 Madam Vice President, ladies and gentlemen, let me first of all thank the society for this very kind invitation. I feel honored, and I am certainly very pleased to be here. And if I had a light here, I could read my manuscript. So that would have to be, that is wonderful. Can it be a little brighter? Too many times. All right, well, this is good, OK. So as is well known, one of the characteristics of medieval art is that pictures frequently feature writing as well. And that is especially true, of course, of the illumination of manuscripts, where the picture responds in some way to an already existing text. Sometimes elements of that text may even move across the divide and be fused with the accompanying image in what current scholarship refers to as the iconicity of writing. And you see it, for instance, in early insular gospel books. Still, the normal case is that the writing script is introduced as an alternative form of communication that conveys additional information. And that includes the recording of speech. Paradoxically, writing as an element of pictorial composition can make spoken words visible. The artist encloses them in ready-made graphic formulas that transport actual speech acts in extension of the speaker's gesture. So this, then, is my topic, the graphic shape and the function of such paratexts and their incorporation into the overall design. They rarely command the attention they deserve, ignored as merely occasional or purely pragmatic contributions. And occasional is actually correct. Most of the time, medieval artists and scribes have not chosen to accentuate their work in this way. Nevertheless, it is still a large field. And I will limit myself to the 11th and 12th centuries and to three sets of observations. First, a brief excursion into the special status and function of the role in this system of virtual communication. And second, looking at a few examples of iconography and iconographic and functional variation of the scroll across England and Europe. Third, considering a variant of this motif that occurs only in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and signals a rather different approach toward the visualization of speech. So the role, since the term scroll and roll are often confused or simply lumped together when it comes to describing the representational speech in such illuminated manuscripts, I want to say something just briefly on shape and function of the inscribed role. The speaker in this scene uses a role, a replica of an instrument of writing that was in actual use throughout the Middle Ages and in many areas of written communication just to remind everybody segments of parchment sewn together in vertical formation inscribed from the top on down and across the narrow width. Now, even in this stylized form, the role opens up, unrolls vertically in a straight line in front of the speaker and further reveals its iconographic origin in the slight curls at either end. The speaker on this title page of the Gospel of Mark is John the Baptist with the beginning of his sermon announcing the coming of Christ, may need for sure may therefore there come as one might hear than I after me. But in this instance, those words don't address the crowd to the right in the picture. That is John's original and if you like proper audience. Instead, the dynamics of the scene are directed outward toward the viewer. The evangelist in the left background has already recorded the event and now he looks at John who uses a role to deliver this message to the present day audience. And that is a rather typical constellation. The role does transport spoken words but it remains relatively static, informed and content. Stiff and declarative, demonstrative rather than dialogic. By contrast, a speech that reverberates within the framework of a pictorial narrative is conveyed by scrolls. So to the scroll, the scroll is actually related to yet another type of role that had its own place in this system of signifiers. And you see it here in somewhat exaggerated form, more and more like a bas-matt. In antiquity, it had served as an attribute of the scholar but the Middle Ages saw it as the insufficient precursor of the codex. And as such, it survived only visually as the symbol of ephemeral knowledge and mostly in the hand of those who had contributed provisional non-canonical wisdom prophets mostly. Here in this picture, it is one of the lesser apostles while Peter in the middle holds a book as the author of two canonical letters. This role is almost closed, rolled up tightly. But since it represents transient oral communication, it undoubtedly helped create the graphic formula that became the open and open-ended projector of speech in pictorial design. Alas, in effect, in actual execution, this graphic sign is a form sui generis, an artistic construct made to convert gesture into visible speech through a tape or a ribbon of almost indeterminate legs. It is inscribed horizontally along its narrow width, not unlike the banners carried in military action, hence the French term for Bande Heuil. It floats outward away from the speaker in almost any direction because unlike the script bearing role, it is generally unencumbered by the laws of gravity. This display here at the beginning of Jerome's commentary on Isaiah in a manuscript from Citro provides a good demonstration. Speaker is the prophet himself who directs two of his prophecies toward the opposite page where the Virgin Mary appears in fulfillment. Visually prominent, the scroll acts as an activating, almost causal factor. Isaiah's speech unvines from the tip of the scroll to where additional words may still be in hand, so to speak. And that seems logical. And yet the painter's dominant concern is function, not very similitude. Then you see that the writing switches back and forth between the two surfaces of the scroll in order to remain visible throughout its playful draping. So this graphic element is enormously variable in application as an integral part of any overall design. And I want