on the sense of sight: on the actual realization of God himself and on the need to develop clear outward, physical vision (oculi carnis), together with inward sight, spiritual clarity (oculi mentis) in the face of daily Christian life. Such an insistence on ocularce-ntricity, on sight in its broadest applications, might naturally lead into a discussion of the value of images, which demand such visual resource for interpretation. On the opposite page (69) to the all-verbal page 68 is a framed image of Christ meeting Cleophas and Luke on the way to Emmaus. The entire composition of this image, with its frame-bound explanation of the scene squeezed into the top left part of the background above the heads of the three figures, accentuates the sense of sight. Three figures each look attentively – Christ and the apostle on the left, looking at the sun, their gaze and ours highlighted by Christ’s staff; and the other apostle looks earnestly at Christ. This looking is enhanced by the figures’ pointing fingers, emphasizing the direction of the gaze (Geddes 2005: 202–203, discusses the pointing fingers). Perhaps most notably, though, the verbal text itself anaphorically insists that the viewer “see”: “Ecce hi duo discipuli, Cleophas et Lucas, tertia die ambulantes apud castellum Emmaus, tristes animo et ad invicem loquentes de morte Iesu. Ecce salvator noster qui eis sequendo apparuit . . . Aspice solem quoniam advesperascit” (“See the two disciples, Cleophas and Luke, on the third day walking to the castle Emmaus, sad in spirit and talking in turns about the death of Jesus. See our saviour who appeared to them as he accompanied them . . . See the sun as the evening approaches”) (Geddes 2003: 69, with modification and expansion).

Unlike the Gospel account of this momentous event, the long caption-like text at page 69 of the St. Albans Psalter instructs the viewer-reader to “See” in an imperative

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detail that is absent from Luke 24.13. This detail insists on the participation of the viewer-reader in a self-authenticating manner: whether the onlooker of the picture can read the caption or is having it read to them, this folio is all about the recognition of the importance of physical and spiritual sight in the image and its scriptural context, for it is not until Luke 24.31 that the apostles recognize Christ as he breaks bread with them. Here, one is reminded of Christina of Markyate’s own Life, where upon receiving a vision, the hagiographer tells the audience that “neque enim phan-tastice erant visiones iste sive per sompnium. sed vero intuitu cernebantur ab ea. Illo scilicet quo spirituales frui merentur oculi” (“for these visions were neither fantastical nor seen through a dream, but were perceived by the intuition (or contemplation) that is the deserved enjoyment of the spiritual eyes”) (Talbot 1997: 170). In the St. Albans Psalter, then, what appears to be an image provided (and justified by Gregory’s dictum) to teach those who cannot read becomes much more complex and multilay-ered when thoroughly analyzed. And this is precisely the point about illustrations: often, but not always, images are closely tied to the accompanying verbal text, but they are not mere formal substitutes for the text. Again, the St. Albans Psalter, as with so many other medieval manuscripts on close inspection demonstrates the danger of oversimplifying the functions of images.

The St. Albans’ Psalter contains dozens of images, including forty full-page paint-ings. Many of the elaborate initials to the psalms – all of which are startlingly large in terms of the overall design of the page, often slightly overlapping the written text as if the more important component – contain images of little books. In and of them-selves, these do not complicate the Gregorian suggestion that images elucidate the words adjacent to the image; however, in the case of many of these, the solid, three-dimensional miniature codices remind us of a potentially completable literacy. For anyone using the St. Albans Psalter, the images are not simply there to be surface-read by the illiterate, as Gregory’s Letter reminds us, but to be consciously and literally (“by the letter”) decoded. This is because within the initials, the mini-books take on multiple functions, including, as here, a metonymic function representing the whole Psalter, and thus salvation itself.

