Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment Materiale Textkulturen Schriftenreihe des Sonderforschungsbereichs 933 Herausgegeben von Ludger Lieb Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Jan Christian Gertz, Markus Hilgert, Hanna Liss, Bernd Schneidmüller, Melanie Trede und Christian Witschel Band 30 Writing Beyond Pen and Parchment Inscribed Objects in Medieval European Literature Edited by Ricarda Wagner, Christine Neufeld, and Ludger Lieb ISBN 978-3-11-064543-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-064544-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-064571-2 ISSN 2198-6932 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946734 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Ricarda Wagner, Christine Neufeld, Ludger Lieb, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston This book is published in open access at www.degruyter.com. Typesetting: Sonderforschungsbereich 933 (Nicolai Schmitt) Cover image: Dante and Virgil before the inscribed gates of Hell. © The British Library Board (British Library, Egerton MS 943, f. 6v). Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the CRC 933 “Material Text Cultures”, financed by the German Research Foundation / Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, for supporting this volume. The generous financial assistance of the CRC 933 enabled two collab- orators, Katja Schulz and Christine Neufeld, to spend several months at Heidelberg University as Mercator Fellows in 2015 and 2016. Their work was indispensable for this book project, which had to break new ground in many respects. We would also like to thank Eastern Michigan University for Christine Neufeld’s 2018 Summer Research Fellowship supporting her work on this project. Furthermore we express our deepest gratitude to Michael R. Ott for his unstinting generosity, not just as a contributor, but as an important collaborator in this endeavour. We also gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Maria Krümpelmann, Tamara Ludwig and Björn Thesing, who have helped to prepare the manuscript for publication and have entered numerous references into our database. We thank the Editorial Board of the CRC 933 for including the volume in the MTK series and Nicolai Schmitt for diligently typesetting the manuscript. Spring 2019 Ricarda Wagner (Bern), Christine Neufeld (Ypsilanti) and Ludger Lieb (Heidelberg) Contents Christine Neufeld and Ricarda Wagner Introduction 1 Literary Inscriptions Across Europe Laura Velte and Michael R. Ott Writing Between Stillness and Movement: Script-Bearing Artefacts in Courtly German Literature 17 Katja Schulz Inscriptions in Old Norse Literature 41 Christine Neufeld and Ricarda Wagner Inscriptions in British Literature: From Runes to the Rise of Public Poetry 63 Iris Roebling-Grau and Sascha A. Schultz Old French Narrated Inscriptions 93 Elisa De Roberto Inscriptions in Italian Literature 109 Stephanie Béreiziat-Lang Inscriptions on the Iberian Peninsula: Material Script and Narrative Logic in Castilian and Catalan Literatures 141 Materials Michael R. Ott Culture in Nature: Writing on Wood 167 Sascha A. Schultz Inscriptions on Stone 179 Stephanie Béreiziat-Lang and Michael R. Ott From Tattoo to Stigma: Writing on Body and Skin 193 VIII Contents Ludger Lieb Woven Words, Embroidered Stories: Inscriptions on Textiles 209 Artefacts Christine Neufeld Writing Spaces: Inscriptions on Architecture 223 Ricarda Wagner Tablets and the Poetics of the Premodern Post-It 239 Laura Velte Sepulchral Representation: Inscribed Tombs and Narrated Epitaphs in the High Middle Ages 255 Michael R. Ott Text-Bearing Warriors: Inscriptions on Weapons 275 Christoph Witt More Than Bling: Inscribed Jewellery Between Social Distinction, Amatory Gift-Giving, and Spiritual Practice 291 A Cabinet of Curiosities With contributions by Maria Krümpelmann, Ludger Lieb, Tamara Ludwig, Christine Neufeld, Michael R. Ott and Ricarda Wagner 315 Indices 333 Christine Neufeld and Ricarda Wagner Introduction When Marshall McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, he argued that the in- vention of print—and with it mass communication—changed not only society, but hu- man consciousness itself. McLuhan’s predictions were eerily prescient: with text-gen- erating devices never far from our fingers, and advertising campaigns conquering even the sanctuary of our lavatory cubicles, we contend daily with what it means to live in a text-saturated world. But what of the time before print, the Middle Ages, when most of society could neither read nor write? What kind of work does writing do in a non-typographical