Book of Heart

The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject
Author(s): Eric Jager

Source: Speculum, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 1996), pp. 1-26
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Medieval Academy of
America
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The Book of the Heart:
Reading and Writing
the Medieval Subject
By Eric Jager
Writing on the heart is a frequent and often vivid image in medieval literature
and art. Saints' legends describe martyrs receiving divine inscriptions in hearts
that are later opened and read by others. Sermons and poems liken the heart
to a book where the believer writes God's commands or where Christ writes the
story of his own Passion. In the secular lyric and romance a different passion
inscribes itself on lovers' hearts, sometimes by way of love letters and usually
anticipating the bodily writing of sexual intercourse. In the realm of visual art
medieval painters depict hearts as books (or books as hearts), and late-medieval
scribes actually produced heart-shaped manuscript codices, examples of which
still survive.
In his famous chapter entitled "The Book as Symbol" Ernst Robert Curtius
placed medieval heart/text tropes within a broader metaphorics of interior writ-
ing that goes back to antiquity.1 More recently, Jacques Derrida proclaimed the
crucial role of interior writing in Western sign theory since Plato, declaring that
"a history of this metaphor" had yet to be written, and going on to examine its
legacy to modern ideas about language and the subject.2 Since Derrida's pro-
nouncement, scholars have been exploring this metaphor's premodern history,
for interior writing figures crucially in such areas as medieval poetics, the idea
of the book, and the art of memory.3 In this essay I examine one aspect of this
metaphor in the Middle Ages, focusing on a specific trope within the larger
metaphorics of interior writing-namely, the book of the heart. If interior writ-
ing is one of the master metaphors of the West, then one of its key forms is the
book of the heart, a trope that dates from the birth of the codex in late antiquity
and that ever since has haunted our ideas about writing and the subject.
The book of the heart is a quintessentially medieval trope. On a material level,
Parts of this essay were read at Villanova University (1994) and at the 1995 meeting of the Medieval
Academy. For valuable advice I am grateful to the two readers for Speculum and, for additional sug-
gestions, to Howard Bloch, David Damrosch, Jesse Gellrich, James Shapiro, Mark Vessey, and Joan
Williamson. Mindell Dubansky and Veronique Sintobin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art kindly
helped with art-historical matters. Several graduate students provided library research and citations:
James Cain, Tobias Gittes, Thomas Hill, and especially Marlene Villalobos Hennessy.
I Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Prince-
ton, N.J., 1953; repr. 1973), pp. 302-47.
2Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), p. 15.
3See Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln, Nebr.,
1986), pp. 6-11; Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology,
and Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y, 1985), pp. 157-66; and MaryJ. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of
Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), pp. 16-32.
Speculum 71 (1996) 1
2 The Book of the Heart
figuring the heart as a book (i.e., a manuscript codex) reflected a scribe-based

technology of writing and book production, while on a conceptual level it re-
flected the medieval notion of knowledge or truth as a totality. Conversely, to
figure a book as a heart was to equate textuality with subjectivity, since the heart
was central to medieval psychology. Today we still refer to learning texts by heart,
but medieval culture often treated the heart as the literal site of memory, under-
standing, and imagination, and hence as the center of verbal and specifically
textual activity. Again, today we commonly speak of written records, though gen-
erally forgetting that "record" derives from the Latin word for heart (cor), and
that a medieval documentary record was a written extension of the inner, re-
membering subject. We even refer to words written on the heart (or, after Gu-
tenberg, printed on the heart), but without necessarily imagining the heart as
an inscriptional space, an internalized scene of writing, as the Middle Ages often
did. During the Middle Ages these now-dead metaphors combined a vivid im-
agery of the book with a pectoral psychology that saw the heart as the psycho-
somatic center of the human being.
That pectoral psychology requires a special word.4 From antiquity until after
the Middle Ages the heart was the traditional seat of emotion. And although
after Galen (d. 201? C.E.) perception and cognition were known to be seated in
the brain, other influential traditions identified the heart as a seat of sensation,
imagination, memory, and even the soul. Aristotle, whose direct influence was
renewed after the twelfth century in the West, associated the heart (kardia) with
the vital functions, emotions, and sensation.5 And Scripture, a preeminent au-
thority, equated the heart (Hebrew leb, lebab; Greek kardia; both translated as
Latin cor) with the innermost self, including conscience, memory, and volition.6
In addition, classical Latin commonly used cor as a synonym for thought, mem-
4 On ancient and medieval pectoral psychology see Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins ofEuropean
Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1954),
chap. 2. On the heart in particular, see references in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed.
Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, 3 (New York, 1989), p. 564; Jacques Le Goff,
"Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages," ibid., pp. 12-27; Giuseppe
Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio'sDecameron (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 150, n. 23; Michel Meslin,
"Heart," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, 16 vols. (New York, 1987), 6:234-37; Car-
ruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 48-49; Paul Saenger, "Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of
the Later Middle Ages," in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Eur
Roger Chartier (Princeton, N.J., 1987), pp. 141-73 (esp. pp. 145-46); and Kevin Marti, Body, Heart,
and Text in the Pearl-Poet (Lewiston, N.Y, 1991), pp. 145-47. See also the biblical and Augustinian
studies cited below, nn. 6 and 28; and my article "Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality
or Pectorality?" Speculum 65 (1990), 845-L59 (esp. pp. 845-47).
5 Aristotle, De iuventate et senectute468b32-469a24; Departibus animalium 665b28-666al8. SeeJanet
Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, Eng., 1992),
p. 18, n. 7; and alsoJohannes Behm, " Kardia," in TheologicalDictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard
Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1964-76), 3:605-14 (at p. 608).
6 For extensive analysis and illustrative passages see Robert C. Dentan, "Heart," in The Interpreter's
Dictionary of the Bible, ed. George A. Buttrick et al., 5 vols. (New York, 1962), 2:549-50; David G. Burke,
"Heart," in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley et al., 4 vols., rev.
ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1979-88), 2:650-53; Behm, "Kardia"; and Alexander Sand, "Kardia," in
Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids,
Mich., 1990-93), 2:249-51.
The Book of the Heart 3
ory, mind, soul, and spirit as well as for the seat of intelligence, volition, character,
and the emotions-a semantic range inherited by patristic Latin and the me-
dieval Romance languages.7 Especially important for the Latin Middle Ages was
recordari (and its cognate noun, recordatio), which linked the heart with memory
in particular, and eventually with writing and books as well. The identity of heart
and memory persisted in French recorder and Italian ricordare and was paralleled
in Middle English herte and other Germanic cognates, which share the same
Indo-European origin with their Romance counterparts.8
Besides its psychological significance, and its association with vital physical
functions (e.g., breath, warmth, blood), the heart was centrally located in the
body, so that it was widely regarded as "le centre vital de l'etre," and even "une
sorte de microcosme de l'etre."9 AsJacques Le Goff has shown, the heart's phys-
ical centrality also lent itself to political metaphor in the Middle Ages: as the
heart was the "king" of the body, so the king was the "heart" of the body politic.10
Thus Bernardus Silvestris (fl. 1136) identified the brain as the seat of the intel-
lect, but the heart as the source of vitality for the brain and the rest of the human
organism-"the animating spark of the body, nurse of its life, the creative prin-
ciple and harmonizing bond of the senses; the central link in the human struc-
ture, the terminus of the veins, root of the nerves, and controller of the arteries,
mainstay of our nature, king, governor, creator."11 Such notions fell away with
the modern "migration of the body's perceived center from the heart up to the
head accompanying Western man's growing trust in reason," and so did the idea
of the heart as an inner tablet or book.12 Modernity retains the notion of the
subject as a textual entity (e.g., Freud, Lacan), but heart/text metaphors have
dwindled into mere figures of speech. Tracing the medieval reciprocity of text
and inner self, heart and book, thus can shed light on an obscure chapter in the
origins of the modern subject as well.
7Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1982), s.v. cor; and Thesaurus linguae Latinae
(Leipzig, 1900-), s.v. cor III (4:933-39). See also Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 11.1.118, ed. W. M.
Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911; repr. 1987): "Cor ... a cura. In eo enim omnis sollicitudo et scientiae
causa manet."
8 See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 48-49, for a summary of recordani and related terminology;
and also Middle English Dictionary (hereafter MED), ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, and Robert
E. Lewis (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1952-), s.v. herte 2a, 3a, 4, 5a. For etymology, see The Oxford English
Dictionary (hereafter OED), 2nd ed., 20 vols. (Oxford, 1989), s.v. Heart; and Indogermanisches etymolo-
gisches W&rterbuch, ed.Julius Pokorny (Bern, 1947-69), s.v. kered- (pp. 579-80), noting also a relation
to Latin credere, etc.
9 Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu, "La legende du coeur inscrit dans la litterature religieuse et di-
dactique," in Le "cuer" au moyen age: Rialiti et senefiance (Aix-en-Provence, 1991), pp. 297
311).
10 Le Goff, "Head or Heart," pp. 22-23.
11 "Corporis ignitus fomes, vitalis alumnus, / Causa creans sensus conciliansque fides. / Humanae
nodus conpaginis, ancora venis, / Fundamen nervis arteriisque tenor. / Naturae columen, rex et
dictator et auctor . . .": Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia 2.14, lines 111-15, ed. Carl Sigmund Ba-
rach and Johann Wrobel, De mundi universitate libri duo sive Megacosmus et Microcosmus (Innsbruck,
1876), p. 69, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee, The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestnis (New York, 1973),
p. 125.
12 Marti, Body, Heart, and Text, p. 2, asserting that the "post-medieval 'repression' of the body"
remains the focus of study, at the expense of the Middle Ages themselves.
I begin this essay by briefly examining an important precursor trope to the

