Manuscripta

This article examines two particular manuscripts-San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 875-with the aim of revealing how the interaction between verbal and visual representations of the book, the act of writing, and the act of reading coexist and interact on the codices’ folios. In the text, Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s ca. 1497 translation of Ovid’s Heroides, the protagonists write letters to absent lovers, frequently commanding their imagined readers to activate their sense of touch in interpreting their letters’ meaning. In the accompanying miniatures, illuminator Robinet Testard’s visual interpretations of these same letters call the reader’s attention to their fictional and actual physical existences. Through the technique of mise en abyme employed systematically in both their texts and illuminations, HM 60 and Paris fr. 875 verbally and visually portray the letters as physical objects on which Ovid’s heroines write. In so doing, the codices self-reflexively foreground their own materiality and encourage their readers to extract meaning from their folios through a process of visual, intellectual, and tactile interpretation. Further, this tactile extraction of meaning encouraged by HM 60’s producers was enacted by at least two later readers through additions or alterations made to the material object, underlining the importance of the sense of touch not only for medieval readers of the codex but also for modern ones, and for those anonymous interpreters somewhere in between.

This article argues that an eleventh- or early twelfth-century Benedictine antiphoner and graduale, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12584—thought to originate at the Parisian abbey of Fossés—was actually produced at Glanfeuil, a small monastery in southern Anjou. It is important to establish the correct provenance of this manuscript, since it is widely used by scholars owing to its early date, completeness, and position as one of the six monastic offices used in René-Jean Hesbert’s Corpus antiphonalium officii. The comparison of several elements of the office of Paris lat. 12584 with identical elements from a genuine, contemporary antiphoner from Fossés, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12044 makes it clear that the former must come from Glanfeuil.