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A Reverence for Books: the Sacrament of Material Text

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A Reverence for Books: the Sacrament of Material Text A REVERENCE FOR BOOKS: THE SACRAMENT OF MATERIAL TEXT, 1558-1649 by Kyle Sebastian Vitale A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Spring 2016 © 2016 Kyle Sebastian Vitale All Rights Reserved A REVERENCE FOR BOOKS: THE SACRAMENT OF MATERIAL TEXT, 1558-1649 by Kyle Sebastian Vitale Approved: __________________________________________________________ John Ernest, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of English Approved: __________________________________________________________ George H. Watson, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Approved: __________________________________________________________ Ann L. Ardis, Ph.D. Senior Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Kristen E. Poole, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Julian D. Yates, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Miranda Wilson, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Alice A. Dailey, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee PROLOGUE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’m a rare book librarian. I get to touch books every single day. My colleague and I have a joke that we are Defenders of Wonder. A physical book assigns a sense of reverence to the content inside. It’s the same feeling you get when you look at a painting or hear a piece of music. And I think that’s something worth defending. --Kyle Triplett, Humans of New York1 Accession Crisis This dissertation developed from a moment of museum dissonance; call it an accession crisis. While visiting the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) I came across a fascinating object: a sixteenth-century tabernacle used for holding the consecrated Host, with a recycled book cover serving as tabernacle door (Figure 1).2 Precious little is known about the tabernacle, which dates to about 1510, but the repoussé door derived from an older liturgical book. At some point the fuller book may have gained reliquary or extra-sacral status due to its age and liturgical functions, which would have allowed the back cover to be reused as an object of sacred worth for the sacrament. What struck me was the ways that this object incarnated a variety of book metaphors from the New Testament. Here was a book, which traditionally contained words, containing the transubstantiated bread, or Word of God, its own words made flesh (Jn 1:14). This sacramental flesh, held within the cover, in turn literalized the Book of Life (Phil. 4:3; Rev. 13:8, 17:8). The holding beautifully conveyed the idea of Christ as a substance to be studied, digested, and treated with reverence. It was a beautiful similitude of Christ’s body; it conjoined metaphors of holiness, sacrifice, and reading; like the book, it offered a narrative of Christ incarnate, sacrificed, and made iv Figure 1 Unknown, tabernacle, about 1510, marble with gilt silver repoussé door, 35 x 17 x 5 in., Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Elma D. and Orville A. Wilkinson Fund, 72.123 v available to the willing viewer or reader. In its appropriation of a book for sacramental purposes, the object likened the act of opening a book and turning its pages to the act of discovering Christ and being sanctified in His body and blood. Flush with this discovery, I found myself not a week later at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., rather puzzled. I was standing before Vittore Carpaccio’s Madonna and Child (Figure 2) which dates to precisely the same time as the tabernacle (1505/1510). The painting seems to convey a traditional image: the Virgin Mary at her devotions, with the Christ child on her lap. Annunciation paintings typically show the angel Gabriel interrupting Mary’s reading to symbolize a shift from written Law to incarnated Word; in the Virgin and Child images, the book continues that symbolism while emphasizing Mary’s obedience and holiness. But I found myself unable to note these fashions in Carpaccio’s painting. Rather than a serene Virgin and Child, this Jesus seems to be grabbing at Mary’s robes while leaning off her lap; meanwhile, Mary’s book is lowered, unnoticed, while Mary shoots a rather annoyed, even resigned, glance at the Christ child. Parents everywhere can recognize that look: a parent’s peaceful moment interrupted again. This book is no tabernacle door, no metaphor for word made flesh or books of life; it is Mary’s reading, her act of pleasure while enjoying the outdoors. In fact, the painting hung previous to this one, The Virgin Reading, also by Carpaccio, depicts a serene and natural act of quiet reading time. The Christ child quite literally interrupts a quiet moment of reading. This painting by Carpaccio radically redefines the book object within the annunciation painting tradition. Where the book traditionally stood as a signifier of holiness or as the sacred Torah, it now becomes thoroughly secular and leisurely. Carpaccio’s book is not apposite to the Christ child; rather, its reconfiguration as a vi Figure 2 Vittore Carpaccio, Madonna and Child, c. 1505/1510, image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. vii secular object, a careless text of entertainment, makes it ambiguous against the Christ child. The painting does not offer a solution or explanation to the Christ in one hand and a book in another. Rather, the painting suggests two new ideas. First, by offering a distracted Mary, the painting indicates tension or friction between Christ and book. For some reason in Carpaccio’s mind, the relationship between the two proves more complex and thick than the old tradition can render. Carpaccio suggests Christ and book, not Christ through book. However neglected, the book remains in Mary’s hand, not fallen to the ground or ripped to shreds by an infant; Carpaccio wants both focal points to remain in the painting. Second, because he leaves the relationship ambiguous, without a hint of explanation, the painting asks the viewer to sort out the relationship between Christ and the book. It asks logical questions about books and Christ as words. It asks, as it asked me in the National Gallery: what is the relationship between the Word Made Flesh and the books rolling around the trunk of your car? How does your reading life relate to your spiritual life? I was struck by this cognitive cultural dissonance: two museum holdings, dated to virtually the same year, with radically different comprehensions of the book. The one appropriates books to the Holy Sacrament, their form a metaphor or outward sign for their inward contents; the other becomes an object of private use impeded by the infant Word. Carpaccio’s book becomes ambiguous corollary to the spiritual value that Christ traditionally brings to reading and meditation in these annunciation scenes. The book is both a sacramental tool and a private distraction; for both objects, it is linked to Christ. Tellingly, both pieces were conceived and executed around 1510, just as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli were beginning to formulate their viii reforming doctrines. Perhaps, then, this dissonance is no surprise. After all, this decade saw the rise, as Barbara Lewalski describes it, of “the pervasive Protestant emphasis upon the Bible as a book, as God’s Word encapsulated in human words, and in the linguistic features of a variety of texts.”3 The various materialities of Catholic worship and sacrament—stained glass, votive candles, rood screens, guilds, what Eamon Duffy calls “focuses of the sacred” and “channels of sacred power”—were slowly exchanged in England for textual media like the Book of Common Prayer (1549), the Acts and Monuments of the Church (1563), and the Tome of Homilies (1547, 1562).4 Duffy, Christopher Haigh, and others have documented the slower acceptance of Protestant worship practices than was previously believed.5 As Sarah Beckwith and Regina Schwartz suggest, English worshippers particularly felt this slowness with regards to the sacraments. While entire frameworks of baptism, Eucharist, and public penance were dismantled and refocused on hearing and reading, rather than gazing and partaking, elements like the Book of Common Prayer retained through Queen Elizabeth I’s settlement of 1559 some of the outward vestments and sacramental language of worship.6 Did the book become a new material channel for “sacred power,” much like the sacramental materials that came before? Did it help to record and host sacramental relations formally abolished by the church? The IMA tabernacle certainly seems to, containing as it does a book in medieval practice, co-opted for its physical beauty and ancient, liturgical resonance to store the transubstantiated Host. Or did the texts of the Reformation, alongside the surge in printing through the sixteenth century, establish a less material spirituality that truly turned towards inward reflection and assurance? The Virgin Reading, and the Virgin Trying to Read, seem to relegate the book to vital, ix but not sacramental, roles.
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