The Bible and the Refectory

readings of the Night Office would have greatly benefited from the inclusion of navigational support.

With the revelation that the Matins Office involved a mode of devotional reading that was selective and non-sequential, it now begins to make sense why the Fécamp scribes opted to add a combination of navigational reading aids to the two Giant Bibles of their collection – Rouen 1 and Rouen 7.³⁸ If one of these volumes was already stationed in the church to support the Epistle readings of the Mass (likely Rouen 1 given the suitable collection of texts for the Epistle reading), it makes sense that it might also be drafted into service during the nocturn readings of the Office, which took place in the same location.³⁹ If this were the case, that one Giant Bible was used to support both services in the church, it would further warrant the inclusion of navigational reading aids, as the lector would have had to jump between sections of the volume to find the designated readings for each service.

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Webber who offers a tantalizing glimpse into the practice of refectory reading in England.⁴¹ Fortunately the study of reading in the refectory at the Abbey of Fécamp can be studied via the abbey’s Ordinal, which provides a detailed list of refectory readings (listed as ‘Lectiones ad prandium’) for the entire year, including Saints Days, Feast Days, and other special occasions.⁴² Using original material provided by the Ordinal, it is thus possible to piece together a reading schedule for the Abbey of Fécamp, and to demonstrate that the use of a Giant Bible with navigational reading aids would have been useful in this context.

At the beginning of each week, the Rule of St Benedict specifies that one member of the community should be chosen to serve as the weekly reader.⁴³ During each meal, the chosen lector would stand at a lectern and read a passage from a book, while the rest of the community would eat in silence. This refectory reading has often been described as a form of spiritual nourishment – just as the food nourishes the body, the Word of God nourishes the spirit.⁴⁴ Based on an analysis of the Lectiones ad prandium list from the Fécamp Ordinal, it is clear that the refectory readings largely consist of passages from the Gospels, patristic expositions, and hagiographical texts (to commemorate Feast Days).⁴⁵ Like the Mass and Office readings, the refectory programme at Fécamp shows a significant degree of variation in the specific books and chapters read out each day. If we look to the readings for the Week of Easter at Fécamp, for example, we see that the reading involved only short sections of each Gospel, and the sequence of texts is largely out of order (i.e. the schedule does not follow the canonical order of the Gospel texts).⁴⁶

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41 Webber, ‘Reading in the Refectory’.

42 For a list of the Ad prandium readings of Fécamp, see Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp,Vol. 2, 674-85. These readings have also been edited by D. B. Grémont in his article,

‘Lectiones ad prandium à l’abbaye de Fécamp au XIIIe siècle’, Cahiers Léopold Delisle 20, no. 3-4 (1971), 3-41.

43 The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Venarde, Chapter XXXVIII, 134-135.

44 Studzinski draws attention to Origen’s connection between divine reading and nourishing the spirit:

‘In homilies he reminds his hearers that divine reading along with constant prayer and the word of doctrine are what nourish the spirit’ (Reading to Live, 50); cf. Homily 9 on Leviticus 7 in Origen, Homilies on Leviticus: 1-16, ed. Gary Wayne Barkley (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990). Ambrose similarly perceived reading or listening to the reading of Scriptures as nourishment:

‘The words of the Bible were pastures on which its readers fed each day and by which they were renewed and restored as they tasted them or chewed them over, and which would fatten up the flock of the Lord (ps. 118 14.2)’ (Moorhead, Ambrose, 76).

45 Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp, Vol. 2, 674-685.

46 Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp, Vol. 2, 675.

Table 8: Lectiones ad prandium during Easter Week

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Day of the Week Ordinal Entry Modern Bible

Reference Palm Sunday Exposition on the Passion; Scitis quia

post biduum pascha fiet; Jerome on Matthew

Matthew 26:2

Monday Ante sex dies Pasche; Augustine on John John 12:1 Tuesday Erat Pascha et azima post biduum; Jerome

on Mark

Mark 14:1

Wednesday Appropinquabat dies festus azimorum;

Ambrose on Luke

Luke 22:1

Thursday Ante diem festum Pasche; Augustine on John

John 13:1

Friday Egressus dominus trans torrentes Cedron;

Augustine on John

John 18:1

Sabbath of Easter Vespere sabbati Matthew 28:1 Easter Sunday Maria Magdalena with sermons Mark 16:9

The emphasis on the Gospels indicates that either an independent Gospel Book or a Bible containing the Gospels would have been regularly used in the refectory.

Moreover, the Lectiones from the Ordinal demonstrate that the readings only involved the reading of a select passage from the Gospels, and they did not follow the traditional canonical sequence of the text. On Monday, the lector was instructed to read the Gospel of St John 12:1, while on the following day, he was directed to read a chapter from the Gospel of St Mark (14:1). This would have required the reader to look up and find a new book and chapter each day in the refectory, and it makes sense that whatever book was used for this refectory reading would have benefited from navigational support in the form of chapter tables with incipit headings that matched the Ordinal listing. Indeed, if we briefly walk through this process of locating the appropriate reading, we will see that navigational support would have been very beneficial: each day during the meal, the weekly reader would look up the reading scheduled for that day in the Ordinal; he would then take the incipit heading listed in the Ordinal and match it to the incipit headings of the chapter table presented in the Gospel Book or Bible; he would then find the associated chapter number and locate the designated chapter of text in the volume via the number. Without this kind of

navigational system in place (chapter tables and corresponding chapter numbers), one can imagine how difficult and time-consuming it would have been for the weekly reader to locate the very specific chapter needed for the daily reading.

The Gospels were not the only biblical texts frequently read during meal-times, however, and there is evidence to suggest that a larger collection of biblical texts would have been needed in the refectory as well. Both Webber and Reilly relate testimony given by Bernard of Cluny (c. 1100 – c. 1150) and William of Hirsau (c.

1030 – 1091) suggesting that reading during the refectory could also be used as an opportunity to complete any of the scriptural readings from the Office that were not finished during the regular programme.⁴⁷ Bernard explains that ‘once the reading from Exodus had begun, it and the other Books of Moses were to be read both in the church and in the refectory, so that each reading began where the previous one had ended, in order to complete the Pentateuch before Quadragesima’.⁴⁸ The English abbot Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955 – c. 1010) similarly decreed that ‘in the course of the year, the entire canon [of Scripture] ought to be read in church, but because we are lazy and slothful servants, we read in the refectory whatever we do not cover in church’.⁴⁹ It is therefore quite possible that the Fécamp community would have needed access not just to a Gospel Book, but also to other biblical texts to complete the Office readings in the refectory.

According to Webber, both Bernard of Cluny and William of Hirsau give instructions on how to transport the Bible from the church to the refectory to complete any of these unfinished readings (a process that involved two people, reflecting the size of the book and the difficulty in carrying it).⁵⁰ While this may have been a solution for some communities, it seems that the monks of Fécamp had a more efficient plan. Instead