The relationship between the user of the book and God is a fascinating intercon-nection dependent on the sense of touch and embodied perception. At page 333, Psalm 120, David is shown holding his open book, and pointing to rubricated words, “Auxilium Meum a Domino” (“My help comes from the Lord”) on the right (Geddes 2003: 333). The words on the book, however, rather than repeating the rubric of the psalm repeat its opening words: “Levavi oculos meos” (“I have lifted up my eyes”). The rest of the verse reads “I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains from where my help shall come. My help is from the lord: who made heaven and earth. May he not let your foot be moved: neither let him slumber who guards you.” The composition of the historiated, large capital L directly echoes the psalm, with the unmoving foot of Christ physically linking David, the book, the Lord, and the plea for help in a catena of libric salvation. Central to this scene is the book, self-reflexively illustrating its own authority, and directly drawing in the touching reader of the St. Albans Psalter – linking the reader-viewer as an integral component in the chain, an embodied and

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materialized participant in the salvific potential of the Book. Moreover, and conclu-sively, without being literate, the viewer of the image could not access its full inter-pretative potential; the illustration, then, is more complex than we might perhaps anticipate.

This complexity seems to be part of the culture of St. Albans, as exemplified not only by this Psalter, but by so many other manuscripts produced there and elsewhere in the medieval period, including the extraordinary illustrated works of Matthew Paris, monk of St. Albans in the thirteenth century (Lewis 1987). Moreover, a visit to St. Albans Cathedral today reminds the modern pilgrim of the richness of the visual for a medieval congregation, with wall-paintings intact in many places in the building and numerous Crucifixion scenes extant on the nave piers, painted from the twelfth century onward. These nave piers might have served as altars for individual masses, but were (and are) certainly inspiration to the Christian to pray, encouragement toward compunction, and an invitation to remember and be thankful for Christ’s redemption.

Networks of Literacy

Redemption for the Christian is sought through acknowledgment of Christ’s Passion, learned through the Gospels. One of the oldest survivals from this early period is a manuscript mentioned at the beginning of this chapter – Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 286, the Gospels of St. Augustine of Canterbury, brought to England from the Continent at some time between 597 and 690 (digitized in Parker Library on the Web (Stanford University 2013); Budny 1997: I.1–50, II.1–6; Binski and Panayotova 2005: 46–47). This small, portable volume contains the Vulgate version of the four Gospels, written in a calligraphically expert uncial script, and accompanied by two illustrated pages remaining from what would have been a greater number. Both pages demonstrate the significance of illustration in the dissemination of scripture: one page, at folio 125r, contains twelve small scenes from Christ’s Life and Passion, enclosed within a marblesque frame (Figure 25.1); the other, at folio 129v, depicts St. Luke writing his gospel, surrounded by scenes from the Life of Christ. These illustrated pages have elicited significant scholarly commentary, not least because their comic-book-style small narrative frames are rare. For the purposes of this discussion, what is particularly interesting in examining the relationship between word and image are the ways in which later users of the gospel-book clearly felt the illustrations of these two surviving pages to be inadequate for their purposes. What transpires from the afterlife of these images is a complicated and fascinating network of illustrative literacies that demonstrates how significant visual culture was throughout the medi-eval period, and how images could radically change context in the course of their transmission.

At some point, possibly in the ninth or tenth century, all of the images on folio 125r and folio 129v were equipped with captions, written in a careful and respect-ful uncial script. Budny (1997: I.36–37, 49–50) has commented on these in her

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Figure 25.1 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 286, folio 125r. Reproduced with the permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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description of the manuscript. What is interesting is that these images were deemed to require explicative verbal text such that their original function as self-sufficient illustrations was called into question. The captions might indicate, perhaps, that the images’ audience had moved from a contemplative individual use to a didactic and more public environment demanding the mediation of a literate interpreter. The verbal text added to the images generally appears to the sides of the images that sit against the external frames in folio 125r, but is written inside the picture frame where these are interior. At folio 129v, the captions sit beyond the columns of the architec-tural frame in which St. Luke sits, thoughtfully gazing toward a miniature image in which Gabriel announces to Zacharias that he will have a son (John the Baptist). The illustration, as a whole, adeptly designed to show St. Luke after writing his gospel (though the codex that he holds contains words from St. John’s Gospel (1.16), intro-ducing John the Baptist) sets the evangelist within what is depicted as an ecclesiastical context. Here, the illustrations of Christ’s Life on either side of Luke, painted between the pairs of marbled columns, clearly depict not just miniature instructional and devotional paintings particular to the manuscript page, but also early medieval eccle-siastical wall-paintings in miniature reminding viewers of the rich visual surroundings in which Christian worshippers might occasionally have found themselves (remember-ing, of course, that the manuscript originated in Italy).

