Reading Medieval Manuscripts Then,

Now, and Somewhere in Between: Verbal

and Visual Mise en Abyme in Huntington
Library MS HM 60 and Bibliothèque
nationale de France MS fr. 875
Anneliese Pollock Renck

T
his article proposes a new model of text-image re-
lations within the context of two specific manuscript
exemplars, providing an understanding of how the

Abstract: This article examines two particular manuscripts—San Marino, The Hun-
tington Library, MS HM 60 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français
875—with the aim of revealing how the interaction between verbal and visual rep-
resentations of the book, the act of writing, and the act of reading coexist and inter-
act on the codices’ folios. In the text, Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s ca. 1497 translation of
Ovid’s Heroides, the protagonists write letters to absent lovers, frequently command-
ing their imagined readers to activate their sense of touch in interpreting their let-
ters’ meaning. In the accompanying miniatures, illuminator Robinet Testard’s visual
interpretations of these same letters call the reader’s attention to their fictional and
actual physical existences. Through the technique of mise en abyme employed sys-
tematically in both their texts and illuminations, HM 60 and Paris fr. 875 verbally
and visually portray the letters as physical objects on which Ovid’s heroines write. In
so doing, the codices self-reflexively foreground their own materiality and encour-
age their readers to extract meaning from their folios through a process of visual,
intellectual, and tactile interpretation. Further, this tactile extraction of meaning en-
couraged by HM 60’s producers was enacted by at least two later readers through ad-
ditions or alterations made to the material object, underlining the importance of the
sense of touch not only for medieval readers of the codex but also for modern ones,
and for those anonymous interpreters somewhere in between.

Keywords: Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Robinet Testard, medieval manuscripts, scribal

portraits, mise en abyme, female patronage, materiality of reading, text-image rela-
tions, Ovid, Heroides.

Manuscripta 60.1 (2016): 30–72 (doi 10.1484/J.MSS.5.111027)

 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

visual and verbal narratives of the volumes work together

in creating meanings and modeling interpretive practices
for the codices’ medieval readers.1 Ultimately, I argue that 31
the cooperation and competition between text and image
within the manuscripts enact a reading experience centered
around the sense of touch. While this analysis may only
apply specifically to two particular manuscripts, it sheds
further light on the importance placed on the physical
reading practice for late-medieval consumers and manu­
script producers, and contributes to our understanding of
the process.2
The manuscripts studied in this article are two copies of
Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s XXI Epistres d’Ovide, his transla-

1. I would like to thank Cynthia J. Brown and Sonja Drimmer for their
review and suggestions in earlier versions of this article.
2. The importance of the sense of touch in the Middle Ages has been
documented in the cases of other manuscripts, or more broadly in other
areas. For example, Laura Farina argues that a manuscript copy of Won-
ders of the World elicits a tactile rather than visual interaction with its fo-
lios in “Wondrous Skins and Tactile Affection: The Blemmye’s Touch,”
in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. Katie L. Walter
(New York, 2013), 11–28. See also Elizabeth Robertson, “Noli me tangere:
The Enigma of Touch in Middle English Religious Literature and Art for
and about Women,” 29–56 in the same volume, and Jennifer Borland,
“Unruly Reading: The Consuming Role of Touch in the Experience of
a Medieval Manuscript,” in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially En-
gaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Jonathan Wilcox (Turnhout,
2013), 97–114. Laura Gelfand has conducted work on the importance of
the sensory experience in the interpretation of medieval architecture in
“Sense and Simulacra: Manipulation of the Senses in Medieval ‘Copies’
of Jerusalem,” in “The Intimate Senses: Taste, Touch and Smell,” ed. Lara
Farina and Holly Duggan, a special issue of Postmedieval: A Journal of
Medieval Cultural Studies 3 (2012): 407–22. See also Laura Gelfand, “Il-
lusionism and Interactivity: Medieval Installation Art, Architecture and
Devotional Response,” in Push Me, Pull You: Imagination and Devotional
Practices in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura
Gelfand (Leiden, 2011), 87–116.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

tion of Ovid’s Heroides dedicated to Charles VIII3 in the last

decade of the 15th century.4 The XXI Epistres d’Ovide con-
32 tains twenty-one fictional letters ostensibly written by fa-
mous mythological figures from Antiquity. In three cases,
a male lover initiates the correspondence, and the woman
responds; in the remaining fifteen letters, a woman writes
an unanswered letter to an absent husband or lover. Now
housed in San Marino at the Huntington Library under
the shelfmark HM 60, the manuscript in question was il-
luminated by Robinet Testard (ca. 1500),5 quite possibly for
Anne de Bretagne and/or her husband, Louis XII, whom
she married in 1499.6 The volume contains twenty-one half-
page miniatures each appearing at the beginning of a letter,
all but one portraying the fictional writer whose words be-
gin just below the illumination. Robinet Testard also dec-
orated another manuscript of this translation for a female
patron—Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fran-
çais 875—this time for Louise de Savoie.7 As the correspon-

3. See Anneliese Pollock Renck, “The Prologue as Site of Translatio Auc-

toritatis in Three Works by Octovien de Saint-Gelais,” Le moyen français
73 (2013): 89–110 at 95–96 n. 26.
4. Ibid., 95 n. 25.
5. Consuelo W. Dutschke with the assistance of Richard H. Rouse, Sara
S. Hodson, et al., “HM 60,” in Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manu-
scripts in the Huntington Library (San Marino, 1989).
6. Oscar A. Bierstadt asserted that Dejanira’s portrait on folio 46r bears a
very close resemblance to a depiction of Anne de Bretagne in her “Hours
of Anne of Brittany,” in The Library of Robert Hoe: A Contribution to the
History of Bibliophilism in America (New York, 1895), 17. For further elab-
oration on this point, see Cynthia J. Brown, The Queen’s Library: Image-
Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 1477–1514 (Philadephia, 2011),
192–97.
7. Paris fr. 875 was commissioned by Louise de Savoie, confirmed by a
note in Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, MS fr. 8815, fol. 29v, that
the scribe Jean Michel was paid in 1497 “pour avoir trois douzaines et
demye de parchemin pour faire le livre des espitres d’Ovyde que madite
dame lui fait de présent faire.” Cited in Edmond Sénemaud, La biblio-
thèque de Charles d’Orléans, comte d’Angoulême au château de Cognac en
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

dents take up visual poses whose composition displays

many similarities to those found in HM 60, this codex will
be used here to broaden the scope of this article’s inquiry, 33
and to tease out comparisons between another contempo-
rary codex and the object of primary study.
It is my argument that the two manuscripts illuminated
by Robinet Testard for Anne de Bretagne (?) and Louise de
Savoie, through their combined text and images, present
a particular interpretation of Saint-Gelais’s text centered
around the very material existences of the manuscripts
themselves and the tactile reading presented to the female
patrons.8 Within the manuscripts’ visual and verbal narra-
tives, the presence of the letter or codex held by the fictional
correspondents constitutes a mise en abyme of the physi-
cal object containing the text of the XXI Epistres. In other
words, through a portrayal of their protagonists writing let-
ters that represent the very epistles the medieval or modern
reader holds in his/her hands, HM 60 and Paris fr. 875 evoke
these epistles as physical objects, both for their fictional fe-
male writers and their actual female owners. Because the
epistles foregrounded by the text and images represent also
the pages of the manuscripts themselves, the mise en abyme
functions in the two codices as a self-referential technique
through which the volumes assert their own materiality and
encourage their readers to extract meaning from their fo-
lios through processes not only of visual and intellectual,
but of tactile interpretation as well. Further, I argue that

1496 (Paris, 1861), 59. For attribution of the manuscript’s miniatures to

Testard, see François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les manuscrits à pein-
tures en France 1440–1520 (Paris, 1993), 408.
8. The artist’s depictions of the correspondents in the XXI Epistres
d’Ovide differs significantly from the emphasis placed on the protago-
nists as participants in a narrative found in other exemplars. See also
Anneliese Pollock, “(Re)Presenting Women in France, 1490–1510: Trans-
lations of Texts and Images” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa
Barbara, 2014), 170–92.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

this tactile extraction of meaning encouraged by the manu-

script’s producers was enacted by at least two later consum-
34 ers through additions or alterations made to the material
object, underlining the importance of the sense of touch
not only for medieval readers of the codex but also mod-
ern ones, and for those anonymous interpreters somewhere
in between.

