The Book of the Heart
in Late Medieval Piety
Professor Eric Jager
UCLA Department of English
(Originally delivered as a paper at the 1995 MLA Conference
in Chicago, this essay about the artistic reception of a literary metaphor
is here presented, somewhat revised, in appreciation of Professor Garbaty's
memorable lectures at the University of Michigan on medieval literature
in relation to the wider culture, including the other arts.)
The book of the heart is a key metaphor in medieval culture, the master trope in a cluster of related images that figure the inner self in expressly textual terms. The book of the heart is a characteristically medieval trope, for it combines the central symbol of medieval textual culture, the manuscript codex, with a traditional psychology and anthropology centered on the "heart," thereby recreating the inner subject in the image of the "book."
The heart/text metaphor originates in biblical and patristic sources and is largely confined to learned (Latin) writings until about the twelfth century, after which it begins to be individualized, popularized, and eventually visualized. By the late fifteenth century, it appears in a wide variety of popular religious media, including moral treatises written for the laity, vernacular prayer-books, and devotional paintings.
The book of the heart appears as a fully realized visual image, possibly for the first time, in two Flemish portraits painted in the 1480s by the anonymous Master of Sainte Gudule, a follower of Rogier Van der Weyden. The first of these two portraits (fig. 1) shows a man holding an open heart-shaped book that contains visible–if not quite legible–writing. This heart-shaped book may seem to be merely a pictorial conceit, except that several actual heart-shaped (or "cordiform") manuscript books survive from the same period. Whether the artist worked from physical exemplars is less important, however, than what his heart-shaped book suggests about the devotional ideals and practices of his time.
As Paul Saenger has shown in his work on books of hours and late-medieval reading habits, the fifteenth century saw a shift of emphasis from spoken prayer to prayer with the heart. Heart-centered prayer entered public worship in the form of "private [silent] prayer during the Mass, especially at the elevation of the Host." At first recited from memory, private prayers at public Mass were eventually reproduced in "small portable codices" which reflect the new heart-centered ideal in rubrics stating that the prayers are to be read "with the heart" or "in the heart."1
It seems possible, even quite likely, that the heart-shaped book in the painting reflects this ideal of heart-centered prayer in conjunction with personal prayer books and also the affective, or heart-centered, piety of the period. Art historians have conjectured that the cordiform book in this painting represents a prayer book, and one of the extant heart-shaped books is a 15th-century prayer book of similar form. In addition, the background scene inside the church shows the Elevation of the Host, the very part of the Mass which, according to Saenger, was especially linked with heart-centered prayer.
In the eucharistic context, the heart-shaped book may be also an emblem of devotional memory. As Miri Rubin has shown in her book on the late-medieval Eucharist, the Church gradually redesigned the sacrament into a spectacle for popular devotion to the memory of Christ's Passion, including the beginnings of the cult of the Sacred Heart.2 Reciprocally, the believer's heart became the center of devotional feeling and remembrance, a memory text where the believer could "read" of Christ's suffering.
The 14th-century Dominican monk Henry Suso took this idea to a literal extreme, asking God to turn his heart into a "document" of divine love, and then, in a fit of pious fervor, carving Christ's name on his own chest.3
Some popular devotional writings evoke the heart not only as a memory text but specifically as a book. For example, a 14th-century Middle English metrical prayer urges Christ himself to write the details of his Passion on the believer's heart. In the poem's extended metaphor of bodily inscription--and transcription--Christ copies the wounds written upon his own body to the fleshly book of the believer's heart and memory, described in an emphatically personal way as "my hert boke."4
The portrait's formal design suggests a similar identification of the heart--as a book--with Christ's body. The artist aligns the heart-shaped book and the elevated Host on a single vertical axis, and shows each object being held by a pair of hands, so that the viewer's eye is drawn from the book in the foreground to the Host in the background. A kind of visual pun on the Latin words for heart and body, cor and corpus, enhances this fleshly identification.