book of the heart-namely, the tablet of the heart-which medieval culture
eventually re-created in the image of the codex, ancestor of the book as we know
it. I then analyze the book of the heart as inaugurated in Augustine's Confessions,
where the ancient metaphor of interior writing, figured in terms of the heart,
converges with the new literary format of the codex. Next I examine how various
medieval religious writings elaborate the book of the heart as a product of an
inner scene of writing-a scriptorium of the heart. Finally, I look at how late-
medieval artists and artisans transformed the book of the heart from a verbal
trope into a visual image and even a physical artifact-a move that paradoxically
turned the trope inside out, as it were, pushing it to its apparent limit.
THE TABLET OF THE HEART
The comparison of knowledge or memory to an inner writing was common-

place among ancient philosophers and rhetoricians. Classical authors applied
the metaphor mainly to epistemology, as in Plato's famous reference to a word
"written ... in the mind of the learner"; or to rhetorical mnemonics, as in the
pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium: "The places [loci] are very much like wax tab-
lets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of
the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading. "13 Classical tropes
of interior writing usually took their analogy from the wax writing tablet (cerae
in the pseudo-Ciceronian example), with the tablet representing memory, mind,
or the soul-but almost never the heart.14
It was biblical example, as embodied in the Hebraic expression "tablet of the
heart," that led patristic and medieval culture to link interior writing specifically
with the heart.15 In a crucial move St. Paul adapted this Hebraic formula to
condemn the external Law, the letter, in a manner recalling Plato's censure of
external script.16 Paul's influential formulation would echo down the patristic
and medieval centuries: "You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, writ-
ten on your hearts, to be known and read by all men; and you show that you are
a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of
13 Plato, Phaedrus 276a, ed. and trans. Harold North Fowler, Plato, 1, Loeb ed. (London, 1914; repr.
1982), p. 567. Pseudo-Cicero, Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium) 3.17.30, ed.
and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb ed. (London, 1954), p. 209 (modified). Further examples in Frances
A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966), pp. 6-7, 35-36; and Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp.
16-32.
14 On wax tablets, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 16-17, 28-29. On the tablet's practical
use in antiquity, see Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London, 1987), chap. 3.
15 E.g., Prov. 3.3, 7.3;Jer. 17.1, 31.33. Cf. the stony and fleshly heart of Ezek. 11.19, 36.26. English
translations are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce
M. Metzger (New York, 1977). Greek and Latin citations are from The Greek New Testament, ed. Kurt
Aland et al., 3rd corr. ed. (Stuttgart, 1983); and Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. Robert Weber
et al., 3rd corr. ed. (Stuttgart, 1983).
16 Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians
(Edinburgh, 1915; repr. 1960), p. 81, compares Plato.
the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts."117 The
tablets of the heart represent a new covenant of grace (2 Cor. 3.6), and the stone
tablets the Mosaic Law ("carved in letters on stone" [v. 7]). Consistent with the
nearby distinction between the deadly letter and the life-giving spirit (v. 6), the
tablets of the heart exemplify what Derrida calls "a natural, eternal, and universal
writing," by contrast with "a certain fallen writing" embodied here by the stone
tablets.18 As Curtius suggested, and as Derrida more fully analyzed, metaphors
of interior writing involve a crucial reversal of terms, reducing external (literal)
writing from reality to metaphoricity, to a mere copy of the writing within, which
assumes primary status, as here in Paul's "letter ... written on your hearts."19
However, Paul endowed interior writing with a corporeality that was to haunt
the heart/text metaphor throughout its patristic and medieval career. For Paul,
"kardia denotes the center of the person as a rational, emotional and volitional
being" and, in this passage particularly, the place "in which the religious life is
rooted, which determines moral conduct."20 But Greek kardia, like its Latin
equivalent cor, has physical connotations even in psychological use because of its
traditional association with a specific bodily region, the chest or thorax, and with
certain bodily functions.21 (In Latin, cor 'heart' is also echoed in corpus 'body'
and caro 'flesh'.) Paul stresses that corporeality by expanding the inherited He-
braic trope to "tablets of human hearts," where "human" (Greek "sarkinais,"
Latin "carnalibus") denotes "carnal" or "fleshly." Augustine suggests the cor-
poreal drift of Paul's metaphor: "He speaks of the 'fleshy tables of the heart,'
not of the carnal mind, but of a living agent possessing sensation, in comparison
with a stone, which is senseless."22 Although sarx (Latin caro) "is part of an ex-
tended metaphor for the lives of believers," its basic sense, "physical matter,"
suggesting the bodies of believers, also clings to this passage.23 Elsewhere Paul
reinforced this fleshliness by associating the inscribed heart with the circumcised
heart.24 Paul's emphatically corporeal tabula cordis thus contained the seeds of a
further reversal of literal with metaphorical script, a reversal to which the incar-
national poetics of the Middle Ages would eventually give bodily form.
17 2 Cor. 3.2-3, alluding to the heart of flesh exchanged for the heart of stone (Ezek. 11.19, 36.26).
See also Rom. 2.15, omitting "tablets" and "fleshly" hearts but mentioning circumcised hearts nearby
(v. 29); 2 Cor. 1.22, a seal (Vulgate: "pignus") on the heart.
18 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 15 (orig. emphasis). On the symbolism of inscribed stone, see Vance,
Mervelous Signals, pp. 8-11.
19 Curtius, European Literature, p. 305. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 15.
20J. Knox Chamblin, "Psychology," in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne et
al. (Downers Grove, Ill., 1993), pp. 765-75 (at p. 766); Behm, "Kardia" (see above, n. 5), p. 612
(D-2.d).
21 See Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, et al., A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with supplement
(Oxford, 1968), s.v. kardia (p. 877); and Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. cor.
22 "Carnales autem tabulas cordis dixit non carnalis prudentiae, sed tamquam uiuentes sensumque
habentes in conparatione lapidis, qui sine sensu est": De spiritu et littera 17.30, Corpus Scriptorum
Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 60:183, trans. Peter Holmes, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers of the Christian Church, ser. 1, vol. 5 (1887; repr. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1980), p. 96.
23 See RichardJ. Erickson, "Flesh," in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, pp. 303-6 (at p. 303).
24 Rom. 2.15, 29 (" [lex] scriptum in cordibus suis.... circumcisio cordis in spiritu non littera").
THE BOOK OF THE HEART
Paul's metaphors of the incised and circumcised heart powerfully influenced

the poetics of the Confessions, shaping for Augustine what Eugene Vance calls "a
spiritual itinerary that involves the passage from the outward Law of the Letter
incised in stone, the Law commanding circumcision of the flesh, to another
inner Law, a universal Law 'written' in the circumcised heart." For Augustine, as
Vance puts it, "The material world is that of temporal things, of carnal language
and of the dead letter. The soul's world is one in which divine truth is imprinted
in the living heart or the memory. "25
As the story of how the divine Word impresses itself on Augustine's heart, the
Confessions keeps the heart constantly in view. Peter Brown describes the Confes-
sions as essentially "the story of Augustine's 'heart,' or of his 'feelings'-his af-
fectus."26 Indeed, the heart (cor) appears in both the first and last chapters of the
Confessions, and nearly two hundred times in between, including more than sev-
enty references to Augustine's heart (cor meum) in particular.27 Augustine retains
the biblical sense of the heart as the center of moral and intellectual life while
enriching it as the focus of his personal narrative. For Augustine the heart is not
only "the indivisible, authentic centre of human life" but also "the place of
interiority and religious experience, which defines individuality: 'My heart [cor
meum] is where I am, such as I am.' "28
The Confessions treats the heart as not just the psychological but the distinctly
verbal center of the self. Augustine listens with the ears of his heart, and he
confesses in his heart or speaks with his heart's voice.29 Moreover, he repeatedly
associates the heart with the written word-with activities such as reading and
writing as well as with the word inscribed within. Essentially, the heart has three
main textual functions in the Confessions: as conscience, the site where God in-
scribes his law in humans; as understanding, the focus of readerly intellect and
affect; and as memory, a kind of internal record of personal experience, which
in turn provides the basis for Augustine's published confessions.
The heart as conscience dominates the early books of the Confessions, which
narrate Augustine's life under the Old Law and his initial conviction of sin, as
exemplified by the famous pear tree story, which cites Paul's notion of a divine
25 Vance, Mervelous Signals, pp. 10, 31.

