Baby Professor Art and Literature of the Middle Ages Reading Level
"A monument of medieval scholarship with profound implications for our understanding of the changing relationship between writing, mind, and what it means to exist homo at millennium'due south end. Jager moves hands and brilliantly betwixt the study of ideas, the physical weather surrounding the passage from scroll to codex, and visual representations of the heart."—R. Howard Bloch, Augustus R. Street Professor of French, Yale University
"Eric Jager has chosen the perfect championship for his work: he is concerned, above all, with the identification in medieval writing between the codex and the heart, which together formed a favourite picture for the inward personality.…The Book of the Heart offers a serious exploration of a primal symbol of medieval civilization, and some interesting perceptions about its importance in the wider globe."—Colin Morris, Times Literary Supplement
"Jager studies the concept of the 'cocky' as its definition changed from classical antiquity to the estimator age. …He devotes the greatest function of his fine, readable study to medieval attitudes of the self equally text, including an entire chapter on Augustine.…The discussion is much enhanced by superb illustrations."—Choice
"The Book of the Heart provides a fresh perspective on the influence of the book as antiquity on our language and culture. Reading this volume broadens our appreciation of the relationship between things and ideas."
—Henry Petroski, author of The Book on the Bookshelf
Reading the Volume of the Middle from the Centre Ages to the 20-First Century
by Eric Jager, author of The Book of the Centre
Introduction
"Reading" someone's heed, making a "mental note," "turning over a new leafage," personal "grapheme," mental "impressions"—all of these are evocative metaphors for the human psyche and its workings that bear witness how securely books have shaped our sense of who nosotros are.
The heart has a special office in the history of the cocky-volume metaphor. Nosotros still speak of learning texts "by centre," and our give-and-take "record" (from the Latin cor) links the middle with both retention (its original meaning) and written documents. Indeed, "the book of the heart" was a common and influential metaphor from antiquity until early modern times. The heart-book metaphor accomplished its virtually brilliant and powerful expressions during the Eye Ages, when it was central to the notion of the self in religion, psychology, literature, and art, inspiring the heart-shaped books portrayed in paintings of the late Middle Ages, and even actual center-shaped volumes containing songs, poems, or prayers.
The fascinating story of this metaphor is the subject field of Eric Jager's The Volume of the Center. This sectional online feature offers a guided bout of the self-volume in faith, fine art, and literature, from the heart-book to the reckoner-encephalon, including the stories behind the origins of some of our most beloved Valentine's Day icons.
The Commencement Valentine?
The man heart has symbolized honey and passion since ancient times, merely merely during the Middle Ages did information technology acquire the familiar shape and meaning it still has today every bit the universal logo of dear that appears everywhere from Valentine cards and candy boxes to bumper stickers and popular songs. Medieval poets enshrined the heart as a symbol of human passion and popularized many romantic metaphors that we at present recollect of as clichés—the "wounded" heart, the "broken" heart, the "stolen" heart, and then forth. Past about 1400, artists had given the heart its now-familiar form as a symmetrical reddish emblem (quite different from the actual concrete organ), depicting the "heart" in paintings and other visual fine art as a gift or token exchanged between lovers.
For example, a French tapestry dating from around 1400, "The Offering of the Heart" (Musée de Cluny, Paris), shows an elegantly attired couple in a pleasance garden, where the human offers his "heart" to a woman as a symbol of his love and devotion to her. This image, in which lovers are shown exchanging a heart, might well exist called "the kickoff Valentine," although that honor is oft accorded to a honey verse form by Charles d'Orléans, a member of the French regal family unit who was held captive in England after the Battle of Agincourt (1415) and who wrote many poems, some addressed to women, about the heart. One verse form includes the post-obit lines (as translated by David A. Fein, from Charles d'Orléans):
Because I cannot see you lot,
My center complains 24-hour interval and night,
Lovely lady, peerless i of France,
And has charged me to write you
That he does not take all he desires
In the Prison of Discontent.
Merely the bodily custom of exchanging paper hearts or other tokens of dearest on February 14th probably did not begin until several centuries after, when the medieval notion of romantic love—once limited to only leisured and wealthy aristocrats like those pictured in "The Offer of the Heart"—had been democratized to include people from all walks of life. Gifts and greetings were exchanged betwixt lovers and friends on February 14th equally early every bit the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Just the origin of the modern holiday may be dated from the introduction of mass-produced greeting cards around 1840.
