medieval performance, but overt speculation is better than unexamined assumption.
The influence of print and its dominant mode, silent reading, may encourage us to think that questions of performance can be ignored and that it is possible to avoid the dirty work of speculative reconstruction and approach a medieval text in a neutral fashion without prejudging the way in which it was performed. The editorial history of the Song of Roland provides a particularly forceful example of why this is not so, showing how much is at stake in classifying this poem as a song. Here Chartier’s formulation, with one slight modification, once again makes the point: no medieval text existed in its day outside the material support that enabled it to be read or heard. A medieval text might have existed as a monk’s slow mumbling, as an ongoing courtly flirtation, as a regular daily ritual in a monastery or great household, or as a few snatches from a familiar story sung on street corners—but it never simply existed. Just as an eighteenth-century poem existed in some specific edition, so a medieval poem existed in some specific performance, and this performance was no less fundamental in determining what the text was.
The Edge of the Book
“The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.”62 So Jacques Derrida argues in the opening pages of his famous De la grammatologie. While his use of the terms “book” and “writing” continues to perplex, he suggests the extent to which our familiar habits of thought, founded upon long-standing traditions of written authority, predetermine our understanding. The “idea of the book” provides an all-encompassing frame of reference, and efforts to think outside it will inevitably falter. Whatever form of proliferating meaning Derrida evokes by the word “writing” will be difficult for us to grasp since it falls outside our familiar habits of mind. It will be as difficult for us to assess this frame of reference critically as it is for us to see air or for fish to see water. Nor is it clear to what extent this “idea of the book” to which Derrida alludes is grounded in the use of actual physical books at all. Is this sense of totality, the “idea of the book” as an idea of intellectual closure, linked to the salient visual totality of neatly laid-out pages bound between two covers, the books that let us always feel with our right hand where the end is as we read them? Is the idea of the book based on the use of the codex? No immediate answer is available. Historians have identified the development of literacy, the shift from roll to codex, the development of print, and the development of mechanical print as possible sources for profound epistemological shifts, and often described these shifts in remarkably similar terms, but they have been reluctant to compare accounts.63 But even if the idea of the book did not originate with the codex, it clearly drew reinforcement from it.
For medieval Christianity, the book was the fundamental symbol of a universe that was ordered, filled with meaning, and enclosed within fixed limits. The metaphor of the book was ubiquitous, and increasingly, as the codex became the dominant form of textual preservation, the book was visualized specifically as a bound volume rather than as a roll or set of tablets.64 While the mechanical advantages of the codex (chief among them that it could use lower quality parchment and permitted easier consultation of specific passages) must have played a significant role in its increased use, it was its association with Christianity that made it respectable. As Yvonne Johannot puts it, “it is the victory of Christianity in the Empire … that will assure the definitive victory of the codex over the roll.”65 Parchment itself, in which the divine word was inscribed into flesh, became a symbol of the Incarnation. The symbolic authority of Scripture was such that it became almost synonymous with its contents. For medieval Christianity, “The text is Christ as much as it is about Christ.”66 There was a fundamental association of creation, which God speaks into existence, and the Bible, the record of God’s word and “map of divine reality.”67 One thirteenth-century commentator classified the Bible and creation as two books “in which we can read and understand and learn more about God,” suggesting how completely the book had become the model for a knowable universe.68 The book was not just a symbol of the world but a way of understanding it, a mode of thought, or what Jesse Gellerich calls a “structuring principle” in Western mentality.69
This vision of the book as a complete system of knowledge bears a close (and, so far, largely unexamined) relation to the vision of print as a complete system of knowledge. Both visions are based on the premise of the stability and universality of the text, although in the first case this text refers to the single sacred text of the Bible and in the second to the innumerable but effectively identical copies of a printed edition. Both reflect an underlying order that is equally bookish. Thus Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio medici of 1673, echoes the medieval topos of the two books of God, calling creation “that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all.”70 The use of this image by a seventeenth-century author might be taken as a symbolic moment of conjuncture when the order of the medieval book is subsumed into the order of print. Print reinforces the idea already well established in the Middle Ages that book knowledge is the only true knowledge, consigning alternate systems of understanding to a lower realm as “lore” or “folk wisdom” or “experience.” In doing so, it marginalizes a vast range of human activity, past and present, most obviously popular oral and electronic culture, but also song, ritual, dance, gesture, and visual design.
Ironically, then, it is the powerful legacy of the medieval book as an idea or structuring principle that has made the fluidity and acoustic and visual multiplicity of specific medieval books so difficult for us to recognize. We have read medieval texts as if they belonged to the world of print, divorcing the works from their codicological context and thus from the music and conversation that once surrounded them, from their institutional situation, and from the lives they helped shape. In this way we have transformed these works into the isolated verbal icons of late print culture. The world of print is now deeply challenged, however, and the confident assumptions with which we once approached a text, dispensing with any consideration of its material support, are now becoming untenable and thus apparent.71 Electronic texts are recapturing something of the openness that characterized medieval manuscripts. As early as 1989, Bernard Cerquiglini suggested that we might find in the multidimensional and dialogic computer screen a counterpart to the fluidity of medieval writing, and in the last few years a spate of electronic editions has begun to fulfill this prophecy.72 And even the category “writing” may be too restrictive, overdetermined by the conventions that identify knowledge with that which can be captured in alphabetic graphisms. Digitalization is now expanding the range of writings, reducing pictures, sounds, and printed words to a common mathematical denominator. Music, which was harmony but never knowledge, is now information; its substance in the new electronic order is the same as that of typography. This may invite us to reconsider the extent to which we have consigned the musical dimension of early texts to oblivion not as unknowable (although indeed it is difficult to know much) but as insignificant. And in a world of intimidating new literacies, our dependence on “liveware,” the friends who get us up and running, may help us understand the supporting role of earlier textual communities in making a book readable. This social transformation may make it both possible and useful to understand something of the textual materialities that came before us. Perhaps the end of the “Book” has made books visible.
Have we truly come to the end of the book? It has often been suggested. From the 1960s on, there have been recurring laments that book culture is giving way to electronic noise. “If we pose the question of the viability of the book,” wrote George Steiner in 1972, “it is because we find ourselves in a social, psychological, technical situation which gives this question substance.”73 Others have greeted the new tomorrow with rapture. According to Brian Boigon, “People are watching more television than reading books, yet a bunch of academics missed those important ABCs on entertainment that Ed Sullivan used to give away every Sunday night. Let’s face it, Disney and Nintendo have taken most of the attraction away from the educational system in North America.”74 Most of us hover somewhere between. Derrida’s frustratingly elusive account in the opening chapter of Grammatology captures the ambivalence of our situation.