The sacred and secular networks of this manuscript and its images spread far in the earlier medieval period (and indeed, since 1945, CCCC 286 is the book upon which archbishops of Canterbury say their oath at their ordination). Of most relevance here is the small upper middle panel in the full-page painting of twelve scenes from Christ’s Life at folio 125r. This panel shows Christ at the top of a semi-circular table, with five apostles to his right and three to his left, in a scene of the Last Supper. The chalice and plate of food, Christ’s hand in blessing, and the added caption “Cena Domini” (“The Lord’s Supper”) makes clear the referent in the small frame surrounding the picture. Its top central position among the twelve small frames insists on its suprem-acy in this illustrative program. A later illustrative addition is also interpolated into the background of the image itself, which Budny (1997) describes as unidentifiable. Close examination through the Parker on the Web zoom function makes the outline drawing’s identity as a bell – specifically a handbell – clear. This identification reveals another layer of interpretation, then. Its position within the original image is surely reminiscent of the sanctus bell of epiclesis: a visual symbol of the moment of Eucharistic transubstantiation that is implied by this bell. In other words, simply through the addition of this drawing, the image doubles anagogically as a reference to the Last Supper and to a contemporary Lord’s Supper: the celebration of Mass. Here, then, the image is not simply a literal depiction of a scriptural event, but a reminder of the function of the bell to call participants to communion with Christ. As with so many other religious images in manuscripts, on walls, in sculpture and other textual objects, this deduction of full meaning is neither easy nor obvious.

This same image of the Last Supper had an influence far beyond what one might imagine for its small size and function as part of a larger narrative cycle (Budny 1997:

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I.9–11). This influence takes us into a world of politics and public relations many centuries after the manuscript’s creation for it is thought that the depiction of the feast before the Battle of Hastings in the later eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry is directly indebted to this small scene in CCCC 286 (Owen-Crocker 2005: 116–117). In this embroidered panel, Odo, bishop of Bayeux, sits at the head of a round table, with companions, including William the Conqueror, on either side of him, eating and drinking as a serving man brings more victuals. This significant scene is identified by a caption in capitals “et hic episcopus cibum et potum benedicit” (“and here the bishop blesses the food and drink”); the bishop is further identified as Odo with the words “odo episcopus” which fall into the next frame of the Tapestry. Owen-Crocker (2005: 117–118), through close analysis of the geometric design of the tapestry, has been able to demonstrate the centrality of this scene in the overall scheme of the embroidery, which might have been hung in a square room, such as a castle keep. As Christina Lee (2007: 130) and other scholars have pointed out, the appro-priation of sacred imagery for secular purposes here acts to legitimize the secular. This example also demonstrates how well known particular books and their images were in the medieval period: how famous specific works of art could be within their own institutions. As far as word and image are concerned, the identifying captions are far less significant that the complex imagery suggested by the picture and its networks of dissemination.

Word and Object

Manuscripts, tapestries, and wall-paintings are obvious places where word and image interact symbiotically to create a multivalent sensual and intellectual experience. This experience is entirely subjective, even when the word is being read aloud and the image explained; and it is variably aesthetic, pleasure deriving from the individual onlooker’s own conceptual and intellectual preference. Words and images combine not only on the surfaces of books and woven media, but also in a host of objects extant from the medieval period. These objects unequivocally demonstrate the significance of the visual and verbal and in ways that demand a wide range of responses.