26 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, Calif., 1967), p. 169.
27 In the Confessions the term cor occurs 184 times, including cor meum (76) and cor nostrum (8);
praecordia (3); recordari and recordatio (36). As a concordance I have used the electronic text published
by the CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts (Turnhout, 1991). The cited edition is Sancti
Augustini Confessionum libri xiii, ed. Luc Verheijen, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 27 (Turnhout,
1981); translations are from Rex Warner, The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York, 1963), with oc-
casional alterations.
28JamesJ. O'Donnell, ed., Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1992), 2:13. Meslin, "Heart" (see
above, n. 4), p. 236, quoting Confessions 10.3.4. For bibliography on "heart" in Augustine, see Edgardo
de la Peza, El significado de "cor" en San Agustin (Paris, 1962), pp. 13-14; and Anton Maxsein, Philo-
sophia cordis: Das Wesen der Personalitt bei Augustinus (Salzburg, n.d. [1967?]), pp. 430-34.
29Listening: Confessions 1.5.5, 4.5.10, 4.11.16, 4.15.27. Speaking: 5.2.2, 9.12.29. On the inner word,
see the references in O'Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3:77-78.
law inscribed on human hearts (Rom. 2.15): "Certainly, Lord, your law punishes
theft; indeed there is a law written in men's hearts [lex scripta in cordibus hominu
which not iniquity itself can erase."30 The heart's connection with reading is
typified by the famous description of Ambrose ("his eyes went over the pages
and his heart looked into the sense [cor intellectum rimabatur], but voice and
tongue were resting"), which anticipates Augustine's own act of silent, heart-
centered reading in the garden: "As soon as I had reached the end of this sen-
tence, it was as though my heart was filled with a light of confidence [quasi luce
securitatis infusa cordi meo] and all the shadows of my doubt were swept away."'31
Book 9, narrating Augustine's postconversion experience of Scripture, intensifies
this imagery of reading with the heart.32
Augustine suggests that his readerly conversion, with its inward mediation
from Scripture to his heart, in turn makes possible an outward mediation from
heart to text in his own written works. Taking up the story of his authorship,
Augustine declares to God that he now writes from a converted heart: "You
rescued my tongue as you had rescued my heart [cor meum].... My writing was
now done in your service."33 Reversing the inward motion that characterizes the
moment of conversion, seeking outer expression for his converted inner self,
Augustine says he will serve others "with heart and voice and pen" ("et corde et
uoce et litteris") and specifies that his written confessions are a public extension
of his private confessions before God: "This is what I want to do in my heart, in
front of you, in my confession, and with my pen before many witnesses" ("Volo
eam facere in corde meo coram te in confessione, in stilo autem meo coram
multis testibus").3
As a speechless infant Augustine had sought signs to bridge the gap between
self and others, inside and outside; as a literate adult he tries to mediate his heart
to others in writing, at the same time questioning whether such mediation is
actually possible.35 Boldly extending his heart-centered hermeneutic from Scrip-
ture to his own writings, Augustine asserts his book's edifying influence on his
readers: "When the confessions of these past sins are read and heard, they rouse
up the heart [excitant cor] and prevent it from sinking into the sleep of despair."36
Augustine even suggests that his writings provide his audience with a kind of
access to his inner self, his heart: "As to what I now am, at the very moment of
writing these confessions, there are many people who want to know about this-
both those who know me personally and those who do not, but have heard
something about me or from me; but their ear is not laid against my heart, where
I am whatever I am [ad cor meum, ubi ego sum quicumque sum]. And so they want,
30Augustine, Confessions 2.4.9. See also 1.18.29 ("cor," "scripta conscientia"), alluding to Rom.
2.15.
31 Confessions 6.3.3 (cf. "in corde eius ... ruminaret"), 8.12.29. On reading and the heart, see
Carruthers, The Book of Memory, chap. 5 (esp. pp. 170-74).
32 Confessions 9.4.11 ("clamabam in consequenti versu clamore alto cordis mei"), etc.
33 Confessions 9.4.7.
34Confessions 9.13.37, 10.1.1.
35 Confessions 1.6.8 ("intus. . . foris"). Vance, Mervelous Signals, p. 2, cites Augustine's doubts about
the possibility of "intersubjective communication."
as I make my confession, to hear what I am inside myself, beyond the possible

reach of their eyes and ears and minds."37 Although Augustine questions whether
his audience can really know his heart through his book ("in wanting to hear,
they are ready to believe; but will they know?"), he treats his Confessions as vir-
tually a substitute for himself-a personified book, a bookish persona, that an-
ticipates a modern phenomenology of reading.38
Augustine's story of his own authorship depends crucially on the heart's as-
sociation with memory- the inner function that, in the Confessions, is most
nearly synonymous with the heart. Nearly forty times in this work Augustine
invokes memory as recordatio, a term whose derivation from cor he sometimes
emphasizes by wordplay.39 In book 10, his extended meditation on memory, lan-
guage, and consciousness, Augustine associates recordatio with inner verbal im-
pressions, alluding to the writing tablet of rhetorical mnemonics.40 Augustine
also associates the heart with memory in the influential metaphor that marks his
transition from secular rhetor to converted writer: "You had shot through our
hearts with your charity, and we carried about with us your words like arrows
fixed deep in our flesh . . ." ("Sagittaueras tu cor nostrum caritate tua, et ges-
tabamus uerba tua transfixa uisceribus et exempla seruorum tuorum ..."). 41 The
wounded heart is commonly linked with the inscribed heart in later, medieval
tradition, the arrow corresponding to stylus or pen.42
Although Augustine never directly equates his heart with a written record, he
does describe how his heart prompted him to write on at least one occasion.
Narrating the effects of his conversion, he states that he "shall never be able to
recall [recordari] the whole story of those days of quiet" but that he has not
forgotten how God, through an act of human writing, cured him of toothache:
"When the pain became so bad that I was unable to speak it came into my heart
[in cor meum] to ask all my friends who were present to pray for me to you, the
God of all kinds of health. I wrote this down on wax and gave it to them to read.
As soon as we had in our simple devotion gone down on our knees, the pain
went away."43 This embedded scene of writing comments on the production of
the Confessions as a whole. The heart is doubly present here-both as the source
of the impetus for writing down the prayer request and as the site of recollection
38 E.g., Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary History 1 (1969-70), 53-68: "I
am aware of a rational being, of a consciousness . . ." (p. 54). See also the letter excerpted by Brown,
Augustine of Hippo, pp. 158-59. On the Confessions as a corpus, see Gellrich, The Idea of the Book, p. 121.
3 E.g., Confessions 10.8.12 ("abigo ea manu cordis a facie recordationis meae"). Carruthers, The
Book of Memory, p. 172, cites Augustine's wordplay "on the root of Latin recordari (cor, cord
Ancient and Medieval Memories, states (p. 95) that Augustine rejected Aristotle's "physiological imprint
theory" of memory but notes (pp. 97-98) the writing-tablet trope in the Confessions (citing 11.18.23;
see also 10.14.22, 10.16.25), which Augustine uses there for the first time, and again in De Trinitate.
40 Confessions 10.14.22 ("sonos nominum secundum imagines impressas a sensibus corporis," with
a preceding reference to "memoria" and "recordatio"). See also Confessions 10.16.25 ("imprimitur
... in memoria," "in memoria conscribebat").
41 Confessions 9.2.3. Cf. Ps. 37.3 ("sagittae tuae infixae sunt mihi").
42 See Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (London, 1981), pp.
47-48; and O'Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3:77, citing Ovid, Amores 1.2.7.
that informs Augustine's larger writing project.44 In addition, as both a metaphor

for memory and a standard format for notes and drafts, the wax writing tablet
suggests here the rhetorician's twin tasks of recollection and composition. Thus
Augustine's prayerful transcription from heart to tablet also figures his confes-
sional transcription from heart to book, the much larger writing project that
similarly opens his heart to others.
Like the writing tablet, the scroll, too, is sometimes linked with the heart in
the Confessions.45 However, in late antiquity another literary format was ascen-
dant, as a result of the shift from the scroll to the codex, "undoubtedly the most
important revolution in the book in the Common Era."46 By the fourth century
the codex had become a standard format for the Christian Scriptures and other
religious writings, including saints' lives, as Augustine's own usage testifies.47 It
was also becoming a symbol of divine knowledge or revelation in Christian art.48
Augustine pressed the codex even further, linking it with individual religious
experience, especially the inner spiritual life -the life of the heart.49 The codex,
not the scroll or the tablet, provides a symbol of revelation, and a counterpart
to the heart, in the work's most pivotal and memorable evocation of a book.
The codex looms as a symbol throughout the series of conversion-by-reading
stories in book 8 that culminates in Augustine's own conversion. In chapter 6,
which clearly anticipates the climactic scene in the garden, Ponticianus sees a
book ("codicem") of Paul's Epistles lying on a table and tells Augustine of an-
other man who found a book ("codicem") containing a life of St. Anthony and
was converted while reading it as "the waves in his heart rose and fell" ("uoluit
fluctus cordis sui" ) .50 The subsequent chapters keep the heart constantly in view,
especially as an interior space occupied by the innermost self.51 Finally there is
the Tolle lege, where Augustine himself seizes the book of Paul's letters ("codicem
apostoli"), opens it, reads the crucial passage, and is converted in his heart
("cordi meo"). As Augustine describes it, the opened book floods his heart with
light ("luce"), another metaphor pointing to the inner space of the heart.52
44 Modern translators often give recordari a writerly sense in this passage. E.g., "I shall never be able
to recall and write down the whole story of those days" (Warner, p. 192); "When shall I set down the
record of those days of rest?" (R. S. Pine-Coffin, Saint Augustine: Confessions [Harmondsworth, Eng.,
1961], p. 189).
45 Karl F. Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases ofAugustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Const
Tsatsos (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), pp. 28-32, discusses scroll imagery in the Confessions.
46 Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1
p. 59.
47 See Roberts and Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, chaps. 8- 10; and YvonneJohannot, Tourner la page:
Livre, rites, et symboles (Aubenas d'Ardche, 1988), pp. 25-35. Confessions 8.6.15 ("codicem, in quo
scripta erat uita Antonii').
48 SeeJohannot, Tourner la page, pp. 63-68.
49 For earlier symbolic use of the book, including the codex, see Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions
de Saint Augustin dans la tradition litteraire: Antecedents et post&ite (Paris, 1963), pp. 158-60.
50 Confessions 8.6.14, 8.6.15.
51 Confessions 8.8.19 ("cum anima mea in cubiculo nostro, corde meo"); 8.11.27 ("Ista controuersia
in corde meo"); and 8.12.28 ("conspectu cordis mei"). Cor and cubile are also linked in Confessions
9.4.10.
52 Confessions 8.12.29. See also Confessions 1.13.21 ("lumen cordis mei").
Besides intimately linking heart and book, this pivotal scene places the codex,
as both instrument of conversion and symbol of interiority, at the climax and
center of the whole narrative, the "culminating moment" where past and pres-
ent, persona and author, sinner and saint, are finally fused.53 Structurally and
dramatically, then, the image of the codex lies at the very heart of Augustine's
book.
If the coming of the codex effected a material or technical revolution in West-
ern book culture, Augustine's adoption of the codex as a symbol and vessel of
individual spirituality, of the life of the heart, crucially furthered this revolution's
significance for the Middle Ages. Some medieval manuscript evidence discussed
later in this article suggests that the Confessions was indeed recognized, read, and
reproduced as a book of the heart in later centuries. Besides this particular
legacy, Augustine's example also helped to make the codex into the sign of
privileged subjectivity and personal prestige that it remained throughout the
Middle Ages, and into modernity as well.54
THE SCRIPTORIUM OF THE HEART
The book of the heart inaugurated by patristic culture, and by Augustine in