the mise en abyme as site of reader participation

André Gide offered the earliest theorization of the term

mise en abyme, mentioning in 1893 an image or concept
embedded within a work of art that represents this whole.9
Lucien Dällenbach interpreted Gide’s work most famously,
positing that the “essential property [of mise en abyme]
is that it brings out the meaning and form of the work.”10
Thus, mise en abyme for Dällenbach and for the purposes
of this article is not constituted merely by the presence of
the object represented within itself. Rather, this inclusion
provides key information to the reader or viewer about the
work as a whole.
Adding a multi-dimensional perspective to the tradi-
tional definition, art historians of the Early Modern period
have used the term mise en abyme to highlight the artist’s
self-awareness,11 while Gregory Minissale has identified
mise en abyme as a unique site of collaboration between
reader and text. By presenting the artist at work, whether
engaged in the act of painting the picture the reader now
has before his/her eyes or describing the act of writing the
very text being read, the mise en abyme underlines the art-

9. André Gide, Journal 1889–1939 (Paris, 1948), 41.

10. Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Emma Hughes and
Jeremy Whiteley (Cambridge, 1989), 8.
11. Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern
Meta-Painting (Cambridge, 1997).
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

ist’s consciousness, and reminds the reader that the “psychic

space of the work of art” is constituted by reader, writer, and
artist.12 Thus, the mise en abyme encourages the reader’s ac- 35
tive participation in the interpretation of meaning within
the work.
The medieval use of mise en abyme, although widespread
in presentation scenes, depictions of authorial or scribal
practice, and even images of books in the hands of saints or
other religious figures, has received little attention.13 Scribal
and author portraits, as well as presentation scenes, have
been studied in much detail, although scholars have rarely
applied the term mise en abyme to these visual reproduc-
tions of the very book being read or produced within its
own pages. In this article, the essential qualities ascribed to
mise en abyme by Gide, Dällenbach, and Minissale will be
helpful in studying both the text and the images of HM 60
and Paris fr. 875. Indeed, the fact that the codices contain
verbal and visual depictions of themselves, I argue, calls for
the reader’s active participation in better recognizing and
understanding essential meanings and forms in the work.

from early to late-medieval scribal and

authorial portraits

The technique of mise en abyme utilized systematically in

HM 60’s and Paris fr. 875’s illustrations both reinterprets
the manuscripts’ text and inscribes their miniatures within
established medieval visual conventions. Just as the text

12. Gregory Minissale, Framing Consciousness in Art: Transcultural Per-

spectives (Amsterdam, 2009), 52.
13. With two notable exceptions: Stuart Whatling’s PhD thesis, “Nar-
rative Art in Northern Europe, c. 1140–1300: A Narratological Re-­
appraisal” (PhD diss., University of London, 2010), and a conference
held at the Courtauld Institute of Art on February 16, 2009. Some ab-
stracts are available online: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/
projects/medievalarttheory/documents/Mise-en-abyme.pdf.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

contained within the codices translates Ovid’s Latin, so

too do Robinet Testard’s illuminations extract and adapt
36 meanings from Saint-Gelais’s written narrative. However,
these images also comprise Testard’s reproductions and re-­
interpretations of earlier scribal/author portraits present in
the medieval reader’s repertoire of signs and signifiers.
Early author portraits were typically modeled upon the
visual depictions of the Evangelists, generally seated with
a bound book open before them, pen in hand. Their di-
vine inspiration is usually symbolized through their ani-
mal attributes, thus underlining the author not as creator
of the words he writes but as a scribe to God.14 Significantly
for our discussion, the open page in front of the Evange-
list is often left blank, symbolizing its status as “an emblem
of wisdom and truth, its power … ‘unmitigated by refer-
ence to its actual function.’”15 Sonja Drimmer demonstrates
that as the Middle Ages progressed, author portraits began
to invoke, rather than divine inspiration, “the present writ-
er’s responsibility for the book at hand and his physical re-
lationship to it.”16
This depiction, of course, adopted certain aspects of the
Evangelist author portrait, but Drimmer points out at least

14. For an analysis of portraits of the authors of the Gospels from a gen-
eral point of view, see Albert Mathias Friend, “The Portraits of the Evan-
gelists in Greek and Latin,” Art Studies 5 (1927): 118–47 and 7 (1929): 3–29.
15. Sonja Drimmer, “Visualizing Intertextuality: Conflating Forms
of Creativity in Late Medieval ‘Author Portraits,’” in Citation, Intertex-
tuality, and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, vol. 2, Cross-­
Disciplinary Perspectives on Medieval Culture, ed. Giuliano Di Bacco and
Yolanda Plumley (Liverpool, 2013), 84, quoting Michael Camille, “Visual
Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible Moralisé,” Word and Image
5 (1989): 117.
16. Drimmer, “Visualizing Intertextuality,” 89. Elizabeth Sears discusses
a similar phenomenon in works dating from the twelfth century in “Por-
traits in Counterpoint: Jerome and Jeremiah in an Augsburg Manu-
script,” in Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object,
ed. Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2002), 6.
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

one significant difference: in many cases, rather than an

empty book symbolizing wisdom and truth coming directly
from God, the codex pictured in the illumination displayed 37
words on its open page or pages that clearly depicted the
work as composed by and physically linked to the book’s
author. Although the later medieval authors represented
before specific manuscripts, pen in hand, were not neces-
sarily scribes of their works, these portraits connected them
concretely, or physically, through the act of copying, to the
words they composed.17

women writing in late-medieval manuscripts

One further aspect of the development of scribal and au-

thorial portraits from the early to late Middle Ages needs
to be addressed, namely, the visual depiction of women
reading and writing in medieval manuscripts. Lesley Smith
has conducted a thorough analysis of depictions of women
writing in manuscripts before 1400, pointing out that these
depictions are few and far between. Smith ultimately con-
cludes that manuscript images of women writing before
1400 are “not a constant, repeated illustration of the text
in many manuscripts at expected points … but one-offs—
very much the unusual.”18 Arguing that depictions of men

17. On medieval scribal portraits, see Anton Legner, “Illustres Manus,”

in Ornamenta eccelesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik, ed. Anton
Legner, 3 vols. (Cologne, 1985), 1:187–230. See also Michael Gullick, ed.,
Pen in Hand: Medieval Scribal Portraits, Colophons and Tools (Walkhern,
2006). Studies that deal with authors who also acted as scribes include
A.S.G. Edwards, “The Author as Scribe: Cavendish’s Metrical Visions and
MS. Egerton 2402,” The Library, 5th ser., 29 (1974): 446–49, and Peter J.
Lucas, “An Author as Copyist of His Own Work: John Capgrave OSA
(1393–1464),” in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts
and Early Printed Books in Honor of A.I. Doyle, ed. Richard Beadle and
A.J. Piper (Aldershot, 1995), 227–48.
18. Lesley Smith, “Scriba, Femina: Medieval Depictions of Women Writ-
ing,” in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

writing abound because their situations were easily mod-

eled upon the Evangelist portraits, Smith suggests that the
38 infrequency of depictions of female writers can be attrib-
uted to the lack of visual models available to illuminators.19
However, an examination of images of women writing in
manuscripts produced after 1400 yields very different re-
sults from the “one-offs” discussed by Smith. In the cases of
HM 60 and Paris fr. 875, a woman writing does appear at ex-
pected points, and she seems to be adapted from established
models of women writing in other secular manuscripts
throughout the fifteenth century.20 Testard’s illustrations of
the XXI Epistres d’Ovide may thus exemplify a fundamental

Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor (London, 1996), 20–44 at 38.

