The Saint, the Voice, and the Author: Imagining Textual Authority and Personal Presence at Durham Priory, ca. 1080–1150

This article demonstrates that scribe-artists at Durham Cathedral Priory between ca. 1080 and 1150 developed a program of historiated images that focused solely on authors, authorial voice, and forms of textual authorities, which reflected an attempt to foster a culture of reading based on treating texts as the presence and personality of their authors. I argue that the impulse to represent authorship visually and the interest in textual presence at Durham was linked to the community’s intense devotion to their patron saint, Cuthbert. The growing connections between Cuthbert’s cult and the written word in the twelfth century established a broader link between presence and writing. From the example of Durham, I suggest that the tendency of twelfth-century writers to treat written texts as a form of personal presence should not be understood as part of a broad shift from presence to representation, but as evidence of the continued vitality of cultures of real and embodied presence in a world increasingly dominated by the written word.