particular, was in turn preserved and developed by the monastic, scholastic, and
vernacular book culture of the Middle Ages. During the early Middle Ages the
monastic library, scriptorium, and daily lectio divina kept the heart at the center
of reading, copying, and memorizing books. Thus the Benedictine rule begins
by addressing the ear of the heart and later mentions texts that the monks are
to recite by heart.55 The divine office was sung or chanted both within and with-
out, in corde and in concordia.56 And Alcuin says that written signs manifest things
hidden in the breast ("pectoris arcana") and that parted friends can speak and
share their hearts in letters ("per cartas loqui potuissent et necessaria proferre
in cor alterius").5 To warn an erring churchman, Alcuin even turns the monastic
cell into a scriptorium of the heart: "Erase, erase quickly, holy father, that opinion
from the secret chamber of your heart [tui cordis cubili], lest your Lord ... find
it written in the tablets of your heart [tabulis tui cordis] "158
Although books were confined mainly to the monastery during the early Mid-
53John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics 5 (1975), 34-40 (at
p. 36). See Marti, Body, Heart, and Text, p. 57, on textual "centers."
54 On the cultural position of the codex, see Johannot, Tourner la page, chap. 3; and Ivan Illich, In
the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon (Chicago, 1993), chap. 7.
55 Sancti Benedicti regula, prologus ("aurem eordis tui"), 9 ("ex corde recitanda"); The Rule of Saint
Benedict in Latin and English, ed. and trans. Justin McCann (London, 1952), pp. 6, 50. On monastic
memory culture, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic
Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi, 2nd corr. ed. (New York, 1977), pp. 18-22, 89-90; and Carruthers,
The Book of Memory, pp. 170-73.
56 See references in Gellrich, The Idea of the Book, p. 87, n. 87.
57 Alcuin, Epistola 83, MGH Epp 4:126, line 35; Epistola 167, MGH 4:275, lines 4-5. Cited by W. F.
Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf: An Eighth-Century View (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978), pp. 14-15.
58 Alcuin, Adversus Elipandum Toletanum 2.14, PL 101:270, trans. Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf p. 20
(modified).
dle Ages, heart/text tropes sometimes extended into a larger sphere. For ex-
ample, Asser's life of Alfred praises the love of learning planted by God in the
studious king's heart ("in regio corde"), as shown by a book he always carried
on his person (lit., "in his bosom," in sinum suum), and by his gathering, like
the bee, "many various flowers of Holy Scripture, with which he crams full the
cells of his heart [praecordii sui cellulas]."59 And a Gospel book presented to Em-
peror Otto III, probably about 990, contains the dedicatory inscription, "With
this book, Otto Augustus, may God invest thy heart" ("HOC AUGUSTE LIBRO
TIBI COR DEUS INDUAT OTTO").60
However, the full-blown equation of heart and book did not really develop
until after about 1100, when the emerging idea of the individual in law, theology,
and romance was paralleled by a growing tendency to imagine the inner subject
as a text. The scholastics, immersed in a culture of books, and tending to view
God, the world, and humans through metaphors of the book, generated many
such tropes for the inner subject.61 Among scholastics an important precedent
was the biblical image of the opened "book of life" ("liber ... vitae," Apoc.
20.12), which patristic authors, including Augustine, had glossed as the book of
conscience and memory to be opened at the Judgment.62 As Jesse Gellrich has
shown in his analysis of these patristic glosses and their scholastic elaborations,
the liber cordis is commonly equated with conscientia and memoria in authors such
as Hugh of St. Cher and Pierre Bersuire.63 During the same period the heart/
book metaphor materialized in various sorts of written documents that went by
the Latin names recordum, recordatio, and their vernacular derivatives.64
A vivid example of the individualized book of the heart appears in a twelfth-
century sermon probably authored by Peter Comestor and evidently addressed
to a clerical audience. The author enjoins each listener to make his heart into a
book containing God's commandments, just as a scribe prepares parchment to
copy a text from an exemplar:
You know the scribe's work. First, with the knife he cleans the parchment of fat and
removes all filth. Next with the pumice stone he smooths away all hair and sinews,
without which the script will not be legible or durable. Then he applies the ruler to
serve as a guide for writing. All of which you also must do if you want to have the book
59Asser, De rebus gestis zEfredi 88, ed. William H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of KingAlfred (Oxford, 1904),
pp. 73-74, lines 6, 16, 42; trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of
King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1983), pp. 99-100.
'D Aachen, Cathedral Treasury, Gospel Book of Otto III, fol. 15v, ed. Stephan Beissel, Die Bilder der
Handschrift des Kaisers Otto im Miinster zu Aachen (Aachen, 1886), p. 5 (transcription), plate II; trans.
John Beckwith, Early Medieval Art: Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, rev. ed. (London, 1969), p. 106.
The facing illumination (16r) shows the emperor with a scroll extended across his chest; see Beissel,
plate III; Beckwith, fig. 87.
61 See examples in Curtius, European Literature, pp. 315-21; and M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to
Written Record: England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 90-91.
62 Augustine, De civitateDei 20.14. Another early link appears in Ambrose, Epistola 73.3, PL 16:1251
("occulta cordis," etc.).
63 Gellrich, The Idea of the Book, pp. 157-66.
64 See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 56-57; Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus, ed. J. F.
Niermeyer (Leiden, 1984), s. w. recordatio, recordum; and Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British
and Irish Sources, ed. R. E. Latham (London, 1965; repr. 1989), s.v. record/um.
I have described. This parchment book is to be your heart [Hujus libri pergamenum erit
cor vestrum].65
As the author goes on to explain, the knife signifies penance; the pumice, prayer
and alms; the ruler, the guiding example of the Fathers. He then enumerates
the Ten Commandments, urging his listeners to write each one in the parchment
book of the heart, folio by folio.
This elaborate metaphor of the heart as a book is first of all a memory trope,
as the sermon makes clear in explaining that God's commands are to be in-
scribed within so as to preserve them longer and "to recall them to memory"
("ipsa revocante ad memoriam"). Memory was commonly compared to a book
by scholastics, and, conversely, books were beginning to be designed as sophis-
ticated memory devices.66 Thus the figurative pages (folia) correspond to the
traditional mnemonic places (loci), here transformed from architectural spaces
into locations in a memory book. By likening the heart to a manuscript codex,
and by specifying the materials, tools, and methods of medieval bookmaking,
the sermon adapts the sanctified manual labor of the scriptorium to the inner
moral discipline of remembering and obeying God's law.
Like Paul's interior tablet, the inner book here represents a spiritual writing
that transcends the external, material letter, whether embodied in the stone
tablets of the Law or in the book of Scripture itself. As a Pauline legacy, however,
this inner book cannot entirely divest itself of the flesh, as suggested by the
comparison of the heart's preparation for inscription to the removal of flesh (fat,
hair, sinews) from animal skin in order to make parchment, which recalls the
related Pauline image of circumcising the heart. Furthermore, the sermon's os-
tensible purpose is to convert the heart (morally) into a book, but the vivid
conceit from the monastic scriptorium holds out the converse possibility of con-
verting a book (aesthetically, formally) into a heart. That is, in comparing the
book of the heart to the physical product of scribal labor, the author of this
sermon anticipates the painters and scribes who eventually worked the trope
into a visual or tactile artifact, turning spiritual writing back into the literal,
external kind.
Book metaphors seem to have grown in popularity as books themselves pro-
liferated among a wider populace during the later Middle Ages. By the twelfth
century, heart/text tropes were entering vernacular literature, increasingly in
amorous or erotic use. This transition is foreshadowed in the eleventh-century
Latin letters exchanged by Baudri of Bourgueil and Constance of Angers, a monk
and a nun who describe their reading and writing in terms of the heart and
other more erogenous zones.67 As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, the poets of the dolce
stil nuovo turned the heart into "the locus of spiritual refinement of the vital
65 PL 171:815 (my trans.). This sermon appears among the works of Hildebert of Lavardin, Sermones
ad diversos 102 ("De libro vitae"), PL 171:814-18; it was reattributed by P. Glorieux, Pour revaloriser
Migne: Tables rectificatives (Lille, 1952), pp. 63-64. A similar passage appears in Peter Comestor, Ser-
mones 6 ("In nativitate Domini"), PL 198:1740.
66 See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, chap. 7.
67 See Stephen G. Nichols, "An Intellectual Anthropology of Marriage in the Middle Ages," in The
New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee et al. (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 83-85.
spirits, as well as the place where the imagination makes its impressions available
to the intellectual faculty."68 Among vernacular poets, Sordello expressly figures
erotic desire as a writing or engraving on the heart; and Dante's Vita nuova, with
its "libro de la mia memoria," is replete with imagery of the heart.69 Poets even
use the heart/text metaphor to figure sexual intercourse, imagined as a phallic
writing on the female heart.70 At times this erotic imagery of the heart "bordered
on delirium," with its conceits of the wounded, broken, eaten, or otherwise
mutilated heart.71
From the twelfth century on, heart/text tropes increasingly assumed a fleshly
aspect in religious writings as well, to the point that the inscribed heart was often
equated with the physical organ itself. The heart had an obvious relation to the
body, and the written text was commonly regarded by medieval authors as a kind
of body-a corpus.72 Furthermore, religious authors reveled in scribal metaphors
of the Incarnation, evoking God's writing of the Verbum in the Virgin's womb, or
the parchment and ink of the suffering Savior's body.73 At the same time lay
devotion was increasingly marked by an emphasis on Christ's body and by an
affective piety stressing inward emotional experience in "the heart of the be-
liever. 74 Learned meditations on Christ's wounds by Anselm of Canterbury, Ber-
nard of Clairvaux, Pierre Bersuire, and others eventually made their way into
popular devotional texts.75 Thus the Charter of Christ, appearing in English after
about 1330, likens the suffering Savior's body to a written document.76 And the
earlier Wohunge of Ure Lauerd expressly likens Christ's wounded heart to a text
an opened love letter-to be read by his beloved.77 A separate but related met-
68 Mazzotta, The World at Play, p. 150 (with references).

