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The Book of the Heart

University of Chicago Press

Introduction

"Reading" someone's mind, making a "mental note," "turning over a new leaf," personal "character," mental "impressions"-all of these are evocative metaphors for the human psyche and its workings that show how deeply books have shaped our sense of who we are.

The heart has a special role in the history of the self-book metaphor. We still speak of learning texts "by heart," and our word "record" (from the Latin cor) links the heart with both memory (its original meaning) and written documents. Indeed, "the book of the heart" was a common and influential metaphor from antiquity until early modern times. The heart-book metaphor achieved its most vivid and powerful expressions during the Middle Ages, when it was central to the notion of the self in religion, psychology, literature, and art, inspiring the heart-shaped books portrayed in paintings of the late Middle Ages, and even actual heart-shaped volumes containing songs, poems, or prayers.

The fascinating story of this metaphor is the subject of Eric Jager's The Book of the Heart. This exclusive online feature offers a guided tour of the self-book in religion, art, and literature, from the heart-book to the computer-brain, including the stories behind the origins of some of our most beloved Valentine's Day icons.

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The First Valentine?

The human heart has symbolized love and passion since ancient times, but only during the Middle Ages did it acquire the familiar shape and meaning it still has today as the universal logo of love that appears everywhere from Valentine cards and candy boxes to bumper stickers and popular songs. Medieval poets enshrined the heart as a symbol of human passion and popularized many romantic metaphors that we now think of as cliches-the "wounded" heart, the "broken" heart, the "stolen" heart, and so forth. By about 1400, artists had given the heart its now-familiar form as a symmetrical red emblem (quite different from the actual physical organ), depicting the "heart" in paintings and other visual art as a gift or token exchanged between lovers.

For example, a French tapestry dating from around 1400, "The Offering of the Heart" (Musee de Cluny, Paris), shows an elegantly attired couple in a pleasure garden, where the man offers his "heart" to a woman as a symbol of his love and devotion to her. This image, in which lovers are shown exchanging a heart, might well be called "the first Valentine," although that honor is often accorded to a love poem by Charles d'Orleans, a member of the French royal family who was held captive in England after the Battle of Agincourt (1415) and who wrote many poems, some addressed to women, about the heart. One poem includes the following lines (as translated by David A. Fein, from Charles d'Orleans):

Because I cannot see you, My heart complains day and night, Lovely lady, peerless one of France, And has charged me to write you That he does not have all he desires In the Prison of Discontent.

But the actual custom of exchanging paper hearts or other tokens of love on February 14th probably did not begin until several centuries later, when the medieval notion of romantic love-once limited to only leisured and wealthy aristocrats like those pictured in "The Offering of the Heart"-had been democratized to include people from all walks of life. Gifts and greetings were exchanged between lovers and friends on February 14th as early as the sixteenth or seventeenth century. But the origin of the modern holiday may be dated from the introduction of mass-produced greeting cards around 1840.

The Book of the Heart

The notion of the heart as a "book" containing a person's thoughts, feelings, or memories is one of most prominent forms of heart symbolism in the Middle Ages. In romances, lovers' hearts were inscribed with the name or image of their beloved, while saints' legends celebrated martyrs whose hearts received marks of special divine favor. Clergy were instructed to let their inner scribe copy God's commands onto the pages of their hearts, and ordinary believers prayed for Christ to write the memory of his Passion in their "heart books." Artists portrayed authors holding a heart and a pen, and some late-medieval paintings depicted the sitter as a scribe or reader holding a heart-shaped manuscript codex. Medieval artisans even produced actual heart-shaped manuscript books, some of which still survive.

The metaphor of an inner "book" appears in both classical and biblical tradition and may ultimately go back to ancient Egyptian sources. The classical and biblical metaphors combined in early Christian theology, which pictured the heart (representing the soul, mind, conscience, memory, etc.) as a "book" containing a record of the individual's life-every thought, word, and deed. The book of the heart was known only to God during one's earthly life, but would be opened and read aloud to all at the Last Judgment.

As for its "format," the book of the heart was originally imagined as a tablet or scroll, and not until the birth of the codex (200-400 A.D.) did it assume the familiar shape of the book as we still know it today. The theologian Origen (c.250), for example, still pictured the inner book as a scroll "rolled up" in each person's heart, while Saint Basil (c.329-379) compared the heart to a wax writing-tablet that was erased and rewritten as a result of religious conversion.

Saint Augustine (354-430) was a pivotal figure in the evolution of the book of the heart. His spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, is essentially the story of his heart, and his famous conversion story closely identifies his heart with the codex in particular. Artists would later depict Augustine sitting at his desk with an open book, holding a pen in one hand and his heart in the other.

In later centuries, monks and scholars developed the book of the heart by allegorizing every aspect of the manuscript codex and its uses, from its polished vellum (piety) to its securing clasp (secrecy), and from checking the text for errors (accuracy of memory) to regular daily reading (heart-felt devotion). In clerical culture, the book of the heart usually contained divine truths, devotional feelings, or a personal moral record. According to one twelfth-century scholar, "Each person carries in his heart a written record, as it were, whereby his conscience accuses or defends him." The inner book thus represented not only the unique human individual but also the secret or private self-a crucial contribution to the modern concept of the person.

Picturing the Metaphor

Around 1485, an anonymous Flemish artist (known today as the Master of the View of Sainte Gudule) gave pictorial form to the book of the heart, possibly for the first time ever, in a small, round-topped portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting shows a man holding an opened heart-shaped book near a church whose wall is cut away to show a Catholic mass in progress.

The moment pictured in the painting is the Elevation of the Host, the part of the liturgy that directly follows the consecrating words, "This is my body" ("Hoc est enim corpus meum"). The heart-shaped book, aligned with the Host above it,...