Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
600 years ago,
Christians went to church, and they learned to destroy manuscripts.
And we see in this manuscript here, the Hours of Blanche of Savoy,
made in the 14th century,
that the clergy here are kissing a number of objects,
including a book and a pax.
And in the process of kissing these objects,
they pretty much destroyed them.
So here, for example, I'm showing you a pax,
which has been kissed so vigorously and so enthusiastically
that all of the surface detail has been worn right off of the bas-relief.
And the priest, also, would kiss this book, called a missal,
which contains all of the texts that the priest would need to read
in order to perform the Mass,
and in the process of doing that, he would also kiss the book.
And you can see that he's kissed the body of Christ here
to the point where the paint is worn down to the parchment,
and possibly, he's nibbled the corner a little bit here as well.
(Laughter)
So, we can see here just how worn this all looks,
how much spittle has accumulated on this opening
as it's laying there on the altar.
And the problem was, of course,
that in the process of kissing manuscripts over and over again during the Mass,
that the priest would destroy them.
Now, artists realized that this simple use would result in the destruction of books,
and so they came up with a solution,
and that solution that artists came up with is this object right here,
which is called the "osculatory plaque,"
or "kiss target."
(Laughter)
Now, the object - the purpose of this object
is so that priests can aim his lips at the kiss target,
thereby preventing damage to the book itself.
So this is an abstract shape designed to protect the book
from the priest's overenthusiastic love
for the painting depicted here in the book.
But as we can see in various examples of late medieval missals,
the priest wasn't so interested in kissing this abstract target,
and his lips would creep up the shaft of the cross
and smear Christ across the landscape,
to the point where some manuscripts,
such as this one -
and I just have to tell you here, this was commissioned by a bakers guild,
so there's a little man putting bread in the bottom margin here, in an oven -
but this book was commissioned by a bakers guild,
and it's extremely lavish,
and it has a golden osculatory target,
but you can see that the priest has avoided this
and instead has smeared Christ's groin and chest
across the landscape.
But you can't really blame him
because all that metal, it's like kissing someone with braces.
This book also has an osculatory target that has been avoided,
but this time for a different reason.
So this image was inserted into a different kind of book altogether.
This is a book of civic oaths
that was written, and still kept, in the city of 's-Hertogenbosch -
I had to get my tonsils out to say that -
and that is where Hieronymus Bosch came from.
But this book of civic oaths was laid on a table,
not an altar but just a civic table,
and then oath swearers would put one hand on the book
and swear the oaths that are copied inside it.
You can see just how smeared the book has become
after being used for this purpose for a number of decades.
Now, I want to come back to the Blanche of Savoy for a second
to make a second point,
which is that this image also has an audience.
So Blanche of Savoy herself is standing at the altar,
and she's holding a book,
and she is also going to imitate what the priest is doing with his book.
And it looks as if she could almost lift up her book and kiss it herself.
But that's precisely what other people did with their books.
This belonged to Philip the Bold,
and he had an image inserted into his prayer book
with an osculatory plate below -
so, he wasn't a priest; he was a duke -
and you can see there's just a little bit of mild kissing here,
but later on in this same book, we see the pages he really liked.
(Laughter)
He had no fewer than five images of the vera icon,
the true likeness of Christ,
stuck into his book,
and he has pawed them completely
and kissed the face to the point where the paint is chipped right off.
So in this, we can say that this practice of kissing the image of Christ
went from the priesthood
to the noble class to regular upper-class book owners,
such as the one who owned this book, made in Haarlem around 1475,
and you can see that this lay book owner has kissed the face of Christ,
and in this quite beautiful image, this book from Bruges,
also made in the 15th century,
the owner has used a rather moist technique to kiss Christ
and which has caused the blue paint from the facing folio
to stick to the body when the book gets closed,
and it makes Christ look a little like a blue Dalmation.
Now, this idea that to love something
means to kiss it to bits
carries over into other kinds of devotional images,
and I show you this,
a book of sacred poetry, all written in red here,
with a facing image, or a former image, of the Virgin,
and she's been kissed down to the underdrawing,
right out of veneration.
Now, all of these images here
demonstrate to us the emotional charge of pictures
and the emotional appeal that they had to their owners.
