Some Assembly Required: Rubric Lists and Other Separable Elements in Fourteenth-Century Parisian Book Production

Some Assembly Required: Rubric Lists and Other Separable Elements in Fourteenth-Century Parisian Book Production Richard and Mary Rouse he word rubric derives from the Latin ruber, “red.”1 And although scholars sometimes find it useful to restrict the term to a Tspecialized meaning,2 we shall be using “rubrics” here simply to mean all titles, captions, headings, or labels of any sort that are written in red or in similar display script to make them conspicuous. Our focus is not primarily on the literary function of rubrics or their potential effect on a text’s reception, but rather on rubrication as a process, as a part of the mechanics of making a book. And although we have examined roughly a hundred manuscripts as a background to this paper, numbers like that are not especially useful. So we shall confine our remarks instead to a handful of examples, from among the Paris- made manuscripts of four vernacular texts: a large vernacular legend collection (Vie des pères, Vie des saints, Miracles de Notre Dame, etc.), the Roman de la Rose, the Chroniques of Jean Froissart, and a manuscript of the Grandes chroniques de France. We take as our point of departure a manuscript made by the Paris booktrade around 1328 (The Hague, 71.A.24), containing among other things a French-language hagiography called the Vie des pères. A marginal note there in tiny script in leadpoint, meant to have been erased, says in Middle French, “The rubrics are entered on the roll, up to here” (Les rebriches sont entitulées ou rolle jusques à ci).3 The 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Manuscripta conference at St. Louis University in October 2003. We are grateful to Godfried Croenen who read this article in draft, made useful suggestions, and saved us from embarrassing slips. 2 E.g., Keith Busby, Codex and Content: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002) 195, n. 83 makes a distinction useful for his purpose between tituli as “a simple indication of the content of the item to follow” and rubrics that serve as a caption or direction related to an image (miniature or histo- riation). 3 The Hague, 71.A.24, bottom of fol. 136v. 406 Richard and Mary Rouse precise significance of these words is questionable. Conceivably (but improbably) the note implied, “I am making a list of rubrics on a roll, and I have copied onto it the rubrics from this manuscript, up to this point”; more likely it meant the converse, “I have been copying rubrics into this manuscript from a roll, but this is as far as they go (or perhaps, as far as I’ve gone).” What is not questionable is this: there existed a separate parchment roll, with a list of rubrics on it. Moreover, the notion of a roll of rubrics was obviously not something unexpected that needed explaining to the book-artisans who would see this note. The concept of rubrics existing in a physically separate list clearly would not perplex them. Once we begin to think in these terms, we can see other and quite unmistakable evidence for the existence of independent lists of rubrics—physically independent, and so, potentially, independent in their transmission. Consider the striking evidence from an early Roman de la rose, Florence Bibliotheca Riccardiana 2755, which is Paris-made, and in fact probably dates from slightly before the date-span in our title, perhaps from around the turn of the century. The book is plain, provided with only one small opening miniature. It has no internal rubrics and no empty space left for rubrics. Yet at the end of the manuscript (fols. 141r-142v) is a list entitled “Here begin the rubrics of the Roman de la rose” (Ci ce commencent les rebriches dou rommant de la rose); moreover, the list incorporates the numbered folio references, as well as the lemmata or key phrases, to show precisely where the rubrics belong in the text. This list is not something stuck onto the book after the fact. It is an integral part of the Rose that precedes it, beginning on the final folio of the last quire of text, and it is copied by the text hand. But it does not belong to this text. The folio numbers on the list do not agree with the corresponding locations in the preceding text (where the rubrics allegedly should have been entered) and the discrepancy slowly increased; thus, the location of the first rubric for “folio 5” occurs in the text of Riccardiana 2755 on fol. 4v; and the next reference, allegedly to fol. 6, occurs on fol. 5; and so on. In other words, the explanation is not the simple one, that the scribe neglected to leave space for the rubrics. Moreover, the precise wording of the lemmata disagrees with the wording of this manuscript. For example, the list notes that the first rubric should occur at the words “Avis m’estoit,” but the text of Riccardiana 2755 reads “Avis m’iere”; the list’s second rubric is said to fall at the words “Enz en le mi,” but Riccardiana .

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