Featured Graduate Student Research: Johannes Junge Ruhland

I am grateful to The Europe Center for having given me the means to pursue my dissertation research without incurring any significant delays related to the Covid-19 pandemic. I was awarded a grant that would fund the digitisation of several medieval manuscripts which are currently unavailable online, and which I would not have been able to consult in person for a while.

In my dissertation, I discuss manuscripts containing more than one text (multi-text manuscripts) which have typically been disregarded in scholarly discussions of French, Occitan, and Franco-Italian literatures of the Middle Ages. This is because scholars have deemed these manuscripts to be excessively heterogeneous for lack of coherence or unity, and at times also because these manuscripts were put together as we know them today after their individual components were written. Focussing on incongruence in these manuscripts, I propose to change perspectives: rather than describing these manuscripts for what they lack, I suggest that the apparent misfit of themes, voices, logic, and so forth can be regarded as a positive attribute of these books.

I have found that this reversal of perspective opens up an entire field of investigation. Indeed, many multi-text manuscripts appear to be set up as spaces of cognitive exploration for their readers to experiment with the making of connections, the ordering of history, the building of a heritage, and the formation of communities—among others. In a series of case-studies, I examine how incongruence serves as a formal marker that triggers a specific type of engagement on the part of readers. Provisionally, I call manuscripts that work in this way ‘thought laboratories’, because they provide a conditioned setting to make thought happen. In other words, rather than being allowed to daydream (which, of course, they always can and should), readers are assigned specific tasks by thought laboratories.

As I see it, with my dissertation I make three interventions in the field of medieval Romance literature. First, for the study of literature I develop a framework to integrate incongruence into scholars’ toolkit for analysing texts and manuscripts. Often, indeed, it is coherence and the like that are relied on. Second, for the study of how manuscripts were produced, which is called codicology, I propose a number of revisions to the framework through which manuscripts are traditionally categorised. It is because we might be relying on the wrong labels that we have not been able largely to account for what amounted to more than half of the manuscripts produced between 1275 and 1325. Thirdly—and bear with me here, this is very much thought in progress—, for the anthropology of literacy (how people related to written texts) in the Middle Ages, I suggest one possible way in which we can grasp the practices in which readers of manuscripts in the vernacular (any language that was not Latin) engaged. While scholarship has pointed to the importance of process over lesson in medieval scholastic teaching, it is necessary also to consider how this pans out in less explicitly learned contexts with less highly-trained readers.

Specifically, I have used my funds to request the digitisation of three manuscripts. I had the intention to focus solely on the manuscripts of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour (mid-13th century). In it, the narrator distorts the traditional bestiary, in which animals are described as referring to a divine meaning of the world, to suit his amorous ends: indeed, he hopes to woo his lady by making an argued plea for mercy. Since fortunately, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna made one of my target manuscripts available online, in addition to two Bestiaire d’amour manuscripts, I was able to acquire the reproduction of a manuscript held at the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, which I will use at a later stage of my dissertation research. Although I am still working on my materials, here are some highlights from my engagement with one of them this summer.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 12469 is a beautifully decorated manuscript of uncertain origin, likely copied before the mid-14th century. It contains the Bestiaire d’amour, followed by the first redaction of Gossuin de Metz’ Image du monde, which counts as the first encyclopaedia in French, and by Huon de Méry’s Tournoiement Antécrist, which is an allegorical narrative recounting the fight of virtues against vices in a humorous tone. The Image du monde has particularly retained my attention. There exists little scholarship on this text, so I was astounded to find out how the narrator instructs his readers to use ‘do-it-yourself’ methods to better understand what he tells them.

Figure 1 is presumably meant to help readers mentally picture themselves walking around the Earth to understand its sphericity. Figure 2 accompanies instructions for how, by cutting an apple in quarters and flattening out a quarter’s peel, they can represent the layout of continents to themselves. Figure 3 is a schematisation that is paired with instructions for how, with a candle, a wall and one’s own hand or head, one can try to replicate a lunar or solar eclipse, and understand why starts are invisible during the day. Finally, Figure 4 appears at the very end of the text. Since it comes right after a summary of the entire Image du monde, my hypothesis is that, in line with the didacticism of the rest of the text, readers are expected to project all that they have learned onto this schematic universe.

I should also note, in closing, that I was lucky to be able to determine that MS français 12469 is composed of two units that were stitched together at a later date (the Bestiaire d’amour + the Image du monde and Tournoiement Antécrist). Usually, finding this out requires in-person consultation, but the traces of an illumination from a formerly facing folio (sheet), as well as a count of quires (a group of sheets), which was possible thanks to marginal cues, and perhaps also the marks of wear at the end of the Bestiaire d’amour, made this unnecessary. This is a very important piece of information for the case I am making, since knowing how the manuscripts I am discussing were produced is essential in advancing an argument on their subsequent use.

Looking ahead, I anticipate that writing up my observations in the first chapter of my dissertation will help me lay the theoretical groundwork for the rest of my research. A workshop with Sarah Kay (NYU), jointly hosted by the Medieval Studies Workshop (DLCL) and the Philosophy+Literature Initiative (School of Humanities & Sciences) has been scheduled for October 28, 2020.