Set on top of a cairn visible from the A542 road, three miles east from Llangollen in eastern Wales, is a ninth-century croes, known as the Pillar of Eliseg (Figure 25.2). This monument, which might have stood at 4 meters tall and been topped by a sculpted cross, is a commemorative memorial erected by Cyngen to honor his great-grandfather, Eliseg, and his victories over the Anglo-Saxons (Edwards 2009). The inscription in Latin forms a genealogical spiral that is carved around the stone shaft forming word and image simultaneously. In his detailed archaeological work on the monument and its immediate site, Howard Williams (2011) suggests that this monu-ment’s spiraling text with Cyngen at its center, out of which historical, mythical, regional, and familial events emerge, is “transtemporal,” linking present, past, and future in a commemorative act that seeks to make permanent the memory of Powys’s

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glorious ruler and his lineage of five generations. Moreover, the text seeks the active and salvific participation of passers-by who stop to look and read: “+Concenn, son of Cattell, Cattell son of Brohcmail, Brohnmal son of Eliseg, Eliseg son of Guoillauc . . . +Whosoever shall read out loud this hand-inscribed . . . let him give a blessing [on the soul of] Eliseg . . . +Conmarch represented pictorially this writing at the demand of his king, Concenn” (“+Concenn filius Catell Catell filius Brohcmail Brohmal filius Eliseg / Eliseg filius Guoillauc . . . [+Quicu]mque recit(a)uerit manescr[i]p/[tum] [. . .]m det benedictionem supe/[r animam] Eliseg . . . +Conmarch pinxit hoc / chirografu(m) rege suo poscente / Concenn” (Edwards 2009: 172–173)). As Edwards and Williams have discussed in detail, this is a text-image-object the significance of which is greatly enhanced by its visibility to travelers, and perhaps, by its use as a meeting place and a marker. It is important, then, to read the image within its specific landscape, as well as within its sociopolitical and historical moment of production after 854 ce. Its public function and ideological agenda is substantially underscored by the form of the inscription; antiquaries’ transcriptions, emulating the original script, suggest that Conmarch’s “pictorial writing” is a form of majuscule Insular half-uncial, a high grade of writing analogous to that found in the great Celtic gospelbooks, such as the Llandeilo (St. Chad or Lichfield) Gospels and the Book of Durrow. Each major clause on the Pillar of Eliseg also begins with a cross, a pictorial invocation of the sanctity of holy writ,

Figure 25.2 Pillar of Eliseg. Reproduced with the permission of the photographer, Howard R. M. Williams.

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such that the benefits of the prayers requested for those who read aloud (thus perform-ing the text in context) are doubly efficacious. These small crosses reflect the larger original artifact upon which they were carved, too: a public cross, highly noteworthy in its natural landscape, syncretically uniting the Bronze Age barrow upon which it sits with its new Christian signification.

Such might have been part of the function of other early medieval large sculptural monuments, which productively juxtapose word and image. This is certainly the case with the tenth- or eleventh-century runestone, known as Thorwald’s Cross on the Isle of Man at Kirk Andreas. Here, the text is inscribed in runic script on the side of the cross – runes being an alphabet resonant with intrinsic meaning and with qualities of the mystical; in its Old Norse transliteration, the inscription reads !orvaldr reisti kross "e[nna] (“!orvaldr raised this cross”). Although fragmentary now, the cross com-bines Viking and Christian imagery in a richly symbolic demonstration of these two belief systems. The surviving parts of the two carved panels show fascinating scenes in thematic parallel: one side shows a figure thought to be Odin, the Old Norse god, being eaten by the mythical wolf, Fenrir (“fen-dweller”), at the final battle for the Norse gods – Ragnarok. On the other side of the cross is a Christian scene, also pre-sumably referring to the end of this world; it shows a figure (Christ?) with a book (gospel? Book of life?), a cross, and a fish, and the figure is treading on a serpent. Rather than being a marker of a route (like the Pillar of Eliseg), this cross might have functioned both as a meeting point and as memorial to its patron (!orvaldr), as well as being an obvious missionary or conversion symbol. The nature of the inscription, carved discretely on the side of the cross in runes rather than dominating the design, makes this a personal memorial. The cross is commemorative rhetoric: the words and the images are embodied in an object testifying to cultural convergence during its period of construction.