The eucharistic scene also endows the cordiform book with theological values specific to Christ's Incarnation, as suggested by the image of the Virgin and the infant Christ which appears over the altar, precisely where the sitter's horizontal line of sight intersects with the vertical line through the book and the Host. The image of the Christ child above the Host hints at "the child in the Host," a late medieval eucharistic notion that linked the Nativity with the Passion. Within this formal and symbolic pattern, the heart-shaped book doubly suggests the incarnation of the Word--that is, both the Word that became flesh, and the Word inscribed in human, fleshly, hearts.
As a fleshly image of the word, the heart-shaped book embodies
a Christian myth of writing as well. The diptychal heart consisting
of two rounded wings, as still seen today on playing cards and Valentines,
was common by the middle of the fifteenth century. It lent itself
easily to picturing the heart as a book, since the codex itself has a diptychal
form, like its predecessor, the ancient and medieval writing tablet consisting
of two hinged leaves. Indeed, 'writing tablet' is the original sense
of the word diptych. As Ruth Mellinkoff has shown, patristic authors
applied the term diptych (Latin diptychum) to the stone tablets of the
Law, which the apostle Paul famously contrasted with "tablets of fleshly
hearts" representing divine grace.5 In addition, medieval
authors and artists contrasted the tablet and the codex as symbols of the
Law and the Gospel, respectively. Interpreted along these lines,
the heart-shaped book in the portrait folds into itself--or implicates--an
entire Christian grammatology based on such distinctions as law and gospel,
letter and spirit, stone and flesh, exterior and interior. But if
the reified book of the heart summarizes an historical progression of material
and symbolic forms, it also reduces the original trope to a paradox--namely,
interior writing embodied in an external, physical form.
A second very similar painting also attributed to the Master of Sainte Gudule omits the church interior and the eucharistic scene but includes other unique details, such as a pencase and an inkwell lying on the ledge or window sill in the foreground (fig. 2). These details point less to a divine writing than to an expressly human act of inscription.
The pen or pencase is a common emblem of the scribe in medieval portraiture, and art historians have suggested that the sitter is a clerk or secretary to a chapter of Augustinian canons affiliated with the church in the background, identified as Notre-Dame des Victoires au Sablon in Brussels. However, the scribal tools in this portrait, as accessories to the heart-shaped book, may just as well refer to a figurative act of inscription in a book of the heart.
Although the second portrait does not include a eucharistic scene, the heart-shaped book could signify a devotional memory of some sort, or the ideal of heart-centered prayer, as in the first portrait.
Another possibility is that the scribe represents the obedient believer writing God's commands in the book of his heart. As Mary Carruthers mentions in her study, The Book of Memory, the Middle Ages associated memory with the heart and often figured it as a kind of internal writing, a set of connections still preserved in our word "record," from the Latin word for "heart" (cor, cordis).6 Scholastic authors evoke a scriptorium of the heart where the inner scribe faithfully copies God's commands onto his own heart, and where physical scribal labor is allegorized in terms of inner moral discipline.
Another possibility is that the scribe has been writing the book of his own life, conceived as an inner record written on the heart. As Jesse Gellrich has shown in his study, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages, scholastic authors combined the book of the heart and the biblical "book of life" (from Rev. 20) into a figure for individual memory and conscience.7
The late medieval urban middle classes were accustomed to book-keeping and to the steadily expanding documentation of their lives in parish and legal records. Lay readers and book-owners formed a growing public for religious books and even began to imagine their own lives and inner selves in textual terms. At the end of the 15th century, the book as a symbol of the individual's life converges with middle-class piety, literacy, and economic values in the morality play Everyman and its Flemish analogue Elckerlijc, which use books as stage props to represent a moral account-book or book of reckoning. The same symbolism appears at this time in visual art such as the famous fresco of the Last Judgment in Albi, France, which shows each resurrected soul with his or her own book of reckoning (fig. 3). Opened wide and worn on each person's chest--"over the heart"--these individualized books are vivid emblems of the fully revealed inner self. The heart-shaped book depicted by the Flemish artist may similarly represent a personal book of reckoning–a written moral record of which the sitter himself, as suggested by the scribal equipment at his elbow, is both author and protagonist. Indeed, a self-conscious and even self-creating subject are evoked by the sitter's double role as scribe and reader.