The Book of the Middle
The notion of the centre as a "book" containing a person's thoughts, feelings, or memories is ane of most prominent forms of centre symbolism in the Center Ages. In romances, lovers' hearts were inscribed with the name or image of their dearest, while saints' legends historic martyrs whose hearts received marks of special divine favor. Clergy were instructed to permit their inner scribe copy God's commands onto the pages of their hearts, and ordinary believers prayed for Christ to write the retentiveness of his Passion in their "heart books." Artists portrayed authors belongings a centre and a pen, and some late-medieval paintings depicted the sitter as a scribe or reader belongings a middle-shaped manuscript codex. Medieval artisans even produced actual heart-shaped manuscript books, some of which nonetheless survive.
The metaphor of an inner "book" appears in both classical and biblical tradition and may ultimately become back to aboriginal Egyptian sources. The classical and biblical metaphors combined in early on Christian theology, which pictured the eye (representing the soul, mind, conscience, retentivity, etc.) as a "book" containing a tape of the private'south life—every thought, word, and deed. The book of the centre was known only to God during one'south earthly life, but would exist opened and read aloud to all at the Concluding Judgment.
Every bit for its "format," the book of the eye was originally imagined as a tablet or ringlet, and not until the birth of the codex (200-400 A.D.) did it assume the familiar shape of the book as we however know it today. The theologian Origen (c.250), for instance, even so pictured the inner book as a scroll "rolled upward" in each person's middle, while Saint Basil (c.329-379) compared the heart to a wax writing-tablet that was erased and rewritten as a effect of religious conversion.
Saint Augustine (354-430) was a pivotal figure in the evolution of the book of the middle. His spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, is essentially the story of his heart, and his famous conversion story closely identifies his centre with the codex in particular. Artists would later depict Augustine sitting at his desk with an open book, holding a pen in 1 hand and his eye in the other.
In later centuries, monks and scholars developed the book of the eye by allegorizing every aspect of the manuscript codex and its uses, from its polished vellum (piety) to its securing clasp (secrecy), and from checking the text for errors (accurateness of memory) to regular daily reading (heart-felt devotion). In clerical culture, the book of the heart usually contained divine truths, devotional feelings, or a personal moral record. According to one twelfth-century scholar, "Each person carries in his middle a written tape, as it were, whereby his conscience accuses or defends him." The inner book thus represented not but the unique man individual just also the clandestine or private self—a crucial contribution to the mod concept of the person.
Picturing the Metaphor
Around 1485, an anonymous Flemish artist (known today as the Master of the View of Sainte Gudule) gave pictorial course to the volume of the center, possibly for the commencement time always, in a small-scale, round-topped portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting shows a man belongings an opened eye-shaped volume nearly a church whose wall is cut away to evidence a Catholic mass in progress.
The moment pictured in the painting is the Elevation of the Host, the role of the liturgy that directly follows the consecrating words, "This is my body" ("Hoc est enim corpus meum"). The centre-shaped book, aligned with the Host higher up it, suggests the celebration and worship of Christ, as reinforced by a visual pun that links the worshipper's center (cor) to Christ'due south torso (corpus). The heart-shaped volume—which is open just illegible—also suggests the unique and hidden self. The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris holds a heart-shaped Latin prayer book (fifteenth century) like to the one pictured here.
The aforementioned artist painted another, similar portrait, now at the National Gallery in London, which depicts the subject specifically as an author or scribe, as indicated past the pen case and inkwell lying on the nearby ledge or window sill. The reader with the centre-shaped book and scribal tools may suggest the center as a volume of reckoning in which each person keeps his own moral accounts, or the relation of devotional memory ("writing") to recollection ("reading"), or even the individual'due south responsibility for creating ("writing") and understanding ("reading") his own life. The hint of Renaissance self-fashioning has religious roots in Saint Augustine'due south notion of "writing" one'southward ain life and "reading" it retrospectively in the lite of divine grace.
By the late Centre Ages, the "volume of the heart" had get a popular religious notion, as shown by the great fresco of the Last Judgment at the Cathedral of Albi in southern France. Painted in the 1490s, the fresco shows resurrected souls presenting their hearts every bit "open up books" for the final reckoning. Opened broad and worn on each person'due south breast—"over the eye"—these private books of reckoning are vivid emblems of the fully revealed inner self.