Other crosses performed the role of reconfirming Christianity, too, among many possible simultaneous public functions. One of the best-known large public crosses is the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, just north of the Scottish border. This impos-ing earlier eighth-century stone monument was originally established in the grounds of what is now the church enclosure. It is not a personal memorial, unlike those mentioned thus far. It has four highly decorated sides containing images that are predominantly Christian, with runes set into frames around the illustrated panels on the east and west sides, and, arguably earlier, Latin text describing the pictorial scenes on the north and south faces of the shaft. In its original state, it is likely to have been painted and thus visually startling in its vibrancy and in its potential to engage an audience didactically. The Ruthwell Cross is one of the most astonishing objects from the medieval period. It represents an atemporal, multilingual, and multimodal salvific schema through its words and its images. Of greatest fame, perhaps, are the runes themselves, because they inscribe upon the body of the cross the story of Christ’s crucifixion as told more expansively in the moving and visually transfixing poem, The Dream of the Rood (Schapiro 1944; Swanton 2004; Ó Carragáin 2005). The runes might have been made at the time of the monument’s manufacture, or, as has been convinc-

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ingly argued, added some time later (Conner 2008). In its present form, the whole object – text, image, materiality – combines to yield a detailed account of Christ’s victorious defeat of Satan. The largest of the deeply carved panels is a scene on the north side of the monument depicting Christ treading on two beasts, representing either Christ resurrected, or Christ acclaimed by the beasts (Psalm 90.13, “super apsidem et basilicum calcabis conculcabis leonem et draconem”; “The asp and the basilisk you will trample under foot / you will tread on the lion and the dragon”). Akin in its theology to the scene on Thorwald’s Cross, this scene, and particularly Christ’s feet, would be at eye-level for the medieval onlooker who saw the shaft in its location outside. Indeed, this is where the eye rests now for the onlooker who sits to view the cross in its re-location, “sheltered” (as the information plaque tells the present-day reader) inside the church at Ruthwell, and there is no doubt that the monument demands response from onlookers, its complex iconography and textual explication insisting on being gazed at, as the Visionary in The Dream of the Rood tells us is their response to the Cross when it appears:

Hwæ"re, Ic #ær licgende lange hwile,beheold hreowcearig Hælendes treow,o""æt Ic gehyrde #æt hit hleo"rode . . .

Nevertheless, lying there for a long while,I gazed sorrowful on the tree of the Saviour,until I heard that it spoke . . .

(Treharne 2009)

Seeing the cross as the embodiment of Christ present during church ceremonies, and reading the Ruthwell Cross in the light of the Lenten, Good Friday, and Easter season, as scholars have done, the monument takes on a multifunctional role, its images and words didactically underscoring the live performance of the liturgy and enhancing the sensual experience of the services, even as they are happening. The cross is witness and active participant in the events, just as it was at the Crucifixion, and as revealed in The Dream of the Rood. Here, too, one is reminded of the Bury St. Edmunds Cross (Cloisters Cross), which is owned by the Cloisters in New York. An altar cross, or processional cross dated from the twelfth century and carved in walrus ivory, this 23-inch object is spectacularly dramatic despite its relatively small size: its combina-tion of word and image startling in its artistic genius (Parker 2006).

A set of crosses erected to bear witness to another death testify to the desire of those left on earth to memorialize their loved ones. Known as the Eleanor Crosses, twelve large monuments were erected in the thirteenth century to commemorate the funeral journey of Eleanor of Castille, wife of Edward I, in 1290. Unlike the Ruthwell Cross, sheltered and preserved through its relocation behind the altar of the small church (and recontextualized, reconfigured as interior “text,” as church fabric), only three of the Eleanor Crosses survive in situ, and this despite the replacement of what were friable wooden crosses by durable and elaborate stone crosses. Of the three remaining

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memorials, the cross at Hardingstone (www.geograph.org.uk/photo/535329) is inter-esting since it contains four opened books in its polygonal bottom tier that contained prayer-text revealing the intention behind the cross’s erection and its function as com-memorating the temporary respite of the queen’s corpse. Marking the journey of the funeral cortege seems a way of ensuring the permanence of the dead in the mental structures of the living: reminding passers-by to pray for the loss of the queen, keeping her memory alive through words, images of royalty, sculpted representations of Eleanor, her heraldic arms, rosettes, and other symbols. The crosses would have been painted and, given their monumentality and situation in the middle of the villages and towns through which the funeral procession made its way, would have brought into the midst of late thirteenth-century secular life the visual, ideological, and textual signification of church and state.