69 Sordello, "Tant m'abellis lo terminis novels," lines 15-18,71-75, ed. and trans.JamesJ. Wilhe
The Poetry of Sordello (New York, 1987), pp. 42-47. Dante, Vita nuova 1, ed. Manfredi Porena and
Mario Pazzaglia, Dante: Opere (Bologna, 1966), p. 919. See Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita
nuova (1949; repr. Baltimore, 1983), chap. 2.
70 E.g., Chaucer, The Merchant's Tale IV.1884, 1977-81, 1990, as discussed in my book, The Tempter's
Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, N.Y, 1993), pp. 255-69.
71 Le Goff, "Head or Heart," p. 20.
72 Body/text tropes are discussed in Curtius, European Literature, pp. 316- 17; and Leclercq, The Love
of Learning pp. 89-90. Also see recent assessments by Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Mad-
ison, Wis., 1989), pp. 3-27; andJohannot, Tourner la page, pp. 154-61.
73 Mary: Bernard, Sermones in laudibus Virginis Matris 4.11, ed. Jean Leclercq et al., Sancti Bernardi
opera, 8 vols. (Rome, 1957-77), 4:57 ("meis castis visceribus vivaciter impressum"). Christ: see Miri
Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), pp. 306-8.
74 Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilg7im: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, N.Y,
1983), p. 129.
75 Anselm, Liber meditationum et orationum, Meditatio 10, PL 158:761 -62 ("apertio ... revelavit nobis
divitias," etc.). Bernard, Sermones super Cantica 61.2.3-4, ed. Leclercq, Opera, 2:150-51 ("vulnerum
Domini recordabor," "Patet arcanum cordis per foramina corporis"). Bersuire, as cited in Gellrich,
The Idea of the Book, p. 17.
76 See Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 306-8; Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. Carleton B
ed. (Oxford, 1952), p. 19, line 23 ("be chartre"); and Chaucer, "An ABC" 59-60, in The R
Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987), p. 638.
77 Pe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, ed. W. Meredith Thompson, EETS OS 241 (London, 1958), p. 35, lines
546-49 ("A swe / te iesu bu oppnes me bin herte / for to cnawe witerliche & in to re- / den tr
luue lettres"). See Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, p. 48.
aphor, attested in Latin sources and appearing in English before 1200, describes
Christ himself as a scribe or author writing on the individual heart.78 In later
centuries this metaphor figures importantly in popular devotion focused on
Christ's Passion. For example, Philippe de Mezieres (d. 1405) offers a French
gloss on a Latin prayer that asks Christ to write his wounds with his blood in the
heart of the individual believer.79
A Middle English poem of about the same date embodies a similar, but longer
and more elaborate, prayer. This poem was evidently popular, for it survives in
nearly a dozen copies, including the well-known Wheatley manuscript, where it
stands at the head of the volume-a position underscoring its heart/book im-
agery.80 Evoking the various episodes of the Passion (arrest, trial, scourging, etc.),
the poem urges Christ to write a record of each event on the believer's heart.
Early in the poem this record in the believer's heart is explicitly represented as
a book:
Write vp-on my hert boke

Py faire & swete louely loke....81
In keeping with the personal emotional focus of medieval affective piety, the
possessive pronoun ("my") emphatically individualizes this book of the heart.
Furthermore, the "hert boke," although a spiritual or "gostly" writing (6), takes
on a very corporeal aspect through the poem's vivid imagery of nails as pens or
styli and of Christ's blood as ink:
Ihesu, yit write in my hert
how bloode out of by woundes stert;