From Logos to Eros
Compared with the medieval Catholic Church, the secular courts celebrated a very unlike book of the center—i filled non with divine commands or moral records but amorous memories and erotic feelings. The inner scribe who "wrote" this more sensual book of the center was identified not with God, reason, or conscience, but instead with the Cupid, the human lover, or even his lady. And its introspective reader studied the commandments of love, the charms of the love, or his own turbulent emotional history.
The romantic book of the eye never wholly abandoned its religious sources (sensual love, subsequently all, was a quasi-religious form of "worship"), and the religious book of the center often borrowed from its romantic analogue. But as the book of the centre moved from cloister to court, it tended to contrary the Christian priority of logos to eros. Instead of an interior writing that represented spiritual values and the transcending of carnal impulses, courtly poets and artists openly celebrated a writing on the "fleshly" heart that embodied sexual desires, memories, and fantasies.
The Italian poet Boccaccio, for case, dreamed that his lady opened his eye and wrote her name there in golden letters. Petrarch claimed to comport in his heart "the story of [his] suffering" for his beloved Laura. And Charles d'Orléans wrote about mournfully "reading" his book of the middle and "erasing" from information technology the pleasant images and memories of times past.
Dante used an even more elaborate book of the heart in the Vita nuova, the story of his beloved for Beatrice: "In the book of my retentivity, later on the offset pages, which are virtually bare, there is a section headed Incipit vita nova. Below this heading I find the words which it is my intention to re-create into this smaller book, or if not all, at least their meaning." Dante then "transcribes" some "excerpts" from his private book of memory (or middle) to an external and public volume where others can read them.
A similar idea underlies the scene in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, where Olivia questions Viola (interim as a get-between) about Duke Orsino's professed love for her:
Olivia: Where lies your text?
Viola: In Orsino's bust.
Olivia: In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom?
Viola: To answer by the method, in the first of his heart.
Olivia: O, I have read information technology; information technology is heresy. Accept you no more to say?
The allusions to exegetical "method" and doctrinal "heresy" coyly contrast the amorous book of the heart and its sensual content with a moral or religious book of the heart containing divine truths and modeled on Scripture itself.
The Embodied Volume
The amorous book of the heart evoked by secular poets assumed an even more vivid and physical class in the heart-shaped songs and books produced by tardily-medieval and Renaissance artisans. A middle-shaped song composed past Baude Cordier (c.1400) survives in the famous Chantilly manuscript containing shaped musical scores. Addressed to a lady, the song begins with a serial of compliments and goes on to offering her the lover'due south middle:
Beautiful, good, wise, pleasing, and elegant lady,
On this very day when the year begins anew,
I make y'all the gift of a new song in my heart
Which presents itself to you.
More than only a reified metaphor, the heart-shaped song is a script that is fully realized but by its actual enactment. Here the gesture shown in "The Offering of the Center" takes the form of a musical operation, every bit the lover gives his "eye" to his lady by singing the "song in my heart," externalizing the song in the grade of words that consequence from his "heart" (breast).
The virtually consummate physical embodiment of the romantic volume of the heart is the famous eye-shaped songbook known equally the Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu (c.1475). One of several surviving heart-shaped manuscript books containing poems or music, but the only one to incorporate colored illustrations, this book is now kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. As a collection of love poems set to music, this elegant illuminated manuscript in the grade of a double eye takes the centre-book metaphor to what seems like its absolute limit. At the same time, it turns the metaphor within out past making interior and metaphorical writing into literal and external writing in one case over again.
The Modern Book of the Heart
Early on modern scientific discipline and technology further revolutionized the heart-volume metaphor. Later Gutenberg, the book of the centre was oftentimes pictured as a printed book. And every bit physicians reduced the heart to a pump, forcing philosophers to relocate the soul or cocky to the head, the book of the heart was gradually replaced by "the book of the brain." This more cerebral book of the self survived into the twentieth century, when even Freud adjusted it to his theories of the psyche, and Jacques Lacan, one of Freud's psychoanalytic successors, directly likened the unconscious listen to the "censored chapter" of a book. Literary authors also adopted it, equally when Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse (1927), describes a character's psyche in terms of "the infinite serial of impressions which time has laid down, foliage upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain."
