Reader's Notes
When is a book “finished”?
The lives of books do not “end” once the scribe has put their final finishing touches with a flare of the inked quill pen, nor when its parchment or paper pages are carefully sewn together into gathered groupings called quires; not even when all of its sections are tied together into a final collection and bound into a single volume that sits upon a shelf, waiting eagerly to be read. Even then, a book is not complete, as there is always space for more to be added — the blank margins, or the gaps between letters and lines, or the spare empty page at the start and end of the book. These gaps leave room for another voice: the reader.
Medieval marginalia, more than anything, show us how the everyday reader, often anonymous and obscure, understood and connected with the ideas that they read about. They might correct the text, argue with it, agree or add their own ideas. Marginalia also sometimes reveal the long lives that medieval books lived across not merely the handful of years immediately after their creation, but in the centuries after as later readers made notes long after the book’s original creation; while our books today may stay on a shelf for a decade or two before making their way to a dumpster or trash bin, the medieval manuscripts that survive managed to make their way from shelf to shelf for generations, and sometimes did so in adventurous ways, crossing Oceans and even escaping warfare in order to make it to Lawrence, Kansas for a peaceful existence here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.
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Bible, Book of the Gospels. Incomplete Fragment. Italy, 1201-1300 CE.
This fragment was once part of a larger bound manuscript, part of what was unquestionably the most abundant text of the European Middle Ages: the Bible. The small text is minuscule in more ways than one: it’s tiny, yes, but also written in a particular style of handwriting script known as “Gothic minuscule,” noted for its cramped writing style and compressed text that used abbreviations to save space while giving a visual uniformity and evenness to the words. The original manuscript was likely a thing of great beauty and expense. Despite the tiny size of the words on the page, an artist has illuminated the opening letter of the beginning of the Book of Matthew using colored pigments and real gold: Lib[er] gen[er]ationis Ih[e]su [Christ]i filii D[avi]d filii Abraham (“The Book of the begetting of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham). The ornate L is outlined in now-flaking gold, carefully applied in thin, gold leaf attached to the page with a base of egg whites as glue.
While made as a luxury manuscript, at some point it must have seen more practical use by an owner: someone has listed at the bottom of the page a note of “V[er]sus ad retine[n]du[m] i[n] memoria capitula,” — “Verse to retain chapters in memory,” together with a list of mnemonic devices for how to remember the chapters of the Book of Matthew and their subjects, in the correct order. For example, Book 2 is listed as “adoratus — a magis,” summarizing the second book of Matthew as, “Adored — by the Magi.” Such mnemonic devices would help the reader remember the order of chapters and their basic contents without having to go back to the Bible to double-check the order. An elevated, elegant manuscript doubled as a memorization guide.
Bible, Book of the Gospels. Incomplete Fragment. Italy, 1201-1300 CE. Call number: MS C105.
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Osbern of Gloucester’s Panormia, France, 13th and 15th Century.
Osbern of Gloucester wrote his Panormia in the late twelfth century, compiling together a list of words and their meanings. His work was one of the first great Latin dictionaries that sought to define words with a precise meaning together with all known words that derive or relate to them. The text aimed to include every known Latin word, hence the pan prefix in its title, which refers to “everything” in Greek.
This particular leaf is an excerpt of a copy of Panormia translated into Provençal, or Old Occitan, the language spoken in Southern France that dominated literature and poetry in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The leaf dates to the thirteenth century, when Provençal poetry was at its height. Such poetry broke from Latin tradition, which derided non-Latin languages as poetically and intellectually inferior. The leaf includes words such as “Coloro” (color), “Clareo” (lighten, lightness), “Cibo” (food), and “Capro” (goat), together with related words in both Latin and Provençal.
However, a later reader has added further notes and translation, indicating they their mastery of both languages some 200 years after it was first written, long after the decline of Provençal poetry. They’ve defined words and added more connections, enhancing a text that purported to be completely comprehensive, as with their note to the word “clareo” (to shine brightly, connected to our own “clear”) in the second paragraph in the third column.
The core text connects “clareo” to “clara” (meaning “clear” or “bright” as well as “famous”), “claritas” (clarity, clearness, or fame), and more. To this paragraph, the later reader has added a further note, that “clarum face et glorior/aris, et conglorior/aris et inglorious/aris et sive gloria et sive laude et gracie…”, connecting the fame of “clara” to the “glory” on glorior and its associated meanings. While Provençal poetry had declined somewhat from its peak of popularity by this point, its influence still clearly lingered in the interest of this particular reader, who may have used the Panormia to supplement their own compositions in poetry or literature.
