The Book of Signs: Writing and visual difference in Gothic manuscript illumination

Abstract

I. THE BOOK OPENED The dynamic experience of the medieval book as its layers of skin unfold ‘flesh side’ to ‘hair side’, recto to verso - each opening a verbal and visual revelation ordered for the viewer's gaze - is nowhere more evident than in manuscripts of the Book of Revelation itself, written ‘o show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass’ (Rev. I. I.). As we move through the great mid thirteenth-century English Apocalypse in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, 1 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. I6. 2. Facsimiles available in M. R. James, The Trinity College Apocalypse (London: Roxburghe Club, I909), and in The Trinity College Apocalypse, introduction by P. Brieger, transcription and translation by M. Dulong, (London: Evgrammia Press, I967). our eyes are attuned to the integration of text and picture to such an extent that when we come to the beginning of Chapter 10 on fol. 10v, where the picture appears at the bottom of the page, there is no need to look up at the text and gloss opposite. The two-tiered narrative presents a subtle visual equivalent of the written narrative in all its thrust (figure I). Thus we read it in the same left to right direction as the words around it, starting with St John, whose self-referentiality opens the chapter ‘nd I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven clothed with a cloud’ The next verse of the written narrative is contained in the visual unit formed by two figures to the right of the top band of the visual narrative: ‘nd he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea and his left foot upon the earth’ Even the adjective's separateness seems visually conveyed in the isolated ‘book-open’, held out to St John on the right. Likewise responding to the flow of the following text is the visualization of the next phrase ‘nd when the seven thunders uttered their voices’ by seven human heads spitting fire. St John is shown again below them, his head tilted as if attentive to the next stage in his visionary experience, which is at once visual, aural and ultimately, scriptural. It has to become writing: ‘And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, “Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered and write them not” ’(v.4). The ‘voices’ is represented like a cartoon-bubble entering the ears of John below. There is a different, medieval emphasis in its Norman-French translation: ‘Ne escrivez pas les signes ke les set toneires unt parle’ [Do not write the signs that the seven thunders have spoken]. The multiple levels of communication here- writing, hearing, seeing, speaking - are an important aspect of the Book of Revelation, which is constructed through a complex of aural, verbal and visual sensations: ‘and I, John, saw these things and heard them’ (22.8); ‘and I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvellous’ (15.1).

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