invoke “glossing” as a theoretical model but have had relatively few opportunities to observe the practice up close and in the flesh of the medieval page.87 We need a better sense of how glossing worked, not just as an intellectual tradition but as a material practice, and of what we might call the time of the manuscript, that is, the rhythms of its commentary. It would require a better knowledge of medieval philosophy and twelfth-century paleography than mine, however, to offer a proper account. The glosses do not yield easily to the casual passerby. The modern scholars who have transcribed them, Tullio Gregory, Edouard Jeauneau, and Paul Dutton, are steeped in Chartrian commentary. What I hope to offer is a point of interdisciplinary contact to the labor of scholars who have made the Digby glosses the subject of years of careful study.
Unlike the Roland, which attracted only a few brief jottings, many of them no more than pen tests, Digby 23(1) was glossed carefully and extensively, especially during the first two or three generations of its copying. At least four principal hands contribute numerous glosses, both interlinear and marginal, many of them of considerable length. Some of the glosses are early, and one of them has been identified by Dutton as the work of the main scribe.88 Others, on both paleographical grounds and because of their more elaborate content, would seem to date from later in the twelfth century or even from early in the thirteenth century, and there are other glosses that are later still. The glosses range in complexity. Many are brief and relatively straightforward, but others take advantage of the space in the margins and explore at considerable length crucial interpretive issues of the period, such as Plato’s use of myth. The early marginal glosses are written as well-spaced text blocks and are what we would now call left and right justified, with regular margins on both sides. The later ones are longer and more cramped and zigzag in and out as they follow the edge of the text. The growth of commentary is straining the limits of the page, but the overall appearance of the pages is still quite elegant. These are not just hasty notes. It would seem, at first glance, that Digby 23(1) was not just a scholar’s book but a master’s book, or at the very least the book of a student who aspired to be master, and that it was passed from one serious commentator to another, who might have used it for the duration of his teaching career.89
In reconciling the elaborate cosmology and mythology of the Timaeus, “the most important philosophical text of the early twelfth century,” with Christianity the glossators confronted a formidable intellectual task.90 The central points of the text, as understood in the twelfth century, are well summarized by M. D. Chenu:
The world was order and beauty; in all its multiplicity and for all successive generations, it constituted a whole.… The world was necessarily patterned upon a model, a changeless and eternal exemplar, a self-subsistent Living Being, comprehending in itself the natures of all things.… The world’s construction (its creation, as Christian commentators called it) was the work of an Artisan, Efficient Cause, or Demiurge, who acted out of self-diffusing goodness.… The world had a soul, the ordered principle of its movements and cause of life. Underlying the organization of the world was matter (itself also created, said Christian commentators). Man, center of this universe, reflected in himself all its elements and was a “microcosm” in order that he might dominate it all by his intelligence Finally the Timaeus furnished twelfth-century authors with assorted elements of physics—the heavenly spheres, the elements, the concept of space—which provided competition for the Ptolemaic ideas that translators had been bringing into circulation since the beginning of the century.91
But this cosmic vision had been given the most perplexing form. As Winthrop Wetherbee notes, to “read the Timaeus as philosophy or science requires that one should come to terms with its surface of literary myth.”92 Unless one did so, it could easily seem a tissue of lies. For the twelfth century, the mythical surface of the Timaeus was an incentive to glossing perhaps second only to the erotic surface of the Song of Songs, and glossing the Timaeus would be one of the School of Chartres’s great intellectual accomplishments.93 Key terms in this reclamation were involucrum or integumentum, a wrapping or veiling that concealed a deeper meaning under a mythological narrative or literary fiction. Bernard of Chartres writes that “Plato per inuolucrum cuiusdam conuiuii tractat praedictam materiam” (Plato treats the aforementioned material through the involucrum of a certain gathering), while William of Conches refers to “Plato more suo per integumenta loquens” (Plato, in his usual manner, speaking through integumenta).94 Both Bernard and William respected Plato’s wisdom, however, despite the anxieties many of their contemporaries felt at deferring to a pagan author. As Dutton argues, “Bernard tended to remain fairly faithful to what he took to be the meaning of Plato, refusing, for instance, to Christianize the Timaeus. The Bible is virtually absent from Bernard’s sources, and he did not associate the world soul with the Holy Spirit, as even Abelard had done.”95
At the same time, glossing provided a relatively straightforward exposition of the text’s grammatical meaning, ensuring that the students could actually read the text at more elementary levels. The first great practitioner of this method was Bernard of Chartres, whose teaching style is described, probably with some nostalgia, by John of Salisbury:
Bernard of Chartres, the greatest font of literary learning in Gaul in recent times, used to teach grammar in the following way. He would point out, in reading the authors, what was simple and according to rule. On the other hand, he would explain grammatical figures, rhetorical embellishments, and sophistical quibbling, as well as the relation of given passages to other studies. He would do so, however, without trying to teach everything at one time. On the contrary, he would dispense his instruction to his hearers gradually, in a manner commensurate with their powers of assimilation.… And since memory is strengthened and the mind sharpened by practice, Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate what they were hearing. In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others he would resort to punishments, such as flogging. Each student was daily required to recite part of what he had heard on the previous day. Some would recite more, others less. Each succeeding day thus became the disciple of its predecessor. The evening exercise, known as the “declination,” was so replete with grammatical instruction that if anyone were to take part in it for an entire year, provided he were not a dullard, he would become thoroughly familiar with the [correct] method of speaking and writing.96
Bernard was obviously offering instruction to a class of various levels, whose more junior members needed basic grammatical and rhetorical instruction, line by line and word by word.97 This was glossing. As Jeauneau puts it, “While the commentary only shows the ideas in the text, the gloss, without losing sight of the ideas, also concerns itself with the letter of the text. To gloss a text is to follow the letter, sentence by sentence and even word by word, and it is also to show the chain of expressions and of ideas (continuatio litterae) in such a way that the analysis of the most minute details does not cause the reader to lose sight of the overall picture.”98 Jeaneau’s definition echoes that of Bernard’s famous pupil, William of Conches, whose commentary on the Timaeus dates from the 1140s.99 Glossing, in other words, was initially an oral practice, although masters preparing their lectures would write key glosses in the margins and students listening to them would copy key points down, so that there must have been a large number of informal or partially glossed texts in circulation. From this extensive classroom instruction, a master might compile a set of written glosses, first as “a kind of ‘work in progress’ on a particular text,” which would not circulate widely, and then as a more polished composition that would.100 This comprehensive gloss would still follow the pattern of the lectures, working through the text phrase by phrase, as does the gloss of Bernard on the Timaeus, identified by Dutton in 1984, which explores the mysteries of philosophical mythology but also comments on the text’s grammatical structure. As Dutton puts it, “the comprehensive gloss pioneered by Bernard wedded the best features of the soaring commentary with the chief virtues of the grounded gloss, providing a middle way of steady progress in the critical study of philosophical texts.”101 The glosses on the Timaeus normally circulated independently from the text so that a scholar who wished