19. Ibid., 30.
20. At the end of her article Smith includes a list of women depicted
writing, which could be greatly expanded with references to manuscripts
produced after 1400. A few examples can be cited here: numerous ver-
sions of the XXI Epistres contain multiple portraits of women writing
(HM 60; Paris fr. 875; Paris, Chambre des Députés, MS 1466; Paris, Bib-
liothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 874; Vienna, Österreichiches Na-
tionalbibliothek, Cod. 2624; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS
fr. 25397; London, British Library, Harley MS 4867; Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS Rés. 5108); Les
vies des femmes célèbres (Nantes, Musée Dobrée, MS 17) contains por-
traits of female authors (fols. 18v, 21v, and 61v); Saint Petersburg, Na-
tional Library of Russia, MS Fr. F.V.XIV.8 contains two miniatures of
Anne de Bretagne penning a letter (fols. 1v and 58v); two exemplars of
the De mulieribus claris in French translation (Paris, Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France, MSS fr. 598 and 599) contain multiple miniatures of her-
oines writing (Paris fr. 599, fols. 22v and 72v; Paris fr. 598 fols. 31r, 37r,
126r, and 143v). Lastly, one other manuscript, now housed in a private
collection, contains a selection of letters from Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s
translation of the Heroides made for Anne de Bretagne as part of a poetic
anthology. I refer to this manuscript as Christie’s 42 because it was sold
by Christie’s in 2010 as part of sale 7911, lot 42 (the sales catalogue can be
found here: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/oc-
tovien-de-saint-gelais-epistres-dovide-french-5334931-details.aspx). For
a detailed examination of this manuscript, see Cynthia J. Brown, “Cele-
bration and Controversy at a Late Medieval French Court: A Poetic An-
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

shift in an illuminator’s willingness to portray a woman en-

gaged in the act of writing that occurred during this period.
I propose three possible explanations for this shift. First, 39
the visual and verbal models of women reading and writing
offered by an early fifteenth-century author and manuscript
producer, Christine de Pizan, may have enabled further de-
pictions of erudite women later in that century.21 Second,
Susan Groag Bell argues that books of hours produced for
and owned by women throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries, in foregrounding Mary’s devo-
tional reading as a point of contact with God and the scrip-
tures, reflected the lived experiences of the female readers,
and “added respectability to laywomen occupying them-
selves with books.”22 Third, the role of female patrons and

thology for and about Anne of Brittany and Her Female Entourage” and
Brown, The Queen’s Library, 181–244.
21. For a complete list of portraits of Christine, see Gilbert Ouy and
Christine Reno, eds., Album Christine de Pizan (Turnhout, 2012). See
also Deborah McGrady, “Reading for Authority: Portraits of Christine
de Pizan and Her Readers,” in Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Author-
ship in Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (To-
ronto, 2012), 154–77.
22. Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay
Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” in Women and Power in the Mid-
dle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, Ga., 1988),
173. See also Laura Saetveit Miles, “The Origins and Development of the
Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation,” Speculum 89 (2014): 632–69.
To Bell’s discussion of the Virgin Mary reading, I would add that depic-
tions of Mary’s mother, Saint Anne, also included female interaction with
the book, and in this case one that often foregrounded the role of the
mother (Anne) in educating her daughter (Mary). As Michael Clanchy
has argued, “[t]he image of St Anne teaching the Virgin to read … is
the most explicit indicator of the new status given to ladies with their
prayer books,” in “Images of Ladies with Prayer Books: What Do They
Signify,” in The Church and the Book, ed. Robert N. Swanson (Wood-
bridge, Suffolk, 2004), 106–22 at 121. See also Pamela Sheingorn, “‘The
Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta
32 (1993): 69–80.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

book owners evoked an association between the fictional

protagonists of certain works and their real readers.23
40 In summary, the portraits of women readers and writ-
ers in HM 60 and Paris fr. 875 can be situated within two
primary contexts. First, the development of the secular au-
thor portrait began to focus the reader’s attention on the
physical act of copying or transcription as a way to link the
original auctor with the present material object, the book.
Second, the particular depiction of women as writers and
readers, through the visual narrative presenting their inter-
action with the books pictured in the miniatures, emerged
through both religious and secular models provided in
other manuscripts throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries—models that often served to link the manu-
script’s fictional female readers with its real female owner.
These visual topoi would likely have been familiar to read-
ers of HM 60 and Paris fr. 875, and could thus contribute to
their interpretations of the codices’ visual narratives.

robinet testard’s illustrations of the xxi

epistres d’ovide as visual mises en abyme

As noted above, many of the miniatures in both HM 60 and

Paris fr. 875 that prefigure each letter present a woman en-
gaged in the act of transcribing the very epistle whose text
appears below the image. In so doing, the codex asks its
readers to see in its images representations of the very phys-
ical objects they now hold in their hands. In the case of HM
60, eleven of the manuscript’s twenty-one original minia-
tures foreground a character writing, reading, or somehow

23. As Martha Driver has argued in the cases of visual depictions of

women reading in the manuscript versions of the French translation of
Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, in “Mirrors of a Collective Past: Re-
Considering Images of Medieval Women,” in Women and the Book, 75–
93 at 79.
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

interacting with a letter or book;24 only five of the manu-

script’s original illuminations do not include a visual repre-
sentation of the heroine’s epistle.25 41
The female protagonists in both manuscripts are ele-
gantly dressed in a mixture of current and exotic fashions26
and most often situated in an interior scene, as in the case
of Phyllis (HM 60 fol. 7r; Paris fr. 875 fol. 5v). In her right
hand, the heroine holds a quill with which she writes on the
sheet on her lap (fig. 1). Beside her is a desk with an inkwell
and pen case.27 As in late-medieval author portraits, these
tools of a scribe’s trade and the pose in which she is pic-
tured serve to link the woman pictured in the manuscript
with the act of materially producing the manuscript page.
This is reinforced by the words already transcribed on the
sheet before her, which make up an integral part of the writ-
ten message, coming from a human actor rather than God,

24. Reproductions of HM 60’s miniatures are available through Dig-

ital Scriptorium: http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf?Call
Number=HM+60&Description=&page=1.
25. These are Ariadne (fol. 52r), Hypermnestra (fol. 75v), Leander (fol.
97r), Hero (fol. 105r), and Acontius (fol. 112r). In the case of Paris fr. 875,
this number is reduced to three: Hermione (fol. 43r), Hypermnestra (fol.
78r), and Leander (fol. 101v).
26. François Avril writes of the protagonists in Paris fr. 875 that “[d]ress
is alternately exotic or inspired by the fashion of the day,” in Creating
French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, ed.
Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Prosser Gifford (New Haven, Conn., 1995),
175. As an example of these “exotic fashions,” I would point to the turbans
worn by many of the female correspondents. John Block Friedman dis-
cusses this headwear, arguing that the turban on women often “helps to
focus our attention on the central figure’s slightly off-key exoticism, not
quite contemporary and yet not quite historical,” in “The Art of the Ex-
otic: Robinet Testard’s Turbans and Turban-like Coiffure,” in Medieval
Clothing and Textiles 4 (2008): 173–192 at 191.
27. Christopher de Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators, Medieval Crafts-
men (Toronto, 1992), 29, discusses such portable inkpots attached to pen
cases used by scribes.
 Figure 1.

Robinet Testard, Phyllis, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide, France, ca. 1500
San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60, fol. 7r
(Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino)
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

and further assert the physical, rather than spiritual, link

between the woman writing and the words she transcribes.
Dejanira’s portrait in HM 60 (fol. 46r; fig. 2), contain- 43
ing certain similarities to Evangelist portraits that a late-
medieval reader would not have missed, emerges as a sort
of hybrid between religious and secular presentations of
the medieval writer. Seated before her epistle, Dejanira’s at-
tention is turned not downwards towards the words on the
page but up towards her window, where shafts of light de-
scend. Just as the divine inspiration of the Evangelists was
often indicated by the presence of their symbolic animals,
here Dejanira’s act of composition is linked to God through
lightbeams from above. These rays recall more specifically
those of Annunciation scenes typical of the late fifteenth
century, as does the blue veil Dejanira wears, which is also
often associated with Mary during this time period.28 This
visual nod to a well-known portrait of a female religious fig-
ure was perhaps placed here in order to assert the religious
piety of the manuscript’s female owner.29 Additionally, the
presence of the open book in Mary’s hands in many Annun-
ciation scenes serves to link Dejanira’s portrait here with
the act of reading as religious devotion so often visually as-
sociated with the Virgin during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.30 In the secular realm, the fact that Dejanira’s
portrait contains details not present in typical Annuncia-
tion scenes—namely, the quill, inkpot, and desk—serves to

28. Examples of Mary wearing a blue scarf or cape abound. For exam-
ple, one roughly contemporary Annunciation scene (London, British Li-
brary, Add. MS 35254, fol. 5r) depicts Mary before an open book with a
descending shaft of light in the Heures dites d’Henry VII (ca. 1500) illumi-
nated by Jean Bourdichon, possibly for Louis XII, as suggested by Avril
and Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures, 294–96.
29. See Brown, The Queen’s Library, 193, where she discusses the possi-
bility of Anne de Bretagne as HM 60’s owner.
30. The link could either be to Mary at the Annunciation or to St. Anne.
See note 22.
 Figure 2.

