The Typological Imaginary. Kathleen Biddick
the glossing around it, scribes in the mid-twelfth century began to conceive of the page as the unit of graphic organization. We can observe them laying out each page first according to a repetitive rationalized grid of lines and margins by pricking and ruling parchment from margin to margin, leaf after leaf. The Bible text itself no longer determined the scribal vicissitudes of the page. Instead, the repetitive mise-en-page graphically organized the inscription of text and commentaries: “Sometime after the middle of the twelfth century, apparently in the 1160s, a complete change occurred in the layout of northern French glossed books. The ruling was drawn closer together and was written right across the written area” (24). For each page these formal graphic changes produced an exemplary text of forty lines of gloss in the left and right hand margins with twenty lines of biblical text written on alternate lines in the center. Scribes wrote the interlinear gloss between the lines of the central biblical text.16 As Ivan Illich has observed (and as Figure 1 from a printed Glossa ordinaria depicts): “the textual patterning of the book page had such a strong hold on the imagination that Gutenberg and his pupils did what they could to make its essentials survive into the age of print.”17 Not surprisingly, as the page was transformed graphically so was the concept of the Bible as book transformed materially. According to de Hamel, by the second half of the twelfth century owners came to think of glossed books of the Bible not as a collection, or assemblage, of books, but as a corpus, albeit in multivolume form. The Bible thus came to be imagined as a sequenced entity.18 The changing material notions of the Bible as a bookish artifact could only intensify typological operations.19
The fabrication of the page as a modular unit by means of a repetitive, graphic process (the pricking and uniform ruling across the surface of the page) transformed typological thinking from within. The interface, the page, and the fantasy, the typological imaginary, shared the graphic technology of ruling and repetition. As we have already observed, the interlinear gloss juxtaposed the names of New Testament fulfillment onto the names of the figures of the Old Testament text. The graphic organization worked as a visual as well as a rhetorical mode of substitution. The modular framework of a unified and unifying page format rendered typological thinking as an image, that is, as a kind of diagram placed in the central field of the page in which the biblical text is inscribed.
It is possible to imagine the newly conceived interface, the mise-en-page in the Glossa ordinaria, as a little machine. Precisely and repetitiously it rotates the littera back onto the figura and begins to produce typological effects mechanically at the level of the graphic. The rhetoric of typology is subjected to the mechanicity of a graphic form. The layout of the glossed Bible rationalizes textual organization and thus renders typology, once an argument about reference, now also a representation. The modular page works as a kind of typological viewing device: anticipating the device illustrated by Dürer, in which the artist draws a female nude by looking through a transparent screen squared by threads that correspond to the gridded page on which he is drawing.20 Analogously the biblical scholar views the Old Testament through the viewing device of the new mise-en-page, which enables him to map the typological imaginary onto the Old Testament.
Within a quarter century of the stabilized graphic form of the Glossa, we find the central space of such pricked and ruled pages “built over” by an elaborate and disturbingly innovative illustrative program in manuscripts that have been dubbed Bibles moralisées. This genre evacuated the Bible text and in its emptied central space substituted a new graphic program of illuminated roundels. Sara Lipton has exhaustively studied the earliest illustrated examples of the Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB 2554; Vienna, ÖNB 1179).21 These two luxury manuscripts were produced in Capetian court circles between 1208 and the 1220, over a period marked by important royal and papal legislation about Jews as well as the incorporation of the university at Paris.22 Their visual program is obsessed with Jews, who are depicted in 39.7 percent of the roundels and are mentioned by name in 15.7 percent of the adjacent commentary texts. The painstaking research of John Lowden has shown how their designers, like those scribes of the Glossa ordinaria, regarded the page as a unit. The eight medallions, which occupy the central area designed for the biblical text in the Glossa ordinaria, were planned and illuminated before the addition of biblical text and moralizing commentary in the right and left margins. In a comparison of biblical text and commentary for the Book of Ruth in seven extant Bibles moraliseés, Lowden has shown that the biblical passages, paraphrases, show an “undergraduate” knowledge of the Bible and that most of its moralizing paraphrases depart from the textbook version of the Glossa ordinaria.23
My chief concern is with the formal graphic level exemplified by folio 3v, taken from the purportedly earliest version of the Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB 2554) and reproduced in Figure 2. The commentary, translated from the medieval French by Gerald Guest, reads as follows:
3vA
Here Noah plants his vine and drinks the wine from which he gets drunk (Gen 9: 20–21).
3va
That Noah planted the vine and drank the wine, which he himself planted, signifies Jesus Christ, who planted the Jews and drank from the wine at the Passion.
3vB
Here Noah sleeps, and one of his children uncovers him, and the others are ashamed and cover him (Gen 9: 21–23).
3vb
That one of the brothers uncovered him and the others cover him signifies the Jews who uncovered the shame of Jesus Christ and the Christians who covered him.
3vC
Here the pagans make the Tower of Babel, against the commandment of God, and God strikes them down and turns their work to nothing (Gen 11:4–9).
3vc
That the pagans began the tower of Babel against God’s commandment signifies the astronomers and the dialecticians who make false proofs against the will of Jesus Christ, and He turns their work to nothing and blinds them and strikes them.
3vD
Here the pagans come and throw Abraham and another into the fire, and God saves Abraham because of his good faith, and the other was put back and was burned.
3vd
That Abraham was in the fire and God saved him because of his good faith signifies those who are in the fire of the world, in covetousness and lust, and God saves them because of their strong faith, and he who was put back signifies those who remain in mortal sin and are burned.
The lining and pricking of the page is readily visible and the reader can see that the illuminations are the first layer to be laid down over the gridded page. Scribes inserted the commentary at a later stage in the graphic process. The concatenation of roundels relies on the alteration and repetition of interlinear gloss and Bible text already familiar from the Glossa ordinaria (which textbook was familiar to the designers of the Bible moralisée). I have chosen this particular folio page to consider at greater length because it contains the first mention of Abraham, who indexes the covenant of circumcision, even though the Bible moralisée skips over Genesis 17 and any direct reference to the covenant between God and Abraham. The specter of covenant anxiously haunts the composition of folio 3v, especially in the concerns about genital uncovering and the same and “new” knowledge foregrounded there. Roundel 3vB depicts the story of the sons of Noah, one of whom uncovers the genitals of Noah as he sleeps in a drunken stupor. His brothers, who feel ashamed at the sight, cover him. This story is then glossed by roundel 3vb, which depicts a scene in which Jews are unwinding the loincloth of the crucified Christ. They point at what they have exposed. The commentary to this roundel shifts the key of shame. In the roundel above, it was the two sons of Noah who were ashamed. In the lower roundel it is the “shame of Jesus” that the Jews see and the Christians cover. This shame or scandal that the Jews are scrutinizing is the circumcised penis of Christ. This scandalous knowledge of the cut of the foreskin is transposed in the lower roundel (3vC), which links the destruction of the Tower of Babel with folio 3vc, in