to show just a few more examples. Like this one here, they not only convey information, but they strive for clear function, a certain aesthetic appeal, and the manipulation of the viewer. In their most stylized form, as simple flat strips, those scrolls along with their text messages may become visual props distributed systematically in a carefully balanced construction that helps lend geometrical rigor to an underlying vegetative design, which is the tree of Jesse. This sort of systematic abundance was especially common in the famous scriptorium of Hermashausen, but also in Hildesheim or in the southeast in Prague, for example. On the other hand, such strips could serve more individual purposes as well. In this initial to a sermon on the birth of Mary from Admont in Austria, the young Mary is being educated by her parents, and their words are shaped so as to highlight the domestic intimacy of the scene. So flat strips are quite common, but the general tendency was to retain the idea of a tape, a tape that could be rolled out and would be back up again, even where such tapes might serve, as they do here, more explicitly architectural purposes. In this illustration to Psalm 26 in a Westminster manuscript, they support the scene of David's anointment with quotes from Daniel and his interpreter, Augustine. In general, the slide curls at either end of the tape point to a larger framework that is just not being accessed in the present case. As the formal equivalent of conversation, this artist from the Muir's region has intertwined two speeches and written one of them upside down, presumably the response. The curious viewer will have to turn the book around only to discover that this is not genuine dialogue after all. These scrolls record laudatory summaries of each man's philosophical achievements announced in the third person. Such internal contradictions in pictorial fiction usually reveals the viewer, the external reader, as the primary addressee. And here, where this contradiction is underlined in a special graphic constellation, it even involves the book as physical object. The monastery of Lobes in Lorraine comes a Bible with this historiated initial for Hosea. Two scrolls serve as connective tissue that holds together a complex sequence of events. The gesture of Hosea's left hand brings together two different zones or levels, both Jehovah's strange command from above and in the real world, the evil adulteress Hosea has been told to marry. And with the other hand, Hosea holds the second scroll, arranged horizontally at a right angle to Jehovah's words and serving the mundane purpose of naming the outcome of this union in the third zone, with a couple's three mystic gotten offspring. And the daughter in the middle, who is called without mercy and her provocative stare, then challenges the viewer to take it all in and comprehend the incomprehensible. Artistic desire to fashion formal equivalents for different occasions led to an ingenious and rare modification in this Austrian manuscript of Anselm of Canterbury's prayers. When the words envisioned light and the divine, the scroll turns into an inverted funnel to reflect that special connection. But I bring up the scene of Peter's rescue, mainly because it exemplifies something else very well. Even in the 12th century, the large majority of these spoken texts is not original. Most are quotations from biblical, liturgical, or theological writing. Thus, they are often not even first person statements. So for example, the angel here says, quote, and the light lit up the prison, unquote. Or in a more mixed mode, quote, he woke him saying, arise quickly, unquote. In fact, as the musical notation above those words makes explicit, all of these phrases in the scene, including a titillus in the top left corner, are borrowed from the liturgy, and quite specifically here from a response performed during the monastic office on Peter's feast day, August 1. In other words, the pictorial staging of the texts may cast it as spontaneous monologue or spontaneous dialogue. But this visual fiction is really meant to lend historic immediacy, histrionic immediacy to slivers of sacred or edifying writing as they now flow from the mass of pictorial actors. And these actors don't just pronounce those texts, they perform them. And this performance invokes a textural dimension beyond the picture that is shared a priori by producer and consumer who habitually come together after all as a small and coherent group. In this particular manuscript, they even hear the added echo of communal liturgical singing. The text quoted and evoked on this tidal page of a Gospel of John is a theological toppers. How the anti-Trinitarian teachings by the Heresiat Arius are effectively refuted by the initial words of this very Gospel. John does the honors himself, as it were, and Arius is already on the ground, covered partly by his scroll that voices succinctly in his doubts regarding the concept of the Trinity. That is, in the beginning, the father must have been without the son. The writing is upside down, challenging the authority of the evangelist above who reacts with painful poignancy. Although there is physical contact as well, John's foot is only on his adversary's head, the more poignant effect and quite unconventional is created by the graphic formulation of the verbal response. Scroll and words in unison reach right into the heretics ear. And it is the vocali thrust of the last word, principio, that administers the dogmatic who declares. Words have consequences, and they can hurt. That is what the victors look straight at the viewer, seems to say. With this example, I have already reached my third set. For obvious reasons, such scrolls everywhere function in close physical proximity to the speaker. Most can speak just so when speakers still hold in their hands the tightly wound remainders of the tape, as we have seen in several cases. The most elaborate rendings even show a pin in the middle that provides stability. And all of that means that