Robinet Testard, Dejanira, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide, France, ca. 1500
San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60, fol. 46r
(Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino)
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

remind viewers of the heroine’s role in the physical produc-

tion of the letter before her.
But Testard’s miniatures do not merely serve to link the 45
heroines to the physical production of the manuscript. As
discussed above, the mise en abyme—a representation of a
literary or artistic work (the letter in the miniature) pic-
tured within itself (the folios of the manuscript)—also
invites the reader’s active participation in recognizing es-
sential forms and meanings in the work. In this case, the
representation of Phyllis and Dejanira engaged in the pro-
duction of their epistles, and the emphasis on the physical-
ity of this act through the scribal tools and the words on the
page, evoke for readers the fact that the heroines interact
with the very words they read, the very volumes they hold.
In other words, Testard’s use of mise en abyme, in placing
the material act of production at the center of the image,
signals the correspondence between fictional female pro-
tagonist and real female (?) reader through their shared
possession and interpretation of the heroine’s words writ-
ten on a physical object.
Although most of HM 60’s miniatures present the corre-
spondents engaged in the act of writing, some of these por-
traits also highlight the fictional characters’ roles as readers
and interpreters of the letters before them. Paris (HM 60,
fol. 80r; fig. 3; Paris fr. 875, fol. 83r) is pictured in an interior
scene, right hand holding a pen to a single leaf. Although
only the case in Paris’s and Helen’s miniatures in HM 60, the
words on the correspondent’s page are clearly legible, read-
ing “Vaten mon am,” mirroring Helen’s miniature (fol. 88v;
fig. 4; Paris fr. 875, fol. 92r), who is, indeed, the only other
letter-writer whose words are distinguishable: her characters
clearly appear “Vaten mon amoureux …. ”31 With punctu-

31. The letter pictured in the miniature preceding Paris’s epistle in

Paris fr. 875, although not in Helen’s, likewise reads “VATEN MON
AMOU …. ” (fol. 83r).
 Figure 3.

Robinet Testard, Paris, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide, France, ca. 1500
San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60, fol. 80r
(Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino)
 Figure 4.

Robinet Testard, Helen, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide, France, ca. 1500
San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60, fol. 88v
(Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino)
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

ation added, this citation would read “Va t’en, mon amou-
reux,” roughly translating as “Go away, my love.” Could this
48 have been a conscious effort on the illuminator’s part to
connect through their two miniatures the verbal and ma-
terial exchange between Paris and Helen? In other words,
when Saint-Gelais’s Helen begins her response to Paris by
alluding to his letter that she has received and which she has
before her eyes,32 this textual reference is visually corrobo-
rated by the words transcribed on the page in front of Helen
in Testard’s miniature, which are the very same words Paris
was shown writing. Thus, Helen is presented in the illumi-
nation as both reader of Paris’s letter through the shared
words on their pages, and as writer of her own through the
pen and inkpot she holds in her hands.
In the cases of Medea33 and Briseis in HM 60, neither
heroine holds any sort of writing implement in her hand.
However, the presence of a leaf or codex on the table in
front of her indicates the heroine’s participation in the pro-
cess of producing meaning, if not through composition,
then through reading.34 Briseis (fol. 11v) is pictured in an
exterior scene, standing at a table in front of her (fig. 5).

32. Helen writes: “Apres que j’eu a mes yeulx presentee / La tienne lectre
de divers motz hantee / Et que j’eu bien tout le faict pourpencé … ” (HM
60, fol. 88v) (“After I had before my eyes / Your letter haunted by so
many words / And I had intensely considered its meaning … ”). As HM
60 comprises the primary focus of this article, I have transcribed all tex-
tual citations from this source. However, a comparison to the text found
in Paris fr. 875 reveals no significant variants. I have added apostrophes,
commas, and periods to the transcriptions where necessary to facilitate
comprehension. I have also added the acute accent in the cases of mas-
culine nouns and past participles, and differentiated between j and i and
u and v. All translations are my own.
33. Medea (fol. 62r) and Dido (fol. 35v) are anomalous in terms of the
other miniatures in HM 60, because both hold bound codices rather
than single leaves.
34. David Hult has pointed to the importance of interpretive participa-
tion by readers in the Middle Ages, describing the “dialogue established
 Figure 5.

Robinet Testard, Briseis, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide, France, ca. 1500
San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60, fol. 11v
(Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino)
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

Her two hands grasp the letter on the table that she has pre-
sumably just composed and transcribed. In Paris fr. 875 (fol.
50 10v) the heroine holds her letter in her right hand, and an
inkwell and pen case in her left. Through this image and its
accompanying text, three layers of readers are announced:
first, the fictional author herself, who now holds her letter
before her eyes; second, the anticipated reader, Achilles, to
whom Briseis addresses her words and intends to send the
physical object that contains them; and third, the manu-
script’s readers who peruse the text of Briseis’s letter and re-
gard her image engaged in the act of reading the epistle she
has just composed. Beneath this image, Briseis’s letter be-
gins with her verbal description of the very leaf she holds
in her hands and the very epistle the medieval owner now
reads. Testard’s Briseis, then, mirrors the reader’s own po-
sition, that of someone holding an object with the heroine’s
narrative written on it.
In presenting this dual visual and verbal message, HM
60 offers up a very specific depiction of the act of reading.
The manuscript’s miniatures, through their focus on the in-
terpretation conducted by the letter-writers themselves and
their use of mise en abyme, encourage an active participa-
tion on the part of the reader in producing meaning. View-
ing the miniature and then the text below it, readers are
asked to mirror Briseis’s very actions, that is, to partake in
her position as interpreter of the letter they see in the min-
iature, the letter they read in the text, and the letter from
whose material existence in the form of the codex’s folios
they are asked to extract meaning.
The mise en abyme of the protagonists’ letters in HM 60
and Paris fr. 875 bears comparison with another manuscript
painted by Robinet Testard, Paris fr. 599. Owned by Louise

between writer and reader.” David Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Read-

ership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge, 1986), 94.
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

de Savoie as early as 1496,35 the text of Des cleres et nobles

femmes contains biographies of famous women from An-
tiquity to the Middle Ages. Although seven of the volume’s 51
miniatures present a woman engaged in the act of reading36
or writing,37 these portraits distinguish themselves from
those found in Testard’s illuminations for the two copies of
the XXI Epistres for two primary reasons.
First, because the texts the fictional heroines read or
write are not meant to represent the object consumed by
Paris fr. 599’s female owner, these miniatures do not con-
stitute a mise en abyme. While the heroines in Paris fr. 599
certainly bear certain similarities to their female patron-
ess in terms of their modes of dress and intellectual activ-
ity, they do not emphasize the very correlation between
the artifacts physically transcribed by these female protag-
onists within the fictional narrative and the actual manu-
script interpreted by Louise. Thus, Louise would likely have
seen in these women illustrations of female activity, surely,
but not an encouragement to associate herself with them
through the shared act of touching and interpreting their
works. In fact, it is only in the volume’s last miniature, rep-
resenting Boccaccio on folio 94v, that the book pictured in
the male author’s right hand signifies the writer’s physical
and intellectual connection to the manuscript itself. Yet be-

35. The manuscript contains a French translation of Boccaccio’s De

mulieribus claris, and is mentioned in Louise’s 1496 inventory of her
possessions upon her husband’s death, as produced in Sénemaud, La
bibliothèque de Charles d’Orléans, 19. This entry is cited by Kathleen
Wilson-­Chevalier and Mary Beth Winn, “Louise de Savoie, ses livres,
sa bibliothèque,” in Louise de Savoie, 1476–1531, ed. Pascal Brioist, Laure
Fagnart, and Cédric Michon (Tours, 2015), 235–52, who identify Sénem-
aud’s description of the manuscript as corresponding with Paris fr. 599.
36. Here I refer to the sibyl Erythrea (fol. 18v), Thisbe (fol. 13r), Penelope
(fol. 34r), Demophile (fol. 2r), and Gualdrada (fol. 89v).
37. Nicostrata (fol. 22v) writes in a codex on a pupitre, while Cornificia
(fol. 72r) writes on a single sheet or scroll positioned in her lap.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

cause Boccaccio is not a woman, and because of his status

as revered auctor rather than character in the work’s narra-
52 tive, this last image would not have encouraged the codex’s
female owner to see herself in the manuscript’s pages, or
rather, to see a connection between the object pictured on
the manuscript page, held by a man, and the one containing
its pages, held by her. Moreover, the closed book in Boccac-
cio’s hand does not mirror Louise’s position as reader inter-
acting with her open volume.
Second, the words on the page so carefully constructed
by the French artist in Paris fr. 875 and HM 60 so as to ap-
pear to be real characters are not painted in the same style
in Paris fr. 599. On the contrary, the objects read and writ-
ten by the female protagonists in Louise’s copy of Des cleres
et nobles femmes instead contain merely black lines, thus
symbolically standing in for the text to be interpreted and
produced by the learned women, but not also emphasizing
the correlation between the words written by the volume’s
female protagonists and the narrative read by its medieval
female reader through their feigned visual correlation with
actual letters of an alphabet.
The example of Nicostrata (fol. 22v) can be helpful in
teasing out the differences between other representations of
women writing and those found in Paris fr. 875 and HM 60.
The heroine, according to the French translation of Boccac-
cio, invented the Latin alphabet38 and provided the foun-
dations of basic grammar to the Italians.39 Although these
contributions directly lead to the writing of great works and
great glory for Europe,40 and although Boccaccio’s text at-