And with pat blode write bou so ofte,
Myn hard hert til hit be softe.
(49-52)
This blood/ink trope may have been inspired by the Charter of Christ or the
scholastic penchant for likening Christ's blood to the rubricator's red ink, but
78 E.g., Liber meditationum 36, PL 40:931 ("Scribe digito tuo in pectore meo dulcem memoriam....
Scribe in tabulis cordis mei voluntatem tuam . . ."); Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises of the
Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Richard Morris, EETS OS 34 (London, 1868), p. 235 (" [Christ]
sceolde his a3en wille ... in ure heorte write"); Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics, p. 43, line 100 ("Di pines
in vr hertes write"); and Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, ed. Charlotte D'Evelyn, EETS OS
158 (London, 1921), p. 36, line 1350 ("Writ in myn herte pat reuful sy3t"). See also Gertrude of
Helfta, as cited below, n. 85.
79 Philippe de Mezieres, Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage 2.26, ed. Joan B. Williamson
(Washington, D.C., 1993), p. 214 ("O bone Jhesu, scribe in corde meo vulnera tua preciosissimo
sanguine tuo . . .").
80 "Ihesu bat haste me dere bought": London, British Library, MS Wheatley 39574; ed. M
The Wheatley Manuscript, EETS OS 155 (London, 1921), pp. 1-6. For other manuscripts and editions,
see John Edwin Wells, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400 (New Haven, Conn.,
1916), Second Supplement (1923), p. 1078; and Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, The Index
of Middle English Verse (New York, 1943), no. 1761. See also text and notes in Brown, ed., Religious
Lyrics, pp. 114-19, 274-75.
81 Quoted from Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics, no. 91, p. l 15, lines 29-30; further quotations are cited
parenthetically by line number.
here it provides a figurative link between the writing of the wounds on Christ's
body and the writing on the heart.82
As a whole, the poem claims to operate within a poetics of transcendence
adapted from Paul's doctrine of letter and spirit. Like Augustine's Confessions, or
the scholastic sermon considered above, it seeks to spiritualize itself, to transcend
its own human authorship and materiality, through an act of divine inscription
on the heart. Thus its opening lines contrast the Old Law of Moses ("Pogh my
hert be hard as stone") with the New Law of Christ ("3it maist lou gostly write
per-on" [5-6]). As the author of the "hert boke," Christ essentially transcribes
his wounds from the exemplar of his own body to a copy in the believer's heart
and memory, where the sacred sites of the Passion become the loci in a memory
book. Yet the "hert boke" remains grounded in bodily events and material
texts-not only the emphatically physical Corpus Christi, but also the scriptural
Passion narrative, and the corpus of the Passion poem itself. In short, the poem
aspires to transcend itself through spiritual writing, but its self-effacing rhetoric
cannot completely undo its self-assertive poetics.
Crucial to this poetics is the poem's rhetoric of prayer. Addressing Christ as
an author, the poem implores the suffering Savior to inscribe the "hert boke,"
an act of divine writing that transcends the poem's own production from earthly
materials by human means. However, in order to achieve that end, the poem
must both exist as a material text and function as a prayer script, a kind of
vernacular liturgy, as indicated by one manuscript rubric: "IN seiynge of lis
orisoun stynteth & bydeth at euery cros & Pynketh whate ye haue seide....983
The "cros [sing]" of the heart, occurring on a spatial plane between the prayer
text and the reader's chest (heart), is a gesture, a sign, that mediates between
the material page and the inner scene of writing, between the letter and the
spirit. The "hert boke" thus remains a product of bodily exercises and material
texts, from the Corpus Christi to the widely disseminated corpus of the Passion
poem itself.
The inscribed heart also figures importantly in medieval saints' legends, where
the physical organ itself is sometimes opened, read, and interpreted like a book.
The Middle Ages produced many such legends, as for example that of Clare of
Montefalco, whose "spiritual sisters came to believe so intensely that Christ had
planted his cross in her heart that at her death in 1308 they threw themselves
upon her body, tore out her heart, and found incised upon it the insignia of the
Passion."84 These legends are commonly about female saints, where miraculous
inscription often has erotic undertones.85 Yet male saints also populate such me-
82 On blood/ink, see Marti, Body, Heart, and Text, p. 53; and Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 307.
83 Bath, Longleat House, MS 29, fol. 147r; quoted in Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics, p. 114.
84 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance ofFood to Medieval Women
(Berkeley, Calif., 1987), p. 211.
85 See further examples and source material in Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 210-11, 255-
57; Polo de Beaulieu, "La legende" (see above, n. 9); and Lidia Bianchi et al., Iconografia di S. Cater
da Siena, 1 (Rome, 1988), pp. 112-14, 172, 175, 176. See also Gertrude of Helfta, Legatus divinae
pietatis 2.4.1, ed. and trans. Pierre Doyere, Gertrude d'Helfta: Oeuvres spirituelles, Sources Chretiennes
139 (Paris, 1968), p. 242 ("Scribe, misericordissime Domine, vulnera tua in corde meo pretioso
sanguine tuo .. . ").
dieval legends. In one of the most famous of such stories, as recounted in The
Golden Legend, the name of Christ is written in golden letters on the heart of
Ignatius of Antioch:
In the midst of all sorts of tortures blessed Ignatius never ceased calling upon the name
ofJesus Christ. When the executioners asked him why he repeated this name so often,
he replied: "I have this name written on my heart [hoc nomen cordi meo inscriptum habeo]
and therefore cannot stop invoking it!" After his death those who had heard him say
this were driven by curiosity to find out if it was true, so they took the heart out of his
body, split it down the middle, and found there the nameJesus Christ inscribed in gold
letters [ cor ejus ab ejus corpore avellunt et illud scindentes per medium totum cor ejus inscriptum
hoc nomine, Jesus Christus, litteris aureis inveniunt]. This brought many of them to accept
the faith.86
Here the organ itself contains the text; opened like a book that memorializes
the martyr, it is read by others, resulting in their conversion. The legend thus
plays out a version of Augustine's heart-centered hermeneutic, although here
the audience reads the message directly from the saint's heart, a bodily scripture,
rather than from its literary embodiment. Even the structure of the Latin phras-
ing emphasizes the heart's corporeality as a textual medium: "they took the heart
out of his body" ("cor ejus ab ejus corpore"). 87
Such legends may well have inspired the gruesome act of self-inscription re-
ported of the Dominican monk Heinrich Seuse (c. 1295-1366), who asked God
to turn his heart into a document ("urkuinde") of divine love and then, in a fit
of pious fervor, took a stylus to his own flesh. Seuse's Leben, probably written by
himself, recounts that
he pushed back his scapular, bared his bosom, took a sharp stylus, and called on God
to help him saying: "Almighty God, give me strength this day to carry out my desire,
for thou must be chiseled into the core of my heart [in den grund mins herzen]." Then
stabbing the stylus backwards and forwards, in and out of the flesh, he engraved the
name of Jesus (IHS) over his heart [eben uf sin herz]. Blood gushed out of the jagged
wounds and saturated his clothing. The bliss he experienced in having a visible pledge
of oneness with his truelove made the very pain seem like a sweet delight.88
These scarlet letters apparently remained a legible scar for the rest of Seuse's
life: "When the wounds that he had made were healed the sacred name still
remained above his heart in letters the width of a cornstalk and the length of
86Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea 36, ed. Th. Graesse, Legenda aurea vulgo historia lombardica
dicta, 3rd ed. (Bratislava, 1890; repr. Osnabruick, 1969), p. 157; trans. William Granger Ryan, The
Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 1:142-43.
87 See Sandro Botticelli, "The Extraction of the Heart of St. Ignatius," Florence, Uffizi, San Barnaba
Altarpiece (predella panel); reproduced in Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Complete Catalogue, 2
vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 2:68 (fig. B53); and Umberto Baldini, Botticelli (Florence, 1988), p. 213.
88 Heinrich Seuse, Leben 4, ed. Karl Bihlmeyer, in Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schrzften (1907; repr. Frank-
furt am Main, 1961), p. 16, trans. M. Ann Edward, The Exemplar: Life and Writings of Blessed Henry Suso,
2 vols. (Dubuque, Iowa, 1962), 1:13. On this work's authorship, see discussion and references in
Jeffrey F. Hamburger, "The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Heinrich Suso
and the Dominicans," Art Bulletin 71 (1989), 20-46 (esp. pp. 21-22).
the joint of his little finger."89 In trying to turn his own body-or heart-into a
memorial of his devotion to Christ, Seuse carries the book of the heart to a
literalistic extreme. But his literalism courts some inadvertent ironies. By stab-
bing himself with a stylus in attempting to write on his heart, Seuse not only
reverses the priority of the spirit over the letter, but also ignores the traditional
warning that the letter-here, literally-can kill. Thus the would-be saint him-
self nearly becomes a self-consuming artifact. Undertaken in the cell where he
performs his devotional reading and more ordinary writing, Seuse's scribal act
also takes the scriptorium of the heart to a new extreme.
THE REIFIED BOOK OF THE HEART
By the late fifteenth century the book of the heart had been transformed from
a figure of speech into a pictorial image and even a manuscript artifact. Thus
reified by artists and scribes, the trope realized its inherent fleshly potential,
reaching what seems like a logical conclusion to its development, and yet also
reducing itself to a paradox-interior writing embodied in an external, physical
form.
As early as 1330 the human heart was being represented in heraldry as the
rounded, symmetrical (diptych) form still seen today on playing cards and val-
entines, and after about 1450 heart-shaped images proliferated in both religious
and secular art.90 King Rene's famous Livre du cuer d'amours espris (1457) exhibits
the courtly or romantic use of this image; and other contemporary manuscripts
illustrate its religious use, particularly as part of the growing cult of devotion to
the Sacred Heart of Christ.9' The diptychal shape lent itself easily to picturing
the heart as a book, since the codex itself has a diptychal form, as does the
ancient and medieval writing tablet consisting of two hinged leaves ("writing
tablet" being the original sense of diptychum).92 In religious or devotional art the
rounded leaves of heart-shaped books also recall the round-topped tablets of the
Law in medieval iconography, emphasizing the traditional contrast between
stone and flesh, letter and spirit.93
89 Seuse, Leben 4, trans. Edward, TheExemplar, 1:14. Early editions contain illustrations showing Seuse
with lettering ("IHS") over his heart; see Bihlmeyer, Deutsche Schriften, figs. 4, 6, 11.
90 Boutell's Heraldry, rev. J. P. Brooke-Little (London, 1978), p. 63, cites the Douglas coat of arms
(ante 1330), illustrated in plate 3 (no. 3). Anne Sauvy, Le miroir du coeur: Quatre siecles d'images savantes
et populaires (Paris, 1989), pp. 47-48, dates the birth of the visual image to c. 1450. MED, s.v. herte Ic,
attests heart-shaped objects (jewelry, etc.) only after 1446.
91 Vienna, Nationalbibliothek, MS 2597. Black-and-white plates in Ernst Trenkler, Das Livre du cuer
d'amours espris des Herzogs Rena von Anjou (Vienna, 1946); color plates in F. Unterkircher, King Rena's
Book of Love (Le Cueur d Amours Espris) (New York, 1975). On the Sacred Heart, see J.-V. Bainvel, La
devotion au sacre-coeur deJesus: Doctrine, histoire, 5th ed. (Paris, 1921); and, on devotional hearts, see
Louis Gougaud, Devotions etpratiques ascetiques du moyen age (Paris, 1925), p. 123, n. 4; andJames Hogg,
ed., An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany, British Library London Additional MS. 37049,
Analecta Cartusiana 95/3 (Salzburg, 1981). See also Douglas Gray, "The Five Wounds of Our Lord,"
Notes & Queries 208 (1963), 50-51, 82-89, 127-34, 163-68 (esp. pp. 88-89).
92 See Thesaurus linguae Latinae, s.v. diptychum.
93 See Johannot, Tourner la page, pp. 43-46; and Ruth Mellinkoff, "The Round-Topped Tablets of
the Law: Sacred Symbol and Emblem of Evil," Journal ofjewish Art 1 (1974), 28-43.
The heart-shaped book of late-fifteenth-century art is not without precedent

