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Cynthia Hahn LETTER AND SPIRIT The Power of the Letter, the Enlivenment of the Word in Medieval Art In about 900 C.E. Asser, bishop of Sherbourne, wrote of an incident during the childhood of the English King Alfred: “One day, . . . showing him and his brothers a book of English poetry . . . [his mother] said: ‘I shall give this book to whichever one of you can learn it the fastest.’ Spurred on by these words, or rather by divine inspiration, and attracted by the beauty of the initial letter in the book, Alfred . . . immediately . . . learnt it.”1 Among the interesting aspects of this story, one stands out in high relief. In explaining how Alfred so quickly became passionate about mastering reading, the story credits divine inspiration and, quite remarkably, the enticement of the beauty of the first letter of the text. Apparently “letter ” and spirit are not always in opposition.2 Despite the appearance of a provocative book by literary historian Laura Kendrick, the subject of the power of letters in the Middle Ages remains little explored.3 Although the question is central to medieval studies of word and image, art historians, with the notable exceptions of Jean Claude Bonne and Emmanuelle Pirotte, have been consistently reluctant to go beyond iconographic interpretations of medieval imagery to the study of processes of the text itself.4 If they have considered the letter on the page, their concern is often limited to layout and hierarchy of script.5 These topics, although of undeniable interest, do not come near to revealing the full potential of the performance of writing and reading in the Middle Ages. This essay will tour the medieval calligraphic and book arts, moving from the most interesting of all written expressions, the Hebrew non-word, or tetragrammaton, to the earliest expressions of Christianity in the numinous writing of the nomina sacra and other abbreviated, or diagrammatic, expressions of the holy. Thereafter, we will consider similar forms of manipulated writing that were pressed into use as missionary tools to convert illiterate non-Christians in the early Middle Ages—as seen in a Gospel manuscript such as Kells that Letter and Spirit 55 56 Cynthia Hahn 56 Cynthia Hahn literally enlivens almost every line of script with animal and human forms.6 Of comparable complexity are the subtleties and beauties of Romanesque illuminated and historiated initials of the high Middle Ages. By the late medieval period, metaphorical treatments perform a meticulous correlation of the written page and Christ’s body. Laura Kendrick has admirably explored “the possibility . . . of imagining and imaging writing as presence,” and argues that “what people in earlier cultures revered was not the marks or the writing per se but rather the interpretive power of the reader, the living person capable of making meaning out of a pattern of marks in a delimited space.”7 Deriving inspiration from the work of Jacques Derrida, Kendrick follows him in finding an alternative to the “dead” letter and insists on finding the author revealed (or concealed ?) in the letter, even if she allows that the author is God.8 Although some medieval initials actually include an author portrait, I argue that Kendrick was beginning down a more productive path when she opened the question of the reader. In examining Plato’s complaints in Phaedrus about writing, she finds that he is just as concerned about writing’s lack of interaction with the reader as he is about the absence of the speaker and any attendant authority.9 Medieval scribes and artists enthusiastically transferred a burden of animation to the reader, requiring him or her to recognize a living reality in words by constructing a mental reality through reading and viewing letters. Furthermore, as Kendrick rightly emphasizes, Christian audiences are meant to “consume,” internalize, even “eat” the divine scriptural texts, taking them in through a process of acquisition that involves the senses in a meditative work of memory.10 As an art historian, I am interested in how various concrete visual means can be shown to provoke the viewer’s act of consumption. I argue that such powers and effects were both purposeful and visually signi ficant. Scribes and artists employed a series of strategies and devices to capture the reader’s attention and engage his or her imagination; these did not go unnoticed in the medieval world, and theologians specifically commented upon them. Art practice, however, comes first and commentary follows. The specific artistic strategies (not all of which I...

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