38. Fol. 23r.

39. “Car Carmente … donna les sentences de lart de gramayre” (fol. 23v).
40. “Car Europe qui contient la tierce partie du monde use e noz lettres
desquelles sont faiz et composez infiniz volumes de livres en toutes fac-
ultez ou sont mis et gardez en perpetuelle memoire les faiz des hommes et
les nobles et excellentes gloires et louenges de dieu affin que nous qui na-
vons point veu toutes icelles choses … nous les congnoissons” (fol. 23v).
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

tributes them to Nicostrata, the written narrative itself does

not portray her either composing or transcribing. Thus, Te-
stard’s choice to paint her engaged in this act supplements 53
Boccaccio’s biography with an added detail rather than re-
inforcing it through the shared use of mise en abyme. As
will be discussed below, the fact that Testard’s miniatures
for the XXI Epistres d’Ovide directly correspond to the tex-
tual emphasis placed on the letters as physical objects cre-
ates a collaboration between verbal and visual narratives
in the manuscript. In other words, Testard emphasizes the
materiality of the letters, and the role of the protagonists in
creating these letters in tandem with the foregrounding of
these two qualities of the epistles in Saint-Gelais’s text. In
Paris fr. 599, by contrast, the example of Nicostrata demon-
strates the non-correspondence between the volume in the
miniature and the volume owned by Louise, both in terms
of the relationship between the text and the image, and the
fact that Nicostrata is not portrayed as writing the same
work she is described (or, in fact, not described) as writing
in Boccaccio’s narrative.
The portraits found in Paris fr. 599 may gesture at cer-
tain shared attributes of the female heroines pictured and
described in Louise’s copy of Des cleres et nobles femmes
and Louise herself, but they do so with less specificity than
the two other manuscripts examined here. While the por-
traits in the former may emphasize the act of reading a text
shared by the female protagonists and Louise herself, the
portraits in Paris fr. 875 and HM 60 bring to the fore the
very specific act of reading and physically interacting with
this text carried out by Dejanira and Anne, or Phyllis and
Louise. Ultimately, then, the portraits of women readers
and writers that do not constitute a mise en abyme of the
manuscript itself also do not encourage the medieval read-
er’s active participation in the interpretation and creation of
meaning figured by the texts and images contained in HM
60 and Paris fr. 875, nor do they emphasize the materiality
of the codex held in the medieval reader’s hands.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

textual mise en abyme in the xxi epistres:

modeling a material reading
54
The interactions of text and image in HM 60 and Paris fr.
875 testify to the multiple systems of signification at work
within the medieval codex. As Stephen Nichols has dis-
cussed, although the text of the manuscripts may describe
something similar to what is pictured in the miniatures,
these two narratives may simultaneously refer to, contra-
dict, or complement each other, thus requiring an interpre-
tive participation on the part of the reader.41 In the cases of
HM 60 and Paris fr. 875, the miniatures bring to the fore the
process of production typical of scribal-author portraits—
a scene that underlines, according to Stuart Whatling, “the
relationship between the depicted action of writing and the
physical object (a finished book) that contains it.”42 How-
ever, the textual emphasis placed on the heroines’ letters
as objects verbally highlights the material existence of the
manuscript held in the reader’s hand, thereby shifting the
reader’s focus away from how the codex was produced and
onto how it should be received.
In the text contained in HM 60 and Paris fr. 875, the her-
oines themselves verbally signal the physical and material
existence of their letters—that is to say, they describe their
letters not only as linguistic, but also as physical messages.
The encouragement to experience the epistles as objects,
not just words, from which meaning can be extracted, is
exemplified by the beginning of Briseis’s correspondence,
where she directs her lover to knowledge conveyed specif-

41. Nichols notes that each manuscript consists of the work of multiple
artists who each contribute to the whole, explaining that “[e]ach system
is a unit independent of the others and yet calls attention to them; each
tries to convey something about the other while to some extent substi-
tuting for it,” in Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manu-
script Culture,” Speculum 65 (1990): 1–10 at 7.
42. Whatling, “Narrative Art in Northern Europe,” 170.
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

ically through the physical attributes of her message. The

heroine begins her address to Achilles with a description of
the object on which she writes: 55

This letter that you now read is

Addressed to you from me, Briseis,
Which I wove into Greek with difficulty
Because I am born of another language;
You will find the writing
Erased in many places, but this was done by my eyes
Which soaked my paper in tears.
You will not recognize many words
But nevertheless the blotches that are on the page
Will at least convey to you my bitter mourning
As much as or more than the writing alone.43

43. “Ceste lectre que maintenant te liz / S’adraisse a toy de par moy, Bri-
seis, / Laquelle j’ay a peine en grec tissue / Pour ce que suys d’estrange
langue issue. / Tu trouveras l’escripture en meintz lieux / Effaccee, maiz
ce ont faict mes yeulx / Qui mon papier ont arroisé de lermes / Dont te
seront incogneuz plusieurs termes, / Mays toutesfoys les taches qui se-
ront / Mon aspre deil au meins t’esprimeront / Autant ou plus que la seule
escripture” (fols. 11v–12r). Interestingly enough, Ovid’s Briseis stated that
lacrimae pondera vocis habent (“tears, too, have none the less the weight
of words”). Ovid, Heroides, trans. Grant Showerman (London, 1931), 32,
line 4. Thus, Saint-Gelais’s Briseis asserts that the blots which are her bit-
ter mourning will express to her absent lover as much or more than the
writing on the page, whereas Ovid’s heroine had merely compared the
weights of tears and words.
Sappho also describes the tears that mar her letter: “Alas! I write to you
and I cry while writing, / Tears pour out of my eyes at all hours! / You
will be able to see well how badly the work is transcribed / How my cry-
ing has erased my letter!” (“Helaz! J’escriptz et en escripvant je pleure, /
Lermes yssent de mes yeulx a toute heure. / Bien pourras veoir quant
l’oeuvre est mal trassee / Comment mon pleur ma lectre effacee”) (fol.
127r). Here, the emphasis is placed on l’oeuvre and ma lectre. In Ovid’s
text the classical author underlines Sappho’s eyes: “Scribimus, et lacri-
mis oculi rorantur obortis; / adspice, quam sit in hoc multa litura loco!”
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

Briseis calls Achilles’s attention to the erased writing on

the page, the paper drenched in tears, and the stains that
56 express as much as or more than the writing itself. In refer-
ring to her letter as something that she “wove” (using the
French verb tissir), the heroine underlines her role in both
the object’s creative (through a word play with the verb is-
sir) and physical (through the reference to the act of weav-
ing) production. Highlighting in particular the materiality
of the letter’s makeup, the act of weaving here could even
refer to the papyrus that Briseis would have written on in
Greek, woven together from individual plant stems. Ulti-
mately, this passage serves as a message to the manuscript’s
reader that the object they hold in their hands has more to
tell them than simply the words they read.
Certain visual aspects represented in Briseis’s miniature
in HM 60 (fig. 5) reinforce this verbal message. Standing
before a table, the heroine places both of her hands on the
letter before her. This gesture indicates her proprietary role
in the letter’s interpretation, and models for her readers and
viewers how they too should interact with the textual nar-
rative, that is to say, physically. Additionally, although the
artist has taken great pains to make the characters tran-
scribed onto Briseis’s page appear to make up real words,
upon closer examination they in fact do not. Thus, HM 60’s
visual narrative reinforces Briseis’s verbal account by fore-
grounding a material interaction between the heroine and
the physical object, and by encouraging this mode of inter-
pretation over the purely linguistic reading associated with
the false words on the page.44
Penelope, too, emphasizes her letter’s physical attributes,
describing it as made up of paper and tears: “I take up pa-
per and ink … , / Thus I write [you] my letter / Drowned

