Fordham Series in Medieval Studies. Remember the Hand : Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia

__Remember the Hand__ studies a body of articulate manuscript books from Iberia in the tenth and eleventh centuries. These exceptional, richly illuminated codices have in common an urgent sense of scribal presence—scribes name themselves, describe themselves, even paint their own portraits. While marginal notes, even biographical ones, are a common feature of medieval manuscripts, rarely do scribes make themselves so fully known. These writers address the reader directly, asking for prayers of intercession and sharing of themselves. They ask the reader to join them in not only acknowledging the labor of writing, but in theorizing it through analogy to agricultural work or textile production, tending a garden of knowledge, weaving a text out of words. By mining this corpus of articulate codices (known to a school of Iberian codicologists, but virtually unstudied outside that community), Catherine Brown recovers these scribes’ understanding of reading as a powerful, intimate encounter between many parties—the author and their text, the scribe and their pen, the patron and their art-object, the reader and the words and images before their eyes—all mediated by the material object known as the book. By rendering that mediation conspicuous and reminding us of the labor that necessarily precedes that mediation, the scribe reaches out to us across time with a simple but profound directive: Remember the hand. __Remember the Hand is available from Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.__ The first book to study the "articulate codices" of medieval Iberia, handmade books in which the scribes through powerful illuminations, devious riddle-poems, and other trappings of the manuscript form name themselves and make their presence (and labor) known to the reader Remember the Hand studies a body of articulate manuscript books from the Christian monasteries of northern Iberia in the tenth and eleventh centuries. These exceptional, richly illuminated codices have in common an urgent sense of scribal presence--scribes name themselves, describe themselves, even paint their own portraits. While marginal notes, even biographical ones, are a common feature of medieval manuscripts, rarely do scribes make themselves so fully known. These writers address the reader directly, asking for prayers of intercession and sharing of themselves. They ask the reader to join them in not only acknowledging the labor of writing but also in theorizing it through analogy to agricultural work or textile production, tending a garden of knowledge, weaving a text out of words.By mining this corpus of articulate codices (known to a school of Iberian codicologists, but virtually unstudied outside that community), Catherine Brown recovers these scribes' understanding of reading as a powerful, intimate encounter between many parties--authors and their text, scribes and their pen, patrons and their art-object, readers and the words and images before their eyes--all mediated by the material object known as the book. By rendering that mediation conspicuous and reminding us of the labor that necessarily precedes that mediation, the scribes reach out to us across time with a simple but profound directive: Remember the hand.Remember the Hand is available from the publisher on an open-access basis Content 7 List of Abbreviations 9 List of Figures 11 List of Plates 15 Preface 17 Introduction: The Articulate Codex, Manuscription, and Empathic Codicology 27 1 Florentius’s Body 37 2 Monks at Work: Grammatica and Contemplative Manuscription 59 3 The Garden of Colophons 90 4 Manu mea: Charters, Presence, and the Authority of Inscription 118 5 Makers and the Inscribed Environment 132 6 Remember Maius: The Library and the Tomb 154 7 The Strange Time of Handwriting 186 8 The Weavers of Albelda 211 Conclusion: The Handy Manuscript 233 Acknowledgments 243 Note 247 Manuscripts Cited 317 Bibliography 319 Index 347