Words in the Middle Ages/Les Mots au Moyen Âge ed. by Victoria Turner and Vincent Debiais

Abstract

Reviewed by: Words in the Middle Ages/Les Mots au Moyen Âge ed. by Victoria Turner and Vincent Debiais Véronique Duché Turner, Victoria, and Vincent Debiais, eds, Words in the Middle Ages/Les Mots au Moyen Âge (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 46), Turnhout, Brepols, 2020; hardback; pp. vi, 340; 100 b/w illustrations, 6 b/w tables; R.R.P. €85.00; ISBN 9782503587950. This bilingual collection of fourteen essays—eleven in English and three in French—offers an intriguing book cover: it shows a panel of the famous eleventh-century Tapestry of Creation, housed in the Museum of the Cathedral of Girona (Spain). Its central scene is delimited by two concentric circles, with Christ Pantocrator in the middle. Two of the three scenes illustrated in the bottom half of the larger circle are represented on the cover: the creation of the birds (‘volatilia celi’—‘birds of the air’) and of the aquatic beings (‘mare’—‘sea’); and Adam, naming the animals around him, with the index of his right hand pointed to them. The inscription reads: ‘Adam non inveniebatur similem sibi’ (‘Adam did not find any creature of his own kind’). These striking scenes, with beautiful colours and fantastic animals (including a unicorn), offer a graphic illustration of the power of the word in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the status of words in the Middle Ages is at the core of this volume, which constitutes the proceedings of the 2016 symposium of the International Medieval Society (IMS) held in Paris in conjunction with the Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris (LAMOP). Philologists, historians, epigraphers, palaeographers, and art historians interrogate the concept of ‘word’ by scrutinizing all sorts of support—texts, images, objects, and buildings. According to its editors, Victoria Turner and Vincent Debiais, this volume ‘traces the status of the word from ontology to usage, encompassing its visual, acoustic, linguistic, and extralinguistic forms’ (back cover). The volume is organized ‘using the zoom-out principle, from the letter to the context of the writing, from the detail contained in the pen stroke to the material and monumental environment of the text’ (p. 3). Firstly, Adrian Papahagi (‘Words with Masks: A Note on the Nomenclature of Some Late Medieval Initials’, pp. 5–20) clarifies the codicological vocabulary, while Dominique Stutzmann (‘Words as Graphic and Linguistic Structures: Word Spacing in Psalm 101 Domine exaudi orationem meam (Eleventh–Fifteenth Centuries)’, pp. 21–59) explores a corpus of forty-eight manuscripts to address ‘the definition, perception and measures of blank spaces between words’ (p. 23), with the open source Oriflamms. exe proving a very useful tool. Focusing on page space, Anne Rauner scrutinizes parish obituaries and their ‘visual rhetoric’ (‘Managing a Living Book: The Planning and the Use of Page Surface in Parish Obituaries in the Late Medieval Diocese of Strasbourg’, pp. 61–88), while Arthur Westwell (‘Correction of Liturgical Words, and Words of Liturgical Correctio in the Ordines Romani of Saint Amand’, pp. 89–107) examines the words of the liturgy and their lexical and morphological characteristics. [End Page 273] Jennifer M. Feltmann (‘Aligning Word and Deed: The Emergence of Confessor as a Priest who Hears Confession’, pp. 109–30) scrutinizes texts as well as sculptures and images to trace the semantic instability of the word ‘confessor’. Focusing on the French Grail romance, Lucas Wood (‘The Origin of the Text and the Authority of the Word in Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie’, pp. 131–44) discusses the topos of the ancient, authoritative source. Morgan Boharski (‘Kisses on Stitches: Words of Active Fetishisation of Cloth Bodies in Old French Romance’, pp. 145–59) turns her attention to two French romances and the erotic dimension of ‘cloth bodies’—a chemise and a manche—offered to the protagonists. Liam Lewis (‘Quacktrap: Glosses and Multilingual Animal Contact in the Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth’, pp. 161–79) studies a bilingual list of animal noises and argues that it offers ‘a contact zone between human, animals, and birds’ (p. 163). Focusing on a set of Gallic epitaphs devoid of royal computation, Morgane Uberti (‘Un règne sans roi: Le Non-dit du temps dans quelques inscriptions de la Gaule du haut Moyen Âge...