Marianna Stell

The famous formula for a feudal society includes three orders: those who pray, those who work, and those who fight. The first recorded use of this idea is thought to have been a late ninth-century translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and it is still popular a millennium later. A more nuanced understanding of life in medieval Europe, however, becomes available with the introduction of another category: women.

“O God,” Hamlet complains to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act 2 Scene II, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” The intersection between the infinite and the infinitesimal was an idea that captured the imagination not only of Shakespeare’s troubled prince but of the medieval world in which the bard set his play. Impossibly small, cleverly constructed objects made of precious materials were appreciated for their apparent craftsmanship and their inherent miraculous quality. The Edith Book of Hours in the Rosenwald Collection is one such object.

“Angels can fly,” G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “because they can take themselves lightly.” If this twentieth-century author and lay-theologian is correct, then it is no wonder that the winged figure in Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1514 copper engraving Melencolia I appears grounded. Dürer’s subject has undertaken a daunting task. The celestial figure sits holding a pair of geometrical dividers in one hand while she rests her chin dejectedly in the other. Abandoned instruments for wood carving are strewn haphazardly in the foreground of the engraving, and the subject gazes toward the horizon with a stony expression. Clearly, this downcast figure is an artist, and what artist takes themselves lightly? Likely not the printmaker, painter, and art theorist, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) for whom this melancholy, celestial being is said to have been a spiritual self-portrait.

Have you ever listened to a fictional story being read aloud and envisioned the characters moving around in your mind’s eye, as though within your own, interior theater? If you have, then you have experienced what medieval intellectual culture considered to be a form of memory. This kind of creative mental visualization—what those of us in the 21st century might call ‘using our imagination’—was once thought to be a kind of memory.

Many of us have a distinctive doodle. We can recognize our former school notebooks from the familiar designs that repeat in various combinations on the corners of pages. Some of these drawn figures may still inadvertently appear on a memo pad when we find ourselves on a lengthy telephone call. The connotation of the word “doodle” implies that the penwork lacks intentionality, and therefore fifteenth-century scribes in the Northern Netherlands cannot be said to have “doodled” in the borders of their manuscripts. Nevertheless, the effect of their labors on paper and parchment is remarkably similar to some of our finer memo pad masterpieces.

“Just use some common sense” is not a phrase that Gregor Reisch (1467-1525) would have leveled against any of his students when the first edition of his textbook, Margarita Philosophica, was printed in 1503. By all accounts, sixteenth-century students were just as rambunctious as contemporary adolescents, so it is not that the Carthusian Prior of Freiburg may have been without occasion. However, in 1503, “common sense” did not refer to a person’s ability to reason. Dogs, sheep, and other animals had “common sense” or, in Latin, a sensus communis. This particular faculty of the mind was thought to be the single internal entry point for all external sensations: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

This Story Map provides a visual journey through the Giant Bible of Mainz, a lavish yet unfinished Middle-Rhenish manuscript written at the same time as Johannes Gutenberg was printing his famous bible.

Library of Congress Magazine, p. 3.

Then, as now, dealers had a clear financial
motivation to break a manuscript: They
make a lot more money by selling individual
leaves to different buyers than by selling
an entire manuscript to a single buyer.
Today, circumspect curators and ethical
book dealers rely on well-documented
provenance records to prove that the
purchase of an item does not support the
dismembering of cultural artifacts.

Library of Congress Magazine, p. 10-11.

Like contemporary digital interfaces,
medieval manuscripts anticipate an
engaged user. Imagine that you are
viewing a well-designed webpage from
behind the glass of a museum case. The
glass would prevent you from interacting
with the page as the designer intended.
You would be an observer, not a user.