all of those speakers seem to quote at their discretion. The message emanates from them. They seem to have direct access to their source, and it is up to them, in their hands, as it were, how much of it is revealed at any time. Now in this picture, the modus operandi is remarkably different, as you can see in the detail on top. Instead of unwinding tape, his scroll from his hand, John uses his hand to pull that tape from a slit in the side of a cylindrical capsule that hovers somewhere above his shoulder, complete with a lid and a pin sticking out on top of the lid. This procedure deviates sharply from everything we have seen, and the question arises, of course, what accounts for it? Now the short answer is that this manuscript was produced in one of the workshops in Canterbury. Among the conventions developed in England, this one stands out as a specialty of Anglo-Saxon scriptoria, with a distinctive perspective of their own, maintained consistently for almost 100 years. This is the most basic form. It may not strike one as unusual at first, because the overall iconography on this title page of the Gospel of Luke is quite conventional. An angel or, as here, the evangelist symbol, the winged bull, brings him a scroll. It is empty, but that too is normal. It is a symbol of the word as such, or inspiration for recording it. What is unusual, at least from a continental perspective, is that the ends of the scroll, instead of being visible and maybe even curled slightly, are stuck in little brown boxes with slits in their sides. Now this page was painted around the middle of the 11th century, but exactly the same iconographic formula appears already around 970 in the benediction of Bishop Asselwold. Several times, in fact, and it can be found in other liturgical manuscripts during the intervening period. Here, angels announced the word, but containers at either end of the scroll suggest, instead of open-endedness, that its virtual contents have already been stored somewhere, hence selected in advance in an intermediate stage between the base text and its partial verbalization in personalized speech. Actually, that is true also when one of the boxes is removed, as in this other Gospel book of Anglo-Saxon provenance with the same kind of overall iconography, hence also maintaining the emptiness of the scroll. Mostly, though, when one of the boxes is removed, the scroll is inscribed. And in most of those cases, more imagination is invested in the appearance of the box. Among the various carriers of script in this scene are two scrolls held up jointly by the hand of God above and emerging from receptacles that blend completely into their overall surroundings. As a result, the scrolls themselves extend in harmony with that architecture, the Benedict on the left and the Marks of Christ Church on the right. But the most striking aspect of this arrangement is that those words, because they emerge from containers, do not originate with the speaker, not even God in this case, but are pulled by him from those receptacles, in other words, accessed from an independent source. Earlier in the same manuscript, that source is portrayed as a rather large handheld cylindrical object with a spindle in the middle, it serves as the virtual container of the pascal tables that an angel offers to the Egyptian abbot, Pekomias. And his reaction is significant. He pulls the emerging scroll toward him with his right hand as an active partner in this transaction. Here one has to really savor the sophistication at work here. A pre-codified and pre-stored text becomes a scrolled speech in transition to renewed codification immediately below in the first line of the actual tables. You can barely see it, but that is the same text, the first line of the tables. What gives rise to such medial playfulness is the interpolation of this particular iconographic feature. And it is a measure of its popularity that elaborately crafted capsules often replace the simple box. So here is another example. In this solder, the famous berry solder, a marginal gloss picks up two lines from the adjacent second psalm, where the psalmist announces the coming of a reform king who may let speak for himself, quote, I have been installed by him over Sion and so forth. And that is the figure portrayed on the margin standing on Sion, who repeats those words, making them visible in an elaborate scroll. The vehicle of this duplication, the intermediary agent, is the capsule that hovers in midair in front of him. The only explanation of this duplication is that the draftsman wanted to create a performance that would resonate well beyond the text. We have seen how the evangelist John manipulates the words of his own gospel as ready to use formula. This king of Sion is made to act out his own pronouncement as an exemplary recipient and as the promulgator of the face as he puts it at the end of his speech, declaring the decree of the Lord. Now, to repeat this kind of dramatization of the visual experience of orality constitutes a significant departure from the common formula that had by no means been unknown in Canterbury in earlier times. This is Matthew from the so-called Golden Evangelary of Canterbury holding a continental scroll. The Anglo-Sites variant arrived later as those workshops founded their own style and it was invoked right up to the Norman conquest. But there is just one much later example and it will round out my third set. We'll do yet another initial, this time introducing the prophet Isaiah in a late 12th century Bible from Saint-Homer. The artist was an itinerant master who had worked in England and in this instance he combined the old Anglo-Saxon model with the more general continental formula to distinguish the different modes of speech. His topic was King Hezekiah of Judah's Illness and Cure, during which Isaiah acts as a messenger of Jehovah. At the upper left Jehovah commands Isaiah to convey this message and in the interior below Isaiah informs the king that Jehovah has lifted his ailment from him. This