The volume of the heart was still used in a romantic sense, as in Edith Wharton'southward 1905 novel, The Firm of Mirth (recently made into a moving-picture show), which describes its heroine, Lily Bart, as "a cracking reader of her own center." And fifty-fifty more recently it has showed up in song lyrics, every bit in Paul McCartney'due south hitting tune from the 1973 flick Live and Let Die, whose opening line goes: "When you were young, and your heart was an open book...."
Popular music also keeps alive many other heart metaphors inherited from the Middle Ages, as shown by recording artists from Sinatra ("I Left My Center in San Francisco") to Sade ("Somebody Already Broke My Heart"). Every bit for the listen-book metaphor in full general, we go along using it in everyday speech whenever we refer to "impressions," "character," and other traces of the old textual self.
But volume metaphors are speedily losing out to newer tropes based on modern media and machines. Already more than a century agone, Kodak gave us "mental pictures" and "photographic memory," while Hollywood has taught us to experience "flashbacks" and to offer our "take" on things. Today, with camcorders and VCRs everywhere, we speak of "replaying" our memories. Or, using the latest loftier-tech metaphor for the human psyche, the computer, we talk about "mental software," "hard-wired" personal traits, and what is on our "screens."
The computer-brain metaphor originated effectually 1970 in the cognitive sciences, where specialists now discuss perception and memory in terms of "synaptic circuitry" and "computational cost." With computers in millions of offices and homes, cyberpsychology has entered everyday life also. And its popularity tells us a lot nigh who we think we are as nosotros enter the 20-start century. (See, for case, the cover of Time magazine for March 25, 1996—a photomontage of a woman'due south face and a reckoner excursion-lath.)
We still pay homage to the old metaphor, equally in the slogan of a contempo literacy campaign, "Find Yourself in a Volume." Simply when these words flash onto the TV screen for a few seconds during a station intermission, they ironically point not only the book'due south demise equally an actual medium for understanding ourselves and the globe, only as well its loosening hold equally a symbol in our collective imagination. (For more than on how the computer/brain model has replaced the volume of the centre and other textual metaphors in both popular and scientific psychology, see the article by Eric Jager from the September 22, 2000 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Teaching, "Books, Computers, and Other Metaphors of Retentivity.")
From the Volume of the Center to the Valentine'southward Day Greeting Card
But even as book metaphors in full general disappear, the volume of the heart still thrives in the form of Valentine'due south Mean solar day greeting cards—the ever-popular "valentine"—sold annually past the millions around the globe.
The original volume of the middle, in ancient times, was imagined every bit a pair of wooden tablets filled with soft wax on which a stylus marked characters, or "impressions." The two tablets, attached and folding close, were known as a "diptych." The volume of the heart remained a diptych with the advent of the codex, a jump set of handwritten or printed sheets that also airtight down the middle.
When the stylized homo heart too assumed the form of a diptych in the Middle Ages (as seen in the medieval tapestry linked above, "The Offering of the Eye"), the diptychal heart was combined with the diptychal codex to produce the centre-shaped books seen in late-medieval fine art and actual book-making (as shown in some of the other linked images above). Hither the heart-book metaphor reached perchance its most perfect embodiment.
Today the book of the heart may accept lost its intellectual strength to more than high-tech metaphors, but in formal and sentimental terms it still lives on in the valentine card, which is also a diptych. The typical valentine contains an paradigm of the heart, along with an amorous message (handwritten or printed, touching or cheesy), and it opens and closes similar a book—a volume of the heart in miniature. In this pop, mass-produced or hand-made form, breathlessly anticipated by lovers and would-be lovers every Feb 14, the middle-book is likely to have a very long life indeed.
See also The History Channel'southward Valentine's Solar day Showroom an excellent general overview of the history of Valentine's Day, from the story of St. Valentine and the Roman festival of the Lupercalia to the function that pre-printed cards and lower postage stamp rates played in popularizing the valentine.
Copyright notice: ©2001 by Eric Jager. This text appears on the University of Chicago Press website past permission of the author. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-apply provisions of U.S. and international copyright police and agreements, and information technology may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire find, including copyright information, is carried and provided that Eric Jager and the University of Chicago Press are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of Eric Jager.
Eric Jager
The Book of the Heart
©2000, 294 pages, 12 halftones
Textile $39.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-39116-8
Newspaper $18.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-39117-5For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please become to the webpage for The Book of the Heart.
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