Image as Adornment and Adoration

Not all image and verbal text in medieval culture – whether in books, as wall-paintings, on objects, in private, in public, monumental, or miniature – were religious words and representations, but given the role of the church in medieval society and its control of literacy for centuries, it is hardly surprising that religious iconography and texts dominate. Many other kinds of books and contexts of textual production contained impressive and profound combinations of the verbal and the visual. As with all the examples above, the relationship between these elements is complex and often entirely subjective – dependent on the abilities and acuity of the viewer-reader. In a manuscript such as Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales 20143A, the mid-fourteenth-century Welsh Cynferth version of the Laws of Hywel Dda (a tenth-century Welsh king), illustrations in the lower margins of the manuscript perform a variety of roles. At folio 71r, a bearded man with a spear pointing at the end of the text has the word “rwneu” encapsulated within a decorated pennant. This verbal reference follows the detailed discussion of the division of goods between a man and his wife who are separating: the whole phrase from the bottom of the right-hand column on folio 71r, “a holl lestri y llynn ar ke . . . ,” is finished off with the “rwyneu” within the pennant (“kerwyneu” meanings “tubs”). This means “and all the drinking vessels and all the tubs” – those possessions a woman can take away from the broken mar-riage.3 The image at the foot of the folio thus acts simultaneously as a visual cue – an information retrieval tool on the page to help readers find their way around the text – and as a run-over, indicating the page end and suggesting textual continuity overleaf. What seems clear is that the image does not simply have a decorative purpose; rather, its function is integral to full textual understanding. Other red, green, and black drawings adorn this pocketbook manuscript – from dragons to a double-headed wyvern, a peacock, and a crucifixion scene with Mary and John in reverse position from the usual image of the Deesis. It is not clear how most of these images relate to the text at all, but while it may seem that they are simply decorative, it is more likely

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that they are intended as pauses in the manuscript, possibly contemplative images, intended to prompt the reader to rest, meditate, and puzzle. What is clear, however, is that these pen-drawn images are (literally) marginal and not designed to be aestheti-cally sophisticated. This might go some way to explaining why so little work has been done on them. Rick Emmerson (2012: 19) points out the mistakes literary his-torians tend to make when studying visual translation: “The first [mistake], the ‘aesthetic,’ assumes that images must be aesthetically pleasing or as sophisticated as the texts they illustrate.” What this does is create a negative value judgment that tends to affect the entire critical response to the textual object, even while images can have all kinds of value attached to them – not simply the aesthetic. In the case of NLW 20143A, pausing to reflect might simply be one; continuity of an erstwhile tradition of illustration in legal manuscripts for significant patrons might be another, as seems to be the case with NLW Peniarth 28, the early thirteenth-century Latin manuscript of Hywel Dda’s Laws, which contains similarly “rustic” pen-drawings. These, though, are clearly linked to the writing on the respective folio, illustrating a king and his officials, including a falconer and a judge; then images of plants, birds, animals, and objects, illustrating the word-text. At folio 26r, for example, an image of leaping greyhound introduces the laws “De canibus” (www.llgc.org.uk/index .php?id=lawsofhyweldda). In this case, the images are certainly information retrieval tools, as well as explicatory texts in themselves.