(“I write, and my eyes let fall the springing tears like drops of dew; look,
how many a blot obscures this place!”) Ovid, Heroides, 186, lines 97–98.
44. I thank Sonja Drimmer for this interpretation.
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

in tears.”45 This invocation of the material object that her

husband is expected to hold in his hands seems unneces-
sary at first: why describe the letter that the heroine intends 57
for Odysseus to see himself? In addition to underlining the
material presence of her letter for her husband, this passage
in the text also functions as a guide for the epistle’s subse-
quent reader, who does not hold Penelope’s actual letter in
hand, and therefore does not see the tears that dramatically
stained the original, albeit fictional, version. Penelope thus
encourages her reader to imagine this letter not merely as
language, as the words read on the page, but also as a physi-
cal object made of ink and paper, subject to stains that serve
as traces, markers, and emblems of the heroine’s grief.
In the case of Phaedra, the female correspondent even
goes so far as to claim that her letter contains, rather than
represents or expresses through language, her deepest emo-
tions and desires, as if these sentiments have been trans-
ferred from one physical container, the heart, to another,
the letter. The heroine begins her declaration with a general
rendition of lovers exchanging letters, who send by card the
feelings held in their hearts: “Those who do not see their
lovers / Readily write and send them letters / … And if they
are able, either by sea or land, / They send in a card that
which the heart contains.”46 For Phaedra, what the heart
holds is sent in the letter itself (“en carte”), thus placing the
emphasis on this physical object as containing lovers’ deep-

45. “Sy prens papier et encre … / Lors je rescriz et adroisse ma lectre /

Baignee en pleurs … ” (fol. 5v). This description of Penelope’s letter has,
in fact, been added by the translator, since Ovid’s original verbally intro-
duced the sheet of paper as it is transferred to the messenger, but not the
actual act of writing in the present tense, and not her tears: “traditur huic
digitis charta notata meis.” (“into his hand is given the sheet writ by these
fingers of mine”) Ovid, Heroides, 14, line 62.
46. “Voluntiers ceulx qui leurs amys ne voyent / Lectres leur font et lec-
tres leur envoyent / … Et sy peult l’on, soyt par mer ou par terre, / Man-
der en carte ce que le cueur enserre” (fol. 17r).
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

est emotions (“ce que le cueur enserre”). Phaedra then states

that she inscribes her desire in letters, using her writing as
58 a declaration of her emotion, but also physically imprinting
it onto the writing surface she uses: “ … by writing I declare
and send you / That which my mouth has not dared ex-
press / And imprint my desire in letters.”47 Here, the transla-
tor Saint-Gelais asserts the physical nature of the desire that
is imprinted on the page in the form of linguistic characters,
or even that Phaedra’s words will make her desire penetrate
her lover’s heart or spirit.48
Addressing Hyppolitus, Phaedra asks her lover to receive
this declaration of her deepest sentiments, and, indeed, the
emotion itself as it is impressed in the characters on the
page. Addressing medieval readers, the late-medieval trans-
lator implicitly asks them to consider the letters not only
as linguistic signifiers, but also as physical presences and
reminders of emotion. The mise en abyme of the epistles
represented within the manuscripts further points to the
whole codex as object not only as a vehicle for words but
likewise as a vehicle for desire and the protagonists them-
selves transmitted by the material existences of their foli-
os.49 The heroines’ instructions to their absent lovers thus

47. Fol. 17v; my translation. The French reads: “ … par escript je de-
claire et te mande / Ce que de bouche n’ay ouzé exprimer / Et mon de-
sir en lectres imprimer.” This last line is added by the translator; Ovid’s
text repeats twice that the God of love has commanded Phaedra to write,
but makes no mention of the desire “imprinted” in her letter. See Ovid,
Heroides, 44, lines 7–17.
48. The Dictionnaire du moyen français (1330–1500) defines “imprimer”
as either to make an imprint in something (“faire une empreinte dans
qqc.”), print a book (“Imprimer [un livre]”), or to make penetrate pro-
foundly in the heart or spirit (“Faire pénétrer profondément [dans le
coeur, dans l’esprit … ]”). Available online at http://www.atilf.fr/dmf/.
49. The association with the letter and the heart perhaps stems from a
more deep-seated classical and medieval tradition, wherein authors of-
ten referred to their inner selves as texts of sorts. Eric Jager discusses the
metaphor of the self-as-text from Antiquity to the present day in The
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

construct verbal models for the manuscripts’ readers, tell-

ing them explicitly how the manuscripts should be read:
not merely as linguistic signifiers, but also as tears, stains, 59
and creased pages through which the heroines’ emotions
and identities are conveyed.
Canace also explicitly states that her letter will convey to
her lover her fate, her actions, and a vivid picture of the act
of writing itself:

If you find these letters marred

By primitive writing and stained by my own blood,
So much so that they do not allow the content to be seen,
You will thus know what has happened to me:
This desire alone makes me want to summon up all my
strength
To write you before I kill myself.
I hold the prepared plume in one hand
And in the other I have the inhuman sword.
In my lap lies the epistle
That has been written by many tears and much grief:
Such is the image and the life-like painting
Of her from whom this writing comes.50

Canace’s description of her blood, tears, and indecipherable

handwriting underlines for the reader the materiality of the

Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000). In the case of the XXI Epistres, we see
a kind of reversal or transfer of this metaphor, as the inner self, in this
case the heart, originally containing the text, is transposed onto and into
the codex.
50. “Sy tu trouves ces lectres entachees / De rude escript et de mon sang
tachees, / Pourtant ne laisse a veoir le contenu, / Lors cognoistras comme
m’est advenu / Ce seul vouloir me meust et m’esvertue / De t’escripre de-
vant que je me tue. / Je tiens la pleume taillee en une main / Et en laultre
jay le glayve inhumain. / En mon giron gist la carte confite / De pleurs et
plaingtz qu’est forment escripte: / Telle est l’ymaige et au vif la peincture /
De celle la dont vient ceste escripture” (fol. 57r).
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

codex s/he holds, views, and touches. Through these mate-

rial indicators, Canace (fig. 6) claims that her lover will see
60 the image and life-like painting of herself engaged in the act
of writing, letter across her lap.
Stuart Whatling’s thesis about the function of mise en
abyme in medieval images as announcing or defining the
reception of an object provides further insight here. He has
noted that mise en abyme was often used in narrative im-
ages to “condition the reception of an object.”51 Although
largely dealing with visual representations, this idea can
be applied to my textual analysis here, for the narratives in
the XXI Epistres provide a model of how to interact with
the object, the letter, not only for the absent lovers but also
for us as readers. In other words, the heroines describe ver-
bally for their lovers and for their subsequent readers how
their letters are meant to be read: through an experience of
the page’s sensory attributes. This experience of the mate-
rial object, the heroines argue, will convey their emotions,
their desires, and their very existence. Paris fr. 875 and HM
60, then, through the interplay of text and image, exemplify
in part Michael Camille’s description of the medieval read-
ing experience,52 as it invokes its own material existence,
thus requiring a sensory interaction from their readers and
viewers that mimics the one described by their heroines
and pictured in their illuminations.

51. Whatling, “Narrative Art in Northern Europe,” 186.

52. Camille argued that manuscript consumption in the Middle Ages
entailed an activation and utilization of all five senses, which “functioned
together on the manuscript page to produce meaning.” He added that
“[r]eading a text was a charged somatic experience in which every turn
of the page was sensational, from the feel of the flesh and hair side of
the parchment on one’s fingertips to the lubricious labial mouthing of
the written words with one’s tongue,” in “Sensations of the Page: Imaging
Technologies and Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” in The Iconic Page
in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and The-
resa Tinkle (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998), 38.
 Figure 6.