Also, the fact that they're on skin -
parchment, which medieval books were copied on, is made from animal skin -
so these books show us inadvertent stories
about how people had emotional responses to pictures
and how they document this skin-on-skin contact from the past.
Now, this dirt and the skin-on-skin contact in manuscripts
is really present here.
You can see that in this prayer book,
this area down here has been encrusted with hand juice
from layers and layers of copying.
But what's really interesting about this book
is that deeper in the same book -
you can see it's the same kind of decoration, the same kind of script -
but this folio here on the right
hasn't been used nearly as much as the other one.
And so we could say that the owner of this book, the reader,
really used that text, liked that text a lot,
and was "eh" about the other one.
And I wanted to find out if we could quantify those dirt levels
and see what people were reading,
what people had an emotional response to.
So to do that, I used this manuscript,
a Book of Hours, made in Delft around 1440,
as a guinea pig.
And here you see six different openings from this book;
you can see that there are different amounts of dirt in the corners.
This has quite a bit; here's a lot; here's a little less.
Now, I wanted to see if you could quantify these words:
more than, less than and so forth.
So I looked around and found this gizmo called a densitometer -
which measures the optical density of a reflecting surface -
zeroed the scale at the top of the page, where nobody would handle the book,
and then took a reading
from the juiciest part of the fingerprint down below
and then logged these numbers into a graph,
and you can instantly see which parts were read.
So here are the folio numbers, the page numbers, down the side,
and then the dirt meter - dirt-o-meter-reader - up the side,
and then the chapters of the book, the different sections of the book,
delineated in red.
And so you can see that the text that was most read
is the Hours of the Virgin.
Now, this has the largest area under the curve;
this is a text to be read from early in the morning,
in little segments, till late at night,
but what you can also see is at the end of the day,
around 10:00 at night,
the graph really falls off.
So we might suggest that this person fell asleep about a third of the time
before finishing the text.
Now, here is another graph from a different Book of Hours,
and you can see it has a completely different pattern,
this time with these sharp spikes,
and these spikes, it turns out, correspond to the pictures in the book.
Here's a person who used the book primarily just to paw the pictures,
although we can say that he was also literate, he could read,
because there's some area, some elevation under the graph here,
at areas of text only.
But the page that he liked the most, with the highest spike here,
is a picture of himself.
So the picture he kept turning back to over and over again
is an image of himself with his coat of arms
and he's looking at Saint Jerome who's looking at the cross,
and he couldn't get enough of this image.
(Laughter)
Now, here is a graph from a third Book of Hours,
and this time, yet another shape.
Here's someone who primarily read it
for the Penitential Psalms and then two prayers,
one to Saint Adrian and the other to Saint Sebastian.
And here you see the incipit pages of those particular texts.
Now, Saint Sebastian, here,
he was venerated with arrows as his martyrdom,
and these arrow wounds resembled buboes from the Bubonic plague,
so he was venerated against Bubonic plague.
So we can suggest that the owner of this book
had a severe anxiety about Bubonic plague or contracting it
and read this text over and over again, possibly to prevent it.
But on the other hand, here's a folio where there's almost no activity,
and this is a prayer to Saint Apollonia.
Now, she was a female, virgin-martyr saint,
and her martyrdom
was to have her teeth ripped out of her mouth by a deranged dentist,
and people would venerate her
for dental pain and mouth pain of all sort.
So we can say that the owner of this book feared the plague but had very good teeth.
(Laughter)
Now, all of this suggests that medieval manuscripts
can tell us something about our lives now, namely that -
well, it's important to remember that that print culture,
which we're currently abandoning as we adopt screen culture,
is quite different from manuscript culture.
So, print culture - on paper,
don't touch the book too much, you're not supposed to write in them
whereas manuscript culture invites this interaction with the book,
and this skin just invites us to touch it and to leave our deposits.
We might even say that medieval people
reveled in the possibility of leaving their mark in the book,
their cumulative marks of wear,
in order to demonstrate
their longstanding commitment to certain texts, to certain images.
And we might even think about the fact
that when we use iPhones and iPads and smartphones
and all of these things that we have to touch,
that we're having, we're experiencing now,
an unrequited love for the tangible object,
the tangible act of reading,
which is lost in translation,
lost in our screen culture,
and that, in fact, we're really yearning to be medievals again.
Thanks.
(Applause)