Beyond Words

BY Anne D. Hedeman

4 MIN READ

A passage in Chretien de Troyes’s romance, Yvain; or, The Knight of the Lion describes how the knight Yvain, after entering a castle and passing through to its garden, saw “a rich man...at his ease on a silk cloth beneath the trees.

Before him was a maid who read a long romance....A lady, too, came in the orchard and she lay upon the cloth to listen. They were the maid’s parents.” 1 This familial scene of reading and listening introduces a common practice in high and late medieval secular life, in which such genres as romance, Roman or contemporary history, and moral philosophy, among others, were read aloud and discussed as often as they were looked at or read silently.

The practice of educational reading involved the activity of skilled readers who could embellish and comment on texts as they read them aloud to groups gathered for edification. 3 This method was used outside the classroom for scholars like King Charles V, who before supper in winter listened to “fair histories, holy scripture or the Faits des Romains or the Moralites des philosophes” 4 Reading aloud could even quell political unrest, as when Duke Louis of Bourbon, in the days following the assassination in 1407 of his nephew, the king’s brother, repeatedly invited courtiers to dinners at which he enforced silence and had the deeds “of the most famous princes, the former kings of France, and of other men worthy of honor” read aloud in order to calm tempers.

When owners opened books from their libraries, they often found illuminations that guided interpretation of texts or stimulated their imagination. For instance, the Chronique anonyme universelle (cat. no. 178), which describes its history as a “genealogy of the Bible” and quotes the beginning of the book of Genesis, reinforces this message by opening its visual cycle with a set of Creation scenes of a sort traditionally found in French bibles. 6 This biblical frame lent added authority to the histories of the popes, French and English kings, and Holy Roman emperors contained in the Chronique. Similarly, the author Christine de Pizan, in introducing her Livre de trois Vertus (cat. no. 182), had the Master of the Cite des Dames adapt a composition customarily employed to represent academic lectures. In this image Prudence addresses women of all ranks about how to function in the world. The distinct styles of dress worn by the women reflect and exemplify the listeners’—and readers’—diverse social origins. French translations of Livy’s Ah urbe condita (cat. nos. 188-89) use illuminations staged in fifteenth-century dress to encapsulate events from the text, thereby accomplishing a visual translation that enhanced and shaped late medieval readers’ understanding of antiquity.

Because artists such as the Dunois Master illustrated different genres—in this instance, a Lancelot romance (cat. no. 186) and a Livy (cat. no. 188)—their application of common models created crossover effects, such as the association of Roman and medieval military leaders with romance heroes. Like the repetition of visual models, the joining of texts in a single manuscript encouraged cultural elision. For instance, the juxtaposition of the anonymous La forme qu’on tenoit aux Tournois and Duke Rene dAnjou’s Le livre des tournois in a manuscript (cat. no. 185) made during Rene’s lifetime juxtaposed a description of how tournaments were set up in the time of King Arthur with Rene’s very similar explanation of how fifteenth-century tournaments should be run. Such chivalric recastings of the present in the guise of the past (in this example, presenting Rene as a new Arthur) were widely popular in the fifteenth century.

Whether dealing with power and politics, courtly pastimes, or received philosophical and historical knowledge, these books were read aloud, discussed, dipped into and remembered, and their illustration played an important role in facilitating their reception.

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