in painting and manuscript illumination, particularly in visual art featuring St.
Augustine. For example, an early-fifteenth-century Italian painting shows the
saint seated at a book-filled desk and writing with a pen on a scroll, his heart
pierced by three arrows-an image that marks the heart's centrality to reading
and writing and that probably alludes to the saint's converted heart "shot
through ... [with] words like arrows. "94 Another example, from a fifteenth-cen-
tury manuscript of the Confessions itself, represents a stage in the visual history
of the trope just preceding its full realization: a miniature at the front of the
volume shows the saint holding a heart in one hand and a pen in the other as
he sits at a desk before an open codex-book.95 Recalling the passage "This is what
I want to do in my heart, in front of you, in my confession, and with my pen
before many witnesses," this image seems to be a visual allegory for writing from
the heart.96 Although it brings heart and book into close proximity, it does not
quite unify them.
The book of the heart appears as a fully realized visual image, possibly for the
first time, in two Flemish portraits attributed to the anonymous Master of Sainte
Gudule (fl. 1485) which depict a man holding an open heart-shaped book that
contains visible (if not quite legible) writing.97 Both portraits are clearly religious
in character; a church forms the main background of each, and one shows the
church interior with a scene from the Mass. Each painting originally may have
been the right wing of a diptych, thus reinforcing the diptychal image of the liber
cordis.98 These heart-shaped books might seem to be merely a visual trope, a
pictorial conceit, and thus an illustration of Huizinga's familiar thesis that late-
medieval religious ideas tend to harden into "mere externalism," except that
some actual heart-shaped manuscript books survive from the Middle Ages.99 Ex-
94 Fra Filippo Lippi, "St. Augustine Perceives the Trinity" (c. 1430), Florence, Uffizi, Barbadori
altarpiece (predella, right compartment). Reproduced in Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work
with a Complete Catalog (New York, 1993), pl. 64 (p. 114). Confessions 9.2.3 is adduced by Henriette
Mendelsohn, Fra Filippo Lippi (Berlin, 1909), p. 217, n. 155.
95 London, British Library, MS Harley 3087, fol. lv. The library has supplied me with a photograph
of this page, which, to my knowledge, is unpublished.
96 Confessions 10.1.1. The syntactical balance of heart and pen in this passage ("in corde meo . .
in stilo autem meo") has a visual parallel in the illustration. Another possible source is Ps. 45.1
(Vulgate 44.2, "Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum.... lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scri-
bentis"), quoted in Confessions 11.2.2.
97 On this artist, also known as the Master of the View of Sainte Gudule, see Max J. Friedlander,
Early Netherlandish Painting, 4, trans. Heinz Norden (Leiden, 1969), pp. 62-63, 79-80,99-100; Miche-
line Comblen-Sonkes, Guide bibliographique de la peintureflamande du XVe siecle (Brussels, 1984), pp.
125-27; and Barbara G. Lane, Flemish Painting outside Bruges, 1400-1500: An Annotated Bibliography
(Boston, 1986), pp. 232-34. The two paintings in question are New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, "Young Man Holding a Prayer Book" (50.145.27); and London, The National Gallery, "Portrait
of a Young Man" (2612). The London painting is catalogued by Martin Davies, The National Gallery,
London (= Les primitifsflamands, 1: Corpus de la peinture des anciens Pays-Bas mrzidionaux au quinz
si&le, 3), 2 vols. (Antwerp, 1953-54), 2:202-7 (no. 62).
98 This hypothesis is noted but disputed by Martin Davies, The Early Netherlandish School, 3rd ed.,
National Gallery Catalogues (London, 1968), p. 113; and Guy Bauman, Early Flemish Portraits, 1425-
1525 (New York, 1986), p. 40.
99Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in
isting examples are very rare, but cordiform books apparently became fashion-
able around 1470 in areas under Burgundian control or influence, and the artist
may have been familiar with actual examples and may even have used them as
models.'00 Whether the Master of Sainte Gudule worked from physical exemplars
is less important, however, than what his heart-shaped books suggest about the
devotional ideals and practices of his time.
As Paul Saenger has recently shown, the fifteenth century saw a shift of em-
phasis from spoken prayer to prayer with the heart-or priere de coeur This new
ideal, based on a traditional view of the heart's centrality to the subject, involved
a "shift from the mouth to the heart as the primary organ of prayer." By the
middle of the century heart-centered prayer was entering public worship in the
form of "private [i.e., silent] prayer during the Mass, especially at the elevation
of the Host." At first recited from memory, private prayers at public Mass were
eventually reproduced in "small portable codices," which reflect the new ideal
of heart-centered private prayer in rubrics stating that the prayers are to be read
"en pense, de coeur, or en coeur"'0' Like Augustine's heart-centered reading, t
silent, heart-centered prayer shifted the emphasis from voice and body to the
interior subject, to the word in the heart. At the same time, however, it tended
to heighten the corporeal, fleshly aspect of this inner word.
It seems possible, even quite likely, that the Master of Sainte Gudule's heart-
shaped books reflect the emergence of heart-centered prayer in conjunction with
personal prayer books. Art historians have conjectured that the cordiform books
in these paintings represent prayer books, and a similar heart-shaped prayer
book actually survives from the fifteenth century.'02 Moreover, in both paintings
and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries, trans. F. Hopman (1924; repr. New York, 1954), p.
152. Surviving heart-shaped books include Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Rothschild 2973 (chan-
sonnier, c. 1460-76); and MS Latin 10536 (book of hours, 15th c.). The former contains secular
songs and opens to a double-heart shape; the latter is a prayer book that opens to a single-heart shape
and thus resembles the cordiform books painted by the Master of Sainte Gudule in shape, size, and
apparent use (see references below, n. 102). For a description, see V. Leroquais, Les livres d'heures
manuscrits de la Bibliotheque Nationale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1927), 1:337-38 (no. 157, "Heures a l'usage
d'Amiens"). A modern facsimile, also with reference to the London painting, is illustrated in Heinz
Petersen, Bucheinbdnde (Graz, 1988), pp. 230-31. Hans Loubier, Der Bucheinband von seinen Anfdngen
bis zumEnde des 18. Jahrhunderts, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1926), pp. 221-22, cites and illustrates a sixteenth-
century cordiform bookbinding.
100 SeeJ. Porcher and E. Droz, "Le chansonnier dejean de Montchenu," in Les tresors des bibliothe
deFrance, ed. Emile Dacier, 5 (Paris, 1935), pp. 100-110: "la forme de coeur, infiniment rare, parait
avoir ete a la mode autour de 1470 dans les pays d'obedience bourguignonne ou soumis a l'influence
du Temeraire" (p. 110).
101 Saenger, "Books of Hours" (see above, n. 4), pp. 144-46, 153. On prayer and prayer books at
the elevation, see also Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 155-63.
102 See Friedlander, Early Netherlandish Painting, 4:80; Davies, The National Gallery, London, 2:203;
and Bauman, Early Flemish Portraits, p. 41 (incorrectly stating that the chansonnier [Paris, BN, MS
Rothschild 2973] is "the only known fifteenth-century heart-shaped book," but noting that "a prayer
book might just as well have a heart shape -indicative of passionate devotion -and the Eucharist
scene in the background of the [Metropolitan] Museum's portrait supports the latter interpreta-
tion"). Porcher and Droz, "Le Chansonnier," describe the cordiform book in the London painting
as follows: "Coeur simple, comme les Heures a l'usage d'Amiens [Paris, BN, MS Latin 10536]" (p.
109, n. 3). See also Petersen, Bucheinbdnde, pp. 230-31.
the sitter's hands approximate the iconography of priere de coeur, in which the
fingers were joined or interlocked to leave "the hands at rest close to the body
in a position creating an area of restricted space symbolic of the activity of prayer
within the heart."'03 Although in these paintings each sitter holds a book, the
hands circumscribe an area near the heart that suggests the same symbolic values.
Both paintings also show the subject grasping the left-hand leaf of the book
between thumb and forefinger, as if having just turned the page to follow a
liturgical program.
Prayer with the heart is further suggested by the background scene from the
Mass in one of the paintings (Fig. 1). As a sacred drama based on the injunction
"Do this in remembrance of me" ("in meam commemorationem"), the medieval
Mass was widely understood as a "rememorative allegory" of Christ's Passion.'04
Thus the heart-shaped book in the painting suggests the remembrance of
Christ's Passion in general, with memory represented here as a liber cordis, as in
the Middle English Passion poem examined earlier. It may also allude to specific
liturgical passages that signify the inner presence of God's Word ("Dominus sit
in corde tuo"), the lifting up of hearts ("Sursum corda"), or the sacrifice of the
heart ("Unde et memores").105 However, the specific scene portrayed in the
painting is the elevation of the host, the climax of the Mass and the very part
that, according to Saenger, was "especially" linked with prie're de coeur. By the late
Middle Ages the elevation had become the emotional focus of the Mass for the
laity, since it was taken to signify the raising of Christ on the cross and direcdy
follows the consecrating words ("Hoc est enim Corpus meum").106 We have al-
ready seen a devotional identification of Christ's body (corpus) with the believer's
heart (cor) in the Middle English Passion poem. The painting suggests the same
identification by aligning the heart-shaped book and the consecrated host on
the same vertical axis (and by placing each in a pair of hands), so that the viewer's
eye is drawn from the book in the foreground to the host in the background.
Since medieval eucharistic doctrine linked the fractio hostiae with the apertio Scr
turae, this identification emphasizes the believer's incorporation of the Verbum
Dei through both the bread received into the body and the scriptural words
received into the heart.'07 Furthermore, just visible over the altar in this painting
is an image of the Virgin holding the infant Christ, located precisely where the
sitter's horizontal line of sight intersects with the vertical line through the liber
cordis and the host. The heart-shaped book in the foreground thus indicates
103 Saenger, "Books of Hours," p. 152. On the history of prayer gestures, see Gougaud, Devotions et
pratiques, pp. 1-49.
104 Luke 22.19. 0. B. Hardison, Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the
Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, 1965; repr. 1969), p. 63.
105 See the influential glosses on these passages in Amalarius, De ecclesiasticis officiis 3.18, 21, 25
(citing "cordis sacrificio"), PL 105:1125, 1133, 1141; as discussed in Hardison, Christian Rite and
Christian Drama, pp. 58, 63, 67.
106 Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama, p. 64. See also Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 55-63,
131-34, 155-63, and figs. 1, 7, 9, 19.
107 See Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum, L'Eucharistie et l'Eglise au moyen dge: Etude historique, 2nd
(Paris, 1949), pp. 82-83. On the Eucharist as "food of the heart," see Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 38
(James of Vitry).
prayer, remembrance, and other spiritual values centered in the heart as well as
the mystery of the Incarnate Word-that is, both the Word that became flesh
and the Word inscribed in human, fleshly, hearts.
The other painting (Fig. 2) omits the church interior and the scene from the
Mass but includes certain details-pen case, inkwell, and the sitter's rolled-back
sleeve-that may equally allude to private, heart-centered prayer and other de-
votional ideals. According to Saenger, priere de coeur "created a new intimacy
between the devotee and the book" that gave rise to customized prayer books
that were "far more personal than those of previous epochs," containing texts
adapted to the purchaser's gender or name and even spaces for the reader to
insert "his or her own requests or desires."''08 The pen case and inkwell thus may
indicate that the sitter holds some sort of personalized prayer book. It has even
been suggested that the anonymous subject is the author or scribe of the book
he is holding.'09 But the scribal tools in this portrait may be figurative accessories
to a figurative book and may illustrate instead an inscriptional metaphor such
as writing on the heart. Since this painting has no eucharistic scene, its heart-
shaped book may point less to Christ's Passion than to some other moral or
devotional idea. One possibility is the personal record of conscience or memory
often signified by the book of the heart-the inner book of one's life to be
opened at the LastJudgment. By the end of the fifteenth century, middle-class
piety, literacy, and economic values had converged in the vivid metaphor of the
moral account book, as shown by the morality play Everyman and its Flemish
analogue Elckerlijc, which use books as stage props to represent the moral life of
the individual."10 The bourgeois piety painted by the Master of Sainte Gudule is
precisely the milieu in which such metaphors flourished; perhaps the heart-
shaped book held by the clearly well-to-do and pious sitter represents the moral
record of his own life-a record of which he himself, as indicated by the scribal
equipment at his elbow, is both the author and the subject.
The book of the heart as pictured by the Master of Sainte Gudule, and as
further corporealized in a few surviving cordiform books, compounds a paradox
that haunted the book of the heart from its origin as a trope. According to
Derrida, the metaphor of interior writing asserts itself from antiquity to mo-
dernity by dint of a reversal that reduces external (literal) writing from reality
to metaphoricity, to a mere copy of the writing on the heart or soul. Pursuing
this analysis, we would have to conclude that the reified book of the heart adds
a second reversal to the series, a second inversion of terms, by making interior
writing into external writing once again. Not that this further turn of the trope
108 Saenger, "Books of Hours," pp. 155-56.