society, a society without the mechanical means to mass-pro- duce texts? For the medievalist this question involves looking not only at manuscript culture but also at other kinds of text-bearing artefacts in the Middle Ages to under- stand the role of writing in medieval society. For a literature scholar in particular, this means asking, what can stories of magical inscribed rings or prophetic writing on walls tell us about how writing was perceived before print transformed this world? Archaeological studies have brought to light a great number of medieval artefacts that bear writing. In addition to codices and single sheets of parchment or paper, ob- jects like swords, rings, tombstones, crosses, and clothing were also used to transmit texts both poetic and mundane. These inscriptions might range in length from single words (a craftman’s name on a candleholder, for example) to longer compositions in verse, as on the monumental Ruthwell Cross. We may find these text-bearing artefacts preserved in museums and can also encounter them in the literature of the Middle Ages. An inscribed sword-hilt in Beowulf tells the story of how a race of giants per- ished from the earth. In some version of the Arthurian legend, the Grail displays the written word of God, and the ominous warning on the gate to Hell in Dante’s Divina Commedia continues to fascinate readers. Rather than adding to the excellent work that has been done on actual text-bear- ing artefacts from the Middle Ages, this book focuses on “narrated inscriptions”, that is, inscriptions imagined in medieval European literatures. By “inscription” we mean all writing whose material differs from the medieval standard of ink and parchment or paper. A prototypical inscription, such as a stone epitaph, is incised, its letters formed by scraping off the material surface of an artefact. But this volume also considers ad- ditive inscriptions, in which a text is affixed to a surface, as in the case of a leather belt beset with gems spelling a word. Narrated inscriptions as opposed to physical ones allow us to explore different perspectives on the powers of the written word in the Middle Ages. By looking at liter- ary accounts, we may uncover not only medieval practices of textuality, but also me- dieval conceptualisations of extraordinary forms of writing. Since fictional events are not necessarily committed to the laws of physics, narrated inscriptions may provide us with fresh insights into the imaginative and sometimes fantastical potential and Open Access. © 2019 Christine Neufeld and Ricarda Wagner, published by De Gruy ter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645446-001 2 Christine Neufeld and Ricarda Wagner boundaries of writing itself. The marked presence of material writing in a literary text also challenges us to examine the issues of metatextuality. As several of the chapters in this volume argue, fictional inscriptions interrupt the process of narration and re- veal what it means to be a reader of both texts and things. This duality of a world marked by linguistic abstractions and tangible objects ac- tually lay at the heart of the emerging discipline of medieval studies in the nineteenth century. One of the first Germanists, Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), understood philology as an encompassing endeavour that attends to both words and things. While some philologists preferred to explore medieval texts in order to chart linguistic develop- ments, others chose to analyse the literary remains of the Middle Ages in order to re- construct the culture and imagination of the past. Such reconstructions also included studies of medieval materiality, as evidenced by the work of another pioneer in me- dieval German studies, Friedrich Panzer (1870–1956). His fascination with the Middle Ages oscillated between a philologist’s love of the written word and an archaeologist’s desire to be among the material remnants of a bygone age, culminating in a monu- mental project to collect all existing medieval inscriptions in the German language. As objects of study that perfectly amalgamate textuality and thingness, inscriptions, Panzer argued, provide a unique window into medieval literary and material culture.1 While Panzer very much wished for inscriptions narrated by literary texts to be included in the collection he initiated, the task fell to later scholars. Nikolaus Hen- kel was the first to present a compilation entirely dedicated to narrated inscriptions, focusing mainly on texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He concluded that epitaphs and other engravings found only in imaginative