Patrons requiring adornment in their manuscripts, or honorands whose status befit-ted grandeur in production, might occasionally explain, too, the de luxe nature of books that were so varied in form and function. Such books would include the eighth-century Lindisfarne Gospels, made perhaps in honor of St. Cuthbert, with exceptional carpet pages and opening folios illustrating ornate and highly decorative script, which function to impress and to startle, to demand contemplation and meditation, sensual appreciation and admiration, and are not principally designed for legibility (British Library 2013a; see Brown 2003). Some of the most de luxe manuscripts from the medieval period are, indeed, renowned particularly for their images, as well as the words. Among these would be the early fifteenth-century Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which contains very well-known imaginings of the pil-grims in the margins, paintings that serve as markers or guides to the content of the Tales (Emmerson 1995). It is likely that an expensive and high-quality production like this was made for a patron, who could be any wealthy commissioner of the work of art – a lay person or an institution. In terms of the laity, noblemen like Sir Geoffrey Luttrell desired books not just for their spiritual and educative content, but also as markers of their wealth and literacy. In the earlier fourteenth century, Luttrell com-missioned an exceptionally lively and richly ornamented Psalter, now the famous eponymous Luttrell Psalter – London, British Library, Add 42130 (British Library 2013b). Here, grotesques and carnivalesque figures leap around the margins of the psalms, juxtaposed with depictions of the saints, in a panorama of God’s varied and dynamic creation. And despite the puzzling invasion of the monstrous and mundane into the frames of this manuscript, in a more existential sense, the scribes and artists

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in this period could be seen as working for God, especially when they were producing religious works. We seldom know the precise details of these scribes, artists, and their audiences, but we are fortunate to have so much surviving work to investigate and to interpret, even if that interpretation (as in the case of the St. Albans Psalter, or the Ruthwell Cross) is immensely complex and never a straightforward case of reading the word-text and easily assimilating the accompanying or nearby illustration. The impact and mnemonic potential of the visual whole is key, though (now, as much as in earlier centuries). There is no doubt that word and image were adored and long remembered, as testified to by a notable event in the late eleventh-century Life of St Wulfstan of Worcester:

[Wulfstan] had at that time a teacher called Earnwig, an expert in writing and colour-ing. He had picked out in gold the capital letters in two manuscripts, a sacramentary and a psalter, and these books he entrusted to the boy Wulfstan. He was captivated by the wonder of the precious letters, and he pored attentively over their beauty while drinking deep the content of the words. But his teacher looked to worldly advantage, and in hope of a greater reward presented the sacramentary to Cnut, who was king at the time, and the psalter to Queen Emma. The boy’s mind was shattered by the loss, and he sighed many a deep sigh. Grief brought on sleep; and lo, while he slept, a man of angelic countenance stood over him and drove away his sadness, promising restitution of the books. That was fulfilled, though much later, as we shall see. (Winterbottom and Thompson 2002: 17)

Unlike Earnwig, seeking promotion through his gift-giving, Wulfstan only wished for spiritual advantage and for the real reward of salvation in his appreciation of the surface beauty and profound meaning of the illuminated books; his earnest love of both the aesthetic and the intellectual is evident in his response to the texts’ contents, and his attention to the precious letters is profound and heartfelt. Perhaps most sig-nificantly, his attention is “captivated,” enthralled by the wonder (“miraculo”) of the lettering, suggesting his remaining rooted, transfixed by the awe such word and image inspired in him. Similarly, the illustrations in the St. Augustine’s Gospels, the Luttrell Psalter, and even the Welsh lawbooks discussed above support the potential of image+word, holistically viewed, to inspire and insist on the contemplation of the juxtaposed significance of letters and picture. How much more complex, then, is the addition into this whole of landscape and physical context? Such is the interpretative multivalency of the large monuments and monumental paintings that survive, from Bede’s ekphrastic depictions of Benedict Biscop’s panels to the collective memory encapsulated in the communal standing crosses, raised throughout the Middle Ages. For Wulfstan and his appreciation of the sacramentary and Psalter, his reward was divine grace evinced in the miraculous return of his books to him many years later. For other textual interpreters of many thousands of Medieval cultural artifacts, the meaning of word+image is as complex, dense, and multilayered now as it was when the items were made, absolutely belying the apparent transparency of pictures and their ostensibly simple role in clarifying word.

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Notes

1 www.ashmolean.org/ash/objectofmonth/ 2005-04/theobject.htm (accessed April 9, 2012).

2 For the full digital edition of the Psalter, see www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml (accessed April 6, 2012).

3 www.llgc.org.uk/drychdigidol/hyw/HYW00001/148/tudalen.html?lng=en

(accessed April 9, 2012). My thanks to Helen Fulton for assistance in translating this section.

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