l0 Davies, TheEarly Netherlandish School, p. 115, n. 8. Oda Van de Castyne, "Autour de 'L'Instruction
Pastorale' du Louvre (A propos de l'exposition d'art ancien a Bruxelles)," Revue belge d 'archeologie et
d'histoire de l'art 5 (1935), 319-28, proposes that the sitter is a clerk or secretary attached to a chapter
of Augustinian canons and that the heart-shaped book may be "un exemplaire d'un ouvrage de saint
Augustin" (p. 326) or at least "une allusion a la doctrine augustinienne" (p. 328). Various interpre-
tations and rebuttals are cited in Davies, The National Gallery, London, pp. 205-7.
'I0 Everyman, ed. A. C. Cawley, corr. ed. (Manchester, Eng., 1977), p. 15, line 503 ("the bokes of
your workes and dedes"); also 104, 134, 136. Cawley, p. xxx, lists "Everyman's account-book" among
the stage properties.
Fig. 1. Master of Sainte Gudule, Young Man

Holding a P.rayer Book.
By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950.
(50.145.27) All rights reserved.
marks a return to primacy or innocence, for the reified book of the heart is the
last possible step in the senies, it marks the trope's logical (and ontological) limit.
By the same token, it represents the height of artifice, being a trope of a trope,
a figure of a figure. Thus even an actual heart-shaped book must remain a met-
aphor-indeed, the grandest of its kind-while only seeming to transcend its
own metaphonicity.
AiFTER GUTENBERG
If the codex-book is histonically bound to the idea of the subject, of an interior

presence, it needs to be stressed that during the Middle Ages this subject was
conceived in essentially scribal terms. The book of the heart as painted by th
Flemish master crystallizes this scribal conception of the subject especially
i~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . . . .
Fig. 2. Master of Sainte Gudule, Portrait of a

Young Man.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Truste s, The
National Gal ery, London.
the panel showing the sit er with pen and inkwel . But this image was created
during a period of radical change in European book production, as an older
manuscript culture was giving way to a new typographical one. The advent of
movable type, which transformed the codex from a unique personal artifact into
a mass-produced object, also transformed the book of the heart as a trope. And
the trope was further qualified by the gradual decline of the old pectoral psy-
chology, as the perceived center of the body shifted from the heart to the head.
The way in which printing technology affected the trope is suggested in a well-
known sermon (c. 1630) by John Donne that evokes the book of the heart as
not only the individual's most portable, personal text but also a typographical
entity. Stating that God provides three books of instruction -the book of nature,
the book of Scripture, and the book of one's inner self-Donne describes the
last as follows:
God opens another book to [man], his manuall, his bosome, his pocket book, his Vade
Mecum, the Abridgement of all Nature, and all Law, his owne heart, and conscience:
And this booke, though he shut it up, and clasp it never so hard, yet it will sometimes
burst open of it selfe; though he interline it with other studies, and knowledges, yet the
Text it selfe, in the booke it selfe, the testimonies of the conscience, will shine through
and appeare: Though he load it, and choak it with Commentaries and questions, that
is, perplexe it with Circumstances, and Disputations, yet the matter it selfe, which is
imprinted there, will present it selfe.... "I
Even after Gutenberg the metaphor of inward verbal impressions sometimes

alludes to the older imagery of wax tablets (or seals); however, Donne contrasts
"imprinted" words with "interlined" words, clearly indicating a printed book
with handwritten insertions or additions."12 The inner book-the book of
"[one's] owne heart, and conscience" -thus comprises two kinds of text, sug-
gesting a divided self.
In Donne's metaphor the imprinted text represents the innate knowledge of
God, while the interlined text represents rationalizations, doubts, and excuses
that obscure this divine knowledge and "choak" or "perplexe" self-knowledge
as well. Donne thus aligns the printed word with truth and perspicuity, and hand-
writing with irrelevance, obscurity, and even delusion-a telling sign of the Gu-
tenberg paradigm shift. Furthermore, the "Commentaries" and "Disputations"
hint pejoratively at medieval scholasticism, and "interlining" at the medieval
biblical gloss in particular. Although originally a Roman Catholic, Donne the
Anglican divine emphasized the link between the church of the fathers (pre-
eminently Augustine) and the reformed Church of England as well as the divide
between his own era and what (in an earlier sermon) he calls "the middle age." 113
Donne locates the book of the heart, and hence the inner subject, on the same
historical divide-at once both theological and textual-by identifying the un-
regenerate or deluded heart with obscure (and obscuring) medieval chirogra-
phy, and the converted, godly heart with penetrating modern typography, with
letters that "will shine through and appeare."
Another familiar text from the early seventeenth century provides an index of
how the book of the heart was affected by changing psychological notions as
well. After the ghost of his father reveals the murder and vengefully commands
him to "remember me," Hamlet vows to write down his filial duty in the book
of his memory:
Remember thee?
I, thou poore Ghost, whiles memory holds a seate
In this distracted Globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the Table of my Memory
Ile wipe away all triuiall fond Records,
All sawes of Bookes, all formes, all pressures past
"'John Donne, "[Sermon] Preached upon Whitsunday [? 1630]," ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and
George R. Potter, The Sermons ofJohn Donne, 9 (Berkeley, Calif., 1958), Sermon 10, p. 237, lines 1
92 (my emphasis).
112 See OED, s.v. Interline, v. (1) .
113 Donne, "A Second Sermon Preached at White-hall, April 19, 1618" (1 Tim. 1.15), ed. Simpson
and Potter, Sermons, 1 (Berkeley, Calif., 1953), Sermon 9, p. 303, line 81. Cited in OED, s.v. Middle
age.
That youth and obseruation coppied there,

And thy Commandment all alone shall liue
Within the Booke and Volume of my Braine,
Vnmixt with baser matter. Yes, by Heauen!"14
Here memory resides emphatically in the head, in "this distracted Globe," and
specifically in "the Booke and Volume of my Braine"- the same part of the body
that later prompts further reflections on remembrance ("Alas poore Yorick"). 115
Moreover, Hamlet's promise to write "thy Commandment" within himself carries
an echo of Scripture, but, in a telling shift from religious to secular matters, the
heavenly God writing a divine Law in his creature is here replaced by an earthly
king and father inscribing the lex talionis in his son, and for not just moral but
political, dynastic ends. The sole trace of the book of the heart in this passage is
the mention of "Records," but the context makes clear that this is a dying met-
aphor, a fragment of a disappearing paradigm."16
The shift of the inner book from the heart to the brain, and from religious to
secular use, was not by any means complete in the early seventeenth century, as
the example from Donne clearly shows, and as many others could corroborate.
The trope remained alive in poets such as George Herbert, and it took on a new
(if somewhat mechanical) life in the very popular English and Dutch emblem
books of the same century, another way in which typography both re-created and
widely disseminated the trope."17 Writing on the heart also figured in the trans-
planted Puritan culture embodied in The New England Primer; where both verbal
and pictorial forms of the trope instruct young readers to learn the primer itself
by heart ("My Book and Heart / Shall never part"). 18 And in the middle of the
nineteenth century the heart/text metaphor still carried emotional and spiritual
force in The Scarlet Letter, where biblical, Augustinian, and saintly precedents for
writing on the fleshly heart converge vividly in Arthur Dimmesdale's "red
stigma. "119
But as this last example suggests, the book of the heart was a quintessentially
medieval trope, not least of all because for some ten centuries it was a wholly
114 William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.91, 95-104, ed. Edward Hubler, in The Complete Signet Classic
Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1972), p. 926 (text and punctuation); The First Folio of
Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York, 1968), p. 766 (orthography, except
for "pressures," altered from "presures").
115 Hamlet 5.1.184, First Folio version (Norton reprint, p. 786).
116 Earlier in the same speech, "heart" (93) is the seat of emotion or spirit. The brain similarly
upstages the heart in Sonnet 122: "tables . .. within my brain" (1), "brain and heart" (5), and "record"
(8).
117 See Thomas Heffernan, Art and Emblem: Early Seventeenth-Century English Poetry of Devotion, Ren-
aissance Monograph 17 (Tokyo, 1991), pp. 21-25 (Donne, Herbert, Quarles), 118 (illustrations).
118 The New England Primer: A History of Its Origin and Development, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New
York, 1897), p. 66 (original emphasis), with heart/book emblem; pp. 69, 78, 81 (lessons "by Heart").
"19 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, chap. 23, ed. Fredson Bowers, The Centenary Edition of
the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1 (Columbus, Ohio, 1962; repr. 1971), p. 255 (this "stigma" being
"no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart").
scribal one, and the mechanical type that so greatly popularized it also seems to
have marked (though alone it did not cause) the beginning of its gradual de-
cline. And if today we still refer to learning texts by heart, to writing down rec-
ords, and even to writing on the heart, it is not necessarily because we still regard
the heart as a kind of book, but because we speak a language inherited from the
Middle Ages.
Eric Jager is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia Univ
(e-mail: e2j@columbia.edu).

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The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject

Author(s): Eric Jager

figuring the heart as a book (i.e., a manuscript codex) reflected a scribe-based

I begin this essay by briefly examining an important precursor trope to the

THE TABLET OF THE HEART

The comparison of knowledge or memory to an inner writing was common-

THE BOOK OF THE HEART

Paul's metaphors of the incised and circumcised heart powerfully influenced

25 Vance, Mervelous Signals, pp. 10, 31.

as I make my confession, to hear what I am inside myself, beyond the possible

that informs Augustine's larger writing project.44 In addition, as both a metaphor

THE SCRIPTORIUM OF THE HEART

The book of the heart inaugurated by patristic culture, and by Augustine in

68 Mazzotta, The World at Play, p. 150 (with references).

Write vp-on my hert boke

Ihesu, yit write in my hert

how bloode out of by woundes stert;

THE REIFIED BOOK OF THE HEART

The heart-shaped book of late-fifteenth-century art is not without precedent

108 Saenger, "Books of Hours," pp. 155-56.

Fig. 1. Master of Sainte Gudule, Young Man

If the codex-book is histonically bound to the idea of the subject, of an interior

Fig. 2. Master of Sainte Gudule, Portrait of a

Even after Gutenberg the metaphor of inward verbal impressions sometimes

That youth and obseruation coppied there,

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