As a specialist in medieval French literature, Henry Ravenhall has examined hundreds of manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Every time he does, he sits quietly in a special library viewing room and gingerly turns each page with clean, dry hands, careful not to tear or otherwise harm these precious artifacts.
“When you look closely at the surface itself, you see patterns of how paint has been smudged or certain characters defaced,” said Ravenhall, an assistant professor in the Department of French at UC Berkeley who’s at work on a book provisionally titled Touch and the Experience of Medieval French Manuscripts. “These signs tell us that medieval culture worked in a way that was totally different from the way we’re thinking about these objects.”
But in his research, Ravenhall has found that medieval readers didn’t treat these books with the same light touch that we do today.
Examine a medieval text, and you’ll see images of certain characters with their faces erased of all detail or entire scenes that are cloudy from repeated touch. It may seem like such imperfections were accrued over centuries of wear and tear, but often these defacements came directly from medieval readers, who touched, smudged and kissed the texts as they read them.
For medieval readers, the experience of reading was about more than sitting alone quietly with a book, Ravenhall says; physically interacting with manuscripts provided a way for readers to connect with each other and express themselves in ways they perhaps couldn’t in their daily lives. His research has shed new light on the social nature of reading in the Middle Ages, and how our reading habits today could be more similar to those of medieval readers than it first appears.