Leaf of Osbern of Gloucester’s Panormia, section of “C’s,” Dictionary. France, ca. 1200-1300 CE, with 15th-century glosses and annotations. Call Number: MS 9/2:15.
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Lactantius’ Divinae Institutiones [The Divine Institutes]. Italy, 15th Century.
Lactantius originally wrote The Divine Institutes in the 4th century as a defense of Christianity and an argument against paganism in an era of antiquity when Christianity did not yet dominate the religious landscape of Europe. His work was a systematic effort to unravel belief in Roman polytheism.
By the time this manuscript was copied in the fifteenth century, polytheistic religions had effectively died out in Europe. Still, a growing interest in classical Roman literature and poetry brought bolstered attention to Roman religion. This codex contains multiple reader responses, giving life to a text read over generations. At some points, one reader has added further citations, noting quotations from Greek philosophers Aristotle (“Aristotelles” on the right-hand page), Epicurus, and Zeno.
However, another reader’s annotations are more combative, revealing a dialogue between reader and text that wasn’t simply a matter of the reader enhancing or adding to the text. They’ve crossed out multiple sections with long slashes, marking the text as wrong without removing its readability for future owners. One such cut sentence on the right-hand page states, “Quod querenda ibi est sapiam, ubi gentibus est stultitie [titulus et quar…] pictagoras plato litterarum persecutores non accesserint ad Judeos.” The reader has added the forceful note, falsu[m], or “false,” roundly denying Lactantius’ argument that classical philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato failed to convert to monotheism by divine providence.
Active arguments in the margins reveal the way readers did more than passively consume texts and famous authors – they debated and disagreed, but their voices are so often shunted to the margins rather than granted center stage.
Lactantius’ Divinae Institutiones [The Divine Institutes]. Italy, ca. 1400-1500 CE. Call Number: MS C61.
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Enerratio in Prophetam Isaiam, by Basilius Caesariensis, and Dioptra, by Philippos Monotropos. Greek, Late 14th Century.
Many marginalia can tell the life’s journey of a manuscript across time and space, giving hints to the hands that held it, read it, and added a piece of their identities to the pages. This Greek manuscript was copied in the late fourteenth century. It contains texts of Philippos Monotropos’ Dioptra, a series of dialogues on the body and soul written in verse initially written in the twelfth century, which is sometimes called the revival of fictionality in the West, and the text of St. Basil’s Enneratio in Prophetam Isaiam, or “Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah,” interpretations of the prophecies as allegories and moral lessons.
The life of this manuscript, now little more than a pile of leaves that were once a bound book, has been an adventurous one. It was born in the Byzantine Empire in the fourteenth century and, at some point, made its way out of Greece and into Jerusalem, where it was then purchased on behalf of Kenneth Spencer Research Library. When or how we cannot say for certain, but we can get a hint of its history in the marginal scribbles of a previous owner. While the texts are Christian in content, the manuscript must have passed into Arabic, likely Muslim, hands at one point, as an owner has written, “In the name of God/Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate. His blessing and protection [be upon him]. And his goodness, upon the dear father,” together with a roughly copied “Παου,” one of the opening words of the first paragraph on the following page, perhaps to mark for the reader where to start.
Though these marginalia reveal that the manuscript was owned by a Muslim, it eventually made its way back into Christian hands, as it was eventually discovered in the shop of a Cappadocian merchant in Christian Quarter of Jerusalem in 1961 by Ihor Ševčenko, professor of Byzantine History at Harvard University. Ševčenko hypothesized that it had made its way out of Greece and into Jerusalem, possibly by way of Turkey which had engaged in a forcible expulsion of Greek Orthodox Christians within its borders across the 1920s after the end of the Greco-Turkish War. By this point, it was little more than a pile of pages, nibbled away by rats and vermin according to Ševčenko, who arranged for its purchase on behalf of Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Today, the remainder of the pages are seeing conservation attention to bring the book back into a readable state. But the marginalia will remain a reminder of the different hands that can hold a book, across time, space, and cultures.
Leaves from MS D71, Enerratio in Prophetam Isaiam, by Basilius Caesariensis, and Dioptra, by Philippos Monotropos. Greek, 1350-1400 CE. Call Number: MS D71.