Robinet Testard, Canace, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide, France, ca. 1500
San Marino, Calif., The Huntington Library, MS HM 60, fol. 57r
(Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino)
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

the manuscript’s invitation to physical

participation in the creation of literary
62 meaning, and subsequent readers who took it up
on its offer

The reader, actively interpreting the manuscript’s text and

images, will also be aware, at a certain level, of a dissonance
between the visual depictions of the correspondents as au-
thors and scribes of the letters and the actual verbal produc-
ers of the manuscript’s text: Ovid, Octovien de Saint-Gelais,
and eventually the codex’s scribe. In other words, although
viewers’ eyes are likely trained to associate earlier author
portraits with many of HM 60’s miniatures, the echoes of
these recurring medieval symbols present a rather odd case,
since they also know that Penelope, for example, did not
actually pen her letter, because it was the poet, Ovid, who
did so.53 However, the fact that these protagonists are not
the actual authors, nor are they the actual scribes of their
epistles may well have been irrelevant to the late-medieval
reader conditioned to view artistic and literary produc-
tion as an intertextual endeavor.54 Viewed in this context,

53. The question of whether a late-medieval reader would have been

attuned to issues of authorship in the modern sense of the word is a
complicated one. Alastair Minnis has shown how the rise of academic
reading in the twelfth century began to establish the importance of the
individual himself in the creation of knowledge, in Alastair J. Minnis,
Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1988), 84. Cynthia
J. Brown shows how, especially in the time period during which HM 60
was produced, this version of authorship evolved with the advent of print
towards a conception of authorship further focused on individual cre-
ation of knowledge. Cynthia J. Brown, Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis
of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995). In light of the
work of Minnis and Brown, it is very likely that the late-medieval readers
of HM 60 would have been attuned to some sort of inquiry as to the au-
thorship of the codex’s text.
54. Sonja Drimmer, in “Visualizing Intertextuality,” convincingly argues
that the late-medieval scribal/author portrait developed as a visual coun-
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

the idea of collaboration among Ovid, Saint-Gelais, and the

correspondents may not have created any sort of confusion,
because the late-medieval reader could easily have viewed 63
the bound codex as a compilation of the twenty-one letters
that in some way mirrored the processes of compilatio and
ordinatio so commonly viewed as inherent in the literary
endeavor at the end of the Middle Ages.55
A non-medieval reader’s desire to distinguish between
correspondent-as-author and Ovid-as-author is exempli-
fied by certain material aspects of HM 60 itself, because
at some point, a reader (or multiple readers) attempted to
clarify the tension between the two by inserting two folios
at the beginning of the manuscript.56 Instead of establishing

terpart to the emphasis placed on compilation found in medieval texts. If

we view the miniatures in HM 60 in this light, they become visual cues
for the reader that highlight the collaboration of multiple authors, in-
cluding Ovid and Saint-Gelais, whose presence, although not pictured
visually, is actually underlined by the act of writing taken up by the her-
oines. This is the case particularly in the miniatures of Paris, Helen, Me-
dea, and Dido (see pages 45–48 and note 33).
55. See Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio
and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning
and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J.J.G. Alex-
ander and M.T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), 115–40.
56. The manuscript, in fact, contains at least two hands, a reflection of
the fact that two folios were likely appended to the codex following the
design of its original quires. The hand on folio 2, dating from at least the
second half of the sixteenth century, is distinctly different from the bâ-
tarde used in Saint-Gelais’s verse epistles. With regard to folio 1, a letter
in the Huntington Library’s information file for HM 60, received from
J. Preston, dated September, 1981, and written by Dorothy Miner in Au-
gust, 1968, states that “the title page has obviously had much later orna-
ment and lettering.” The Hoe Sale Catalogue also notes that the title “was
painted at a later date than the body of the book” (Illustrated Catalogue
De luxe of the Very Valuable Art Property Collected by the Late Robert
Hoe, February 16–March 3, 1911, American Art Association (New York,
1911), 375). Additionally, the stub of a folio appears between the current
folios 2 and 3, indicating that folios 1 and 2 are quired together and sug-
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

a clear attribution of authorship for the volume, however,

these two leaves create a textual opposition that further re-
64 inforces the tension between female and classical author
figures contained in the codex’s letters.
On folio 1r, an ornate title page reads “Les XXI epistres
des Dames Illustres, traduictes d’Ovide, par Le Reverend
Pere en Dieu Monseigneur l’Evesque De Angoulesme.”
However, the top of folio 2r refers to the work, in a differ-
ent hand, as “Les XXI epistres d’Ovide contenuz en ce pres-
ent livre.” These two pages serve as a testimonial to both the
work’s translation and its materiality. The first page most
clearly states that the manuscript contains a translation of
Ovid by Saint-Gelais, and accompanies this textual state-
ment with a portrait of the Latin author himself, labeled
“Ovidus, N” (fig. 7); the second page further reinforces Ov-
id’s role in its title without reference to the French transla-
tor.57 In this way, then, both these visual and textual cues
signal to the reader that this manuscript is a literary work,
originally written by Ovid and translated by Saint-Gelais.
Yet the fact that the very first page of the manuscript re-
fers to the text contained therein as “Les XXI epistres des
Dames Illustres” brings to the fore, in a title found in no
other known copy, the authorship of the heroines them-
selves, thereby giving readers the impression that they are
about to read letters written by famous women. Thus, in the
first two folios alone the reader is presented with two sepa-
rate textual identifications for the work to follow. Although
both titles emphasize the manuscript’s contents as letters,
creating a connection between the pages the reader holds

gesting that these first two were bound into the volume postdating its
original production.
57. The overwhelming majority of the sixteenth-century manuscripts
and printed exemplars containing Saint-Gelais’s translation refer to the
work as Les XXI epistres d’Ovide.
 Figure 7.

Unknown Artist, Ovid, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide

San Marino, The Huntington Library, MS HM 60, fol. 1r
(Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino)
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

and the ones s/he views in the miniatures, the two titles
present contradictory versions of the epistles’ authorship.
66 Yet another reader of HM 60 has altered many of the il-
lustrations throughout the manuscript,58 perhaps also in an
attempt to clarify the heroines’ roles and identities. A partic-
ularly striking example of the alteration HM 60 has under-
gone is that of Canace (fol. 57r; fig. 6). Paris fr. 875’s Canace
(fol. 58r; fig. 8), also painted by Testard, is situated in a sim-
ilar pose, although the positioning of the sword in her left
hand permits her to simultaneously write on the leaf in front
of her with her right hand. In both versions, the women
impale the center of their chests, just below the neckline
of their dresses. But where Paris fr. 875’s Canace displays a
calm facial composure typical of Testard’s work, HM 60’s
heroine’s mouth is wide open, curled into a sobbing, crying,
or screaming position and her eyes look off into the dis-
tance, not with grace but with distress. While Paris fr. 875’s
smooth-faced heroine exemplifies a two-dimensional style
often seen in Testard’s contemporary miniatures,59 the bags
beneath Canace’s eyes and her wrinkled forehead in HM 60
convey the heroine’s grief and exhaustion.60

58. Consuelo W. Dutschke, in “HM 60,” notes that the faces and hands
were heavily repainted, and attributes these alterations, as well as the
manuscript’s current binding, to the eighteenth century. This date is cor-
roborated in Avril and Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures, 408. A num-
ber of documents in the library’s information file discuss these faces and
hands. Dorothy Miner’s letter of August, 1968 suggests two possibilities
concerning the faces and hands: that they were either modified ca. 1860,
or in the seventeenth century at the same time as the manuscript’s cur-
rent binding.
59. François Avril describes Testard’s illuminations in Paris fr. 875 as
“sèche et graphique,” and that “tout effet de dramatisation est en général
évité;” Avril and Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures, 408.
60. It is also apparent that Canace’s fingers have been shortened, and the
position of the hilt of her sword has been moved upwards to accommo-
date the newly configured hand.
 Figure 8.