is ordinary speech, so to speak, delivered in highly stylized scrolls. The king's response is something else, namely an eloquent and exuberant hymn of gratitude which the Middle Ages adopted as one of the canticles used in the monastic liturgy at various times of the year. Hezekiah pulls it from an oval capsule with knobs at either end that indicate a pin inside. In this context, this action amounts to a performance within a performance. Hezekiah's hymn was a set piece, a biblical speech of a higher histrionic order that had become canonical. And while the three speakers together perform a biblical event, Hezekiah's part enjoys the special status of liturgical celebration. And to make that point, the artist drew on a device that must, by his time, have been deemed archaic if not bizarre by French viewers. But what gave people the idea in monastic workplaces 200 years earlier to visualize and manipulate speech in this way? I think that this very late recollection of the Anglo-Saxon practice may hold the key to the answer. Let's think back also to the marginal scene that shows the reform king of the second psalm performing his own words, words that incidentally had also become part of the liturgical repertoire by then. Each time the tape emerges from storage in the capsule and does not release the text until the speaker takes symbolic possession by speaking it. And this overtly theatrical and unusually sophisticated performance goes beyond simple mediation. And I think it is understood best in analogy to the liturgical recapitulation of the word. Consider just two important common denominators in the relationship to the body of sacred writing in the background. Selection and appropriation for a new purpose are followed by active creative engagement in a performance that lends voice to the selection. This iconographic formula, and employed almost exclusively in the liturgical manuscripts as I have said, was conceived and continued in the spirit, even imitation of the liturgy. We can observe that impulse at work elsewhere as well, most obviously where such texts are accompanied by musical notation as they are in the answer manuscript I showed a bit earlier. In that case, those added newms appeal directly to a habitual communal experience on the part of the viewers. The Anglo-Saxon iconographic formula entails a more direct reference to the same thing, but it also relies on the depiction of a special object to connect it with liturgical practice. And that is, of course, the capsule at the center of those performances. It comes in different shapes. I show one more evangelist on the left with a hand-held exemplar and parallels that you have already seen. But the mechanics are always the same. The scroll appears to be stored inside, wound around a pin, sometimes with knobs at either end, and it is put out through a slit at the side to be put to use. Some descriptions are really generic. Others are quite detailed, and at any rate, to portray such a box in prominent position to the hand function would not have made sense at all if the viewer, if it had meant nothing at all to the viewers. Now, unfortunately, no such objects have been documented for Anglo-Saxon England or any other period in English medieval history. At least that is the answer I have received so far after making inquiries here, there, in London, and elsewhere. And now I'm, of course, hoping that someone in this audience can help identify the missing link somewhere. Maybe nothing's been found yet because there's never been a targeted search. Unfortunately, there exists a continental example that tells us what such a cultural artifact might look like in reality. It is the so-called loge rotulus that survives together with a wooden capsule with the obligatory slit. This long rule was made for the abbey of loge around 870, and it is inscribed with a litany of several hundred saints' names. So clearly, it was connected to the liturgy in some way. Pins with knobs are still fastened at both ends, and until 20 years ago, the scroll was still inside this capsule. The library in Frankfurt, where it is now, does not permit a dendrochronological examination, but the capsule itself bears an inscription that dates it to the 15th century. Having examined it recently, I think that is about right, but I also say no reason why it should not have been made in continuation of an older tradition dating back to the 9th century. Now, however that may be, this is an important parallel, despite the distance in time and geography. And taken together with the manuscript evidence, it suggests that planners and painters in Anglo-Saxon workshops did actually more than act in the spirit of the liturgy. They actually saw such containers for paralyturgical roles and adopted them in their device. So to see this relationship as merely analogous is perhaps not enough. Music, in one case, and spoken language in the other, mediate between the written corpus of sacred texts and its current echo. The speech act visualized in writing with a prompt after all the reader or viewer to read it out loud, to voice it. In other words, in a society that communicated orally for the most part, voice was the all-important means of communication, even for these more or less literate clerics who relied on it for their mission, after all, internally in the liturgy and externally in the celebration of the mass sermon and catechetic instruction. In the final analysis, one suspects that the urge to make speech visible may not at all have stemmed from pragmatic considerations, providing more information, for example. The intent was rather to pay homage to that other medium, spoken language. Other combinations of imagery and writing dissolve the medial differences, for instance, in the iconicity that I mentioned at the beginning. The graphic actualization of speech, on the other hand, that is meant to raise the viewer's consciousness of those medial differences. The picture is the third dimension that acts as the meeting place of orality and literacy. Thank you.