Bound Fast with Letters: Medieval Writers, Readers, and Texts - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Richard H. Rouse is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at University of California, Los Angeles.

Mary A. Rouse is former managing editor of Viator. She is coauthor of a number of books, including Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500 (Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Until quite late in the Middle Ages, virtually everyone who learned to write did so on a wax tablet; and virtually everyone who made a draft, of letter or lyric, treatise or document, or a running account at the fishmonger’s, did so on a wax tablet. The wax tablet, as a support for the written word, had a longer uninterrupted association with literate Western civilization than either parchment or paper, and a more intimate relationship with literary creation.

It is only to be expected, then, that in Latin, the written language of the West during most of these centuries, there is a basic set of technical terms dealing with a sort of “wax-tablet subculture”―the physical implements and appurtenances, and the processes of their employment. We had intended to set out in an orderly progression the proper names for things and processes.

But in practice we found that an unusually large proportion of the vocabulary associated with wax tablets is figurative, even fanciful. Therefore, we have attempted here, not always successfully, to distinguish the descriptive, prosaic vocabulary from the metaphorical.

A wax tablet is a thin, hollowed slab, usually made of wood but also (the formal or official tablets) of ivory, filled with a layer of beeswax to form a surface for writing. The commonest name is tabula cerata, “waxed tablet,” an expression used in all times and cultures of the Latin Middle Ages. For example, the Life of St. Boniface records that it was written fi st on waxed tablets for approval before it was fair-copied on parchment: “primitus in ceratis tabulis ad probationem.”

One also on occasion sees such variants as tabula cerea: the ninth-century Life of St. Maclovius (alias St. Macutus), in recording with what precocity he learned, says that his master wrote the alphabet for him “in a waxen tablet,” “in tabula cerea.”

Or one may encounter an even lengthier circumlo- cution, such as that employed by the fifth-century bishop Hilary of Arles, who speaks of writing “on tablets that have been spread with wax, as the custom is” (“in tabulis ut assolet cera illitis”), an expression still used in the twelfth century, by Ordericus Vitalis (tabulae cera illitae).

More frequent than phrases, however, were locutions in which the name of a part stood for the whole. Tabula, tabella, and tabellula, all meaning “tablet,” were surely commonplace enough, and are widely enough recognized today, not to require demonstration. Less well known, we think, is the fact that, particularly in ancient and patristic writings, it was also commonplace to use the other part of the phrase, cera, or most often in the plural cerae, “wax,” to mean “wax tablet.”

Thus, Quintilian, saying that wax tablets should not be unduly large: “ne latas quidem ultra modum esse ceras”; or Jerome, saying he has filled his tablet: “excipientes iam implevimus ceras”; or Isidore, whose chapter on tablets in the Etymologies (lib. 6 ca. 9) is called simply De ceris; and so on. Even the diminutive is used, ceraculum, as in the Life of St. Mochtei, who was taught his letters by an angel of the Lord who brought a wax tablet: “allato angelus Domini ceraculo, eum litterarum docuit elementa.”

A special name, pugillaris, or more frequently the plural, pugillares, was given to small handheld tablets in antiquity; and in the Middle Ages one has, for example, the rubric in St. G all MS 242, De pugillaribus, id est parvis tabulis. (Were not all tablets “held in the hand,” you ask?

No, they were intended to be balanced on the right thigh while one wrote: “tabellas . . . quibus scholastici dextro femore solent uti,” “tablets that students customarily used on the right thigh,” says the Life of Odo of Cluny.)

A final instance of “part standing for the whole” brings us to the boundary of figurative language. Buxus is the box tree, buxum is boxwood. Jerome uses buxum in the Vulgate to mean a wooden tablet: “Now go, and write it upon boxwood” (“Nunc ergo ingressus scribe ei super buxum,” Isa. 30:8); and he explains in his commentary on this passage that boxwood was used to write on because it was more durable, less liable to decay, than other woods.

(excerpted from Chapter 1)