Robinet Testard, Canace, Les XXI epistres d’Ovide, France, ca. 1497
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 875, fol. 58r
(By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France)
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

I would like to suggest that the later artist61 who chose

to alter the heroines’ faces in this way may have done so
68 because of the very contradictory nature of the heroines’
original portraits.62 Presented more often than not with

61. As Sonja Drimmer remarks, “the eighteenth century has an un-

even track record in the study of medieval manuscripts,” in “A Medi-
eval Psalter ‘Perfected’: Eighteenth-Century Conservationism and an
Early (Female) Restorer of Rare Books and Manuscripts,” British Library
Journal (2012): 1–38 at 1. For further work on later collectors and mod-
ifiers of medieval manuscripts, see Sandra Hindman and Nina Rowe,
eds., Manu­script Illumination in the Modern Age: Recovery and Recon-
struction (Evanston, Ill., 2001), and Rowan Watson, “Publishing for the
Leisure Industry: Illuminating Manuals and the Reception of a Medi-
eval Art in Victorian Britain,” in The Revival of Medieval Illumination:
Nineteenth­-Century Belgium Manuscripts and Illuminations from a Eu-
ropean Perspective, ed. Thomas Coomans and Jan de Maeyer (Leuven,
2007), 79–108. Given that HM 60 was sold in 1862 to Edwin Henry Law-
rence, and remained in Britain until its sale in 1911 in New York, the
application in particular of British practices vis-à-vis illuminated manu-
scripts is not inappropriate if we accept Miner’s suggested dating of the
alterations to the nineteenth century.
62. It is difficult to discern definitively whether all the faces and hands
were painted over, or whether some were resupplied by the later artist af-
ter first being rubbed or scraped off, either by the miniatures’ modifier,
an earlier reader, or another sort of wear or damage. However, after sub-
jecting the miniatures to both ultraviolet and directed light, a few fur-
ther observations can be made. Firstly, it is clear that the heroines’ faces
and hands were not the only parts of the illuminations modified. For ex-
ample, Phaedra’s portrait (fol. 17r) displays repainting between her torso
and sleeves; Paris’s letter seems to have moved from its original posi-
tion on the table before him (fol. 80r); in addition to the evident mod-
ification of one of the fingers on Phyllis’s right hand, her pen has also
been repositioned, as the outline of its original composition appears on
the page on her lap (fol. 7r). While not always the case, the fact that
some of HM 60’s miniatures show remnants of the original features in
the cases of both hands and faces testifies to a general program of mod-
ification rather than reinstatement. See, for example, Briseis, folio 11v
(fig. 3), whose right hand has clearly been shortened, as evidenced by
the faint outline of longer fingers on the table in front of her; see also
the portrait of Dejanira, folio 46r (fig. 4), where the phantom outline of
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

author-­scribal portraits rather than depictions of characters

in a tale of fiction, a non-medieval reader/viewer sought to
transform these portraits, or at least their faces, into repre- 69
sentations of the heroines’ grief, anger, and loss that was felt
to more accurately represent their stories in the text. What-
ever the unknown artist’s motivations for altering these
miniatures, however, the fact that they were retouched at
all serves to further underline the manuscript’s material-
ity. Thus, the physical aspects of HM 60’s folios are further
emphasized and brought to the fore by the changes these
anonymous readers made. If, as I argue here, the narratives
constructed by the codex’s late-medieval producers encour-
age a reading based upon the tactile attributes of the book
itself, the physical emendations made by these anonymous
readers in later times are living proof that at least two in-
dividuals heeded this advice. In conjunction with the text
and images contained in HM 60, which repeatedly evoke
the manuscript’s material existence, the codicological de-
tails discussed here further underline the importance of
HM 60 as an object for medieval readers, for modern schol-
ars, and for unknown readers somewhere in between. HM
60 thus exemplifies Michael Camille’s claim that medieval
manuscripts are “embodiments of past lives, not just texts
about them.”63

her previously larger nose is discernable even in digital photos; it is clear

that Helen’s hands and face have been painted over, in contrast to the
thinner layers of paint visible on her neck (fol. 88v; fig. 4). I thank Van-
essa Wilkie, William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval & British Historical
Manuscripts, and Annie Wilkier, Senior Paper Conservator, and Chris-
tina O’Connell, Senior Paintings Conservator at the Huntington Library
for their collaboration in examining the manuscript.
63. Michael Camille, “Glossing the Flesh: Scopophilia and the Margins
of the Medieval Book,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. David C. Greetham
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997), 245–67 at 265.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

conclusion

70 If medieval manuscripts are “embodiments of past lives,”

what can these specific codices tell us? Ultimately, I have
proposed that MSS HM 60 and Paris fr. 875 reveal the work
of multiple actors whose adaptations of previous narra-
tives—Ovid’s Heroides, Saint-Gelais’s translation, Testard’s
illuminations—invoke an address to their anticipated read-
ers highlighting the importance of the volumes’ material
existences. Further, I submit that this address was not co-
incidental, but rather a conscious endeavor. Saint-Gelais’s
verses describing female literary production may seem like
a straightforward translation of a classical author, but upon
closer examination of Ovid’s Heroides, we discover that
Saint-Gelais has chosen to translate the auctor’s verses so
as to increase the emphasis placed on the letters as phys-
ical objects created by its heroines.64 It may seem an obvi-
ous choice to depict the women conducting the actions they
narrate in their letters, but there are many other textual mo-
ments Testard could have chosen to illustrate Saint-Gelais’s
verses, and we must interpret the illuminator’s choice as a
conscious one to underline the heroines’ similarity as writ-
ers rather than their situations as abandoned, overly emo-
tional, and sometimes crazed female lovers.65 Ultimately,
the translator’s decision to describe his female protagonists
in the act of writing so frequently and so vividly, and the il-
luminator’s chosen visual depictions of women as readers
and writers, encourage active tactile interpretations of the
codex and call attention to the shared attributes of the fic-

64. See notes 43–47 for discussions of the French translator’s adapta-
tion of Ovid’s verses.
65. I develop this argument further in “Traduction et adaptation d’un
manuscrit des XXI epistres d’Ovide appartenant à Louise de Savoie (BnF
fr. 875),” in Les femmes, l’art et la culture en Europe entre Moyen Âge et
Renaissance, ed. Cynthia J. Brown and Anne-Marie Legaré (Turnhout,
2016), 221–39.
 Reading Medieval Manuscripts

tional female protagonists and the real medieval (female)

owners and readers.
The materiality emphasized by these two particular 71
manu­script copies can be contrasted to the text-image re-
lations at work in the numerous printed editions of the
XXI Epistres published between 1500 and 1546. As Cynthia
J. Brown discusses elsewhere, many of the woodcuts em-
ployed in these books were re-used both within and across
editions, creating a certain measure of “répétition comme
principe organisateur.”66 Most relevant for my discussion
here, however, is the absolute lack of letters, letter-writing,
or reading represented visually in the printed editions of
the XXI Epistres d’Ovide. Instead, the correspondents are
often presented standing in an exterior scene, or at one
side of an image engaged in conversation with their letter’s
recipients. In Michel Le Noir’s 1500 edition, for example,
Phyllis appears engaged in conversation with Demophoon
on folio 7r. Separated by a tree, the two lovers are identified
by banderoles above their heads. The same female figure is
subsequently used to represent Dido on folio 32r.67 This de-
piction, rather than emphasizing a collaboration between
miniature and text through their shared emphasis on the
epistles as physical objects, “invite—et incite—le lecteur à
comprendre le sens de l’image en lisant le texte.”68
A hybrid printed edition produced by Antoine Vérard
(Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Vélins 2088),69

66. Cynthia J. Brown, “Les images récurrentes de femmes à l’aube de

la Renaissance: Les XXI epistres d’Ovide,” in L’image répétée: Imitation,
copie, remploi, recyclage; Actes du colloque des 2, 3 et 4 juin 2011, Université
de Victoria, Colombie britannique, Canada, Revue Textimage le conféren-
cier (2012). Available online at http://revue-textimage.com/conferencier/​
01_image_repetee/sommaire.htm.
67. Cynthia J. Brown reproduces these two images in ibid, figs. 15a and 19.
68. Ibid., 2.
69. In another incunabulum, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Rés. 2089, also a Vérard edition, all of the woodcuts have been painted.
 Anneliese Pollock Renck

through the very coexistence of woodcuts and painted im-

age within its pages can perhaps demonstrate the impor-
72 tance of the miniatures in creating meaning for the volume’s
readers. In Paris Vélins 2088 only folio 3r has been painted,
providing an image of Penelope passing a letter to a messen-
ger. Another letter lies before her on her desk, along with a
quill and inkpot. It is significant that the artist of Paris Vé-
lins 2088 has chosen to depict the heroine in this manner,
indicating a desire to not only emulate a medieval codex
through its physical form but also through its imitation of
one or more manuscript exemplars known to the illumina-
tor. Alternatively, or additionally, the artist of this minia-
ture could have wished to reinstate in the manu­script the
act of writing and the mise en abyme of the letter within the
codex, thus shifting the interaction of text and image back
towards a collaborative emphasis on the physical attributes
of the manuscript rather than the reliance on the textual
narrative put forward by the non-­hybrid printed editions.
Does this contrast in the case of one literary work apply
more broadly to the material and non-material reading
practices encouraged by fifteenth-century books, whether
manuscripts or incunabula? Further inquiry is required.
What is clear, however, is that HM 60 proposes a distinct
model of reading through its use of mise en abyme. Namely,
the narratives constructed in and by HM 60 and Paris fr.
875 enclose in the physical space of the manuscript visual
and verbal models of how their folios should be viewed,
touched, and interpreted.

Bucknell University