Whatever their precise meaning, the heart-shaped book and its scribal accessories betoken a very personal, individualized kind of text. Although the scribe's identity is lost to history, the artist's record of his individual features marks the book he holds as belonging to him alone, the unique individual pictured here. The man's lifelike image endows his book with a bodily presence and even a personal signature, however anonymous.
The painter's art also fills a flat surface with an illusion of spacial depth and corporeal weight by placing the book in front of a body and a building. As an image of interiority, the open book in the foreground visually echoes the bodily and architectural interiors behind it. And the cordiform book's proximity to stone and flesh enhances its diptychal history, its recapitulation of letter and spirit, law and gospel, and so forth. The different interior and exterior views of the church in the two portraits suggest that the artist may have been experimenting with physical space as a correlative for the subjective, interior space signified by the book and embodied in the sitter himself. In addition, the rounded top of each portrait suggests that originally each may have been the right wing of a folding diptych, a popular devotional object at the time. If so, the pages of the opened book would have been visually echoed in the opened panels of the painted diptych, thus adding another visual (and tactile) image of interiority.
In picturing the heart as a book, the subject as a text, and subjectivity as reading and writing, these paintings resort to a poetics of interiority. Ever since Saint Augustine turned the codex into a symbol of interior life in the story of his readerly conversion in the garden, the codex has been historically bound to the idea of the subject, of a personal presence. For most of the Middle Ages, the codex underwrote the subjectivity of a monastic elite. But the Flemish master suggests how much this situation had changed by the late fifteenth century, when the manuscript book--as both a written medium and a model of the inner self--was spreading to a much larger, more inclusive reading public, a public that soon was to grow even larger with the advent of the printed book.
If the codex-book is historically bound to the idea of the subject, it needs to be stressed that during the Middle Ages this subject was conceivedas about to be profoundly transformed. The late 15th century was a period of fundamental change in European book production, as an older manuscript culture was giving way to a new typographical one. The advent of movable type, which transformed the codex from a unique personal artifact into a mass-produced object, also transformed the book of the heart as a trope. And the trope was further qualified by the gradual decline of the old pectoral psychology, as the perceived center of the body shifted from the heart to the head.
The book of the heart as pictured by the Flemish master, and as further embodied in a few surviving cordiform books, also compounds a paradox that haunted the book of the heart from its origin as a trope. According to Jacques Derrida, the metaphor of interior writing asserts itself from antiquity to modernity by dint of a reversal that reduces external (literal) writing from reality to metaphor, to a mere copy of the writing on the heart or soul.8 Pursuing this analysis, we would have to conclude that the reified book of the heart adds a second reversal to the series, a second inversion of terms, by making interior writing into external writing once again. Not that this further turn of the trope marks a return to primacy or innocence, for the reified book of the heart is the last possible step in the series; it marks the trope's logical (and ontological) limit. By the same token, it represents the height of artifice, being a trope of a trope, a figure of a figure. Thus even an actual heart-shaped book must remain a metaphor--indeed, the grandest of its kind--while only seeming to transcend its own metaphoricity.
Notes
1. Paul Saenger, "Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages," in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier (Princeton, 1987), pp. 141-73.
2. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).
3. For Henry Suso, see references in Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000), pp. 97-102 (with notes on pp. 192-93).
4. "Ihesu Þat haste me dere bought": London, British Library, MS Wheatley 39574; ed. Mabel Day, The Wheatley Manuscript, EETS o.s. 155 (London, 1921), pp. 1-6. See also text and notes in Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1952), pp. 114-19, 274-75.
5. Ruth Mellinkoff, "The Round-Topped Tablets of the Law: Sacred Symbol and Emblem of Evil," Journal of Jewish Art 1 (1974), pp. 28-43.
6. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), pp. 48-49.
7. Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 157-66.
8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (orig. De la grammatologie, 1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), p. 15.
copyright ©2000 by Eric Jager
Professor Eric Jager
UCLA Department of English
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530
Phone: 310-825-3143
E-mail: ejager@humnet.ucla.edu
Image Links
Fig.
1 = "Young Man Holding a Book," The Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Fig.
2 = "Portrait of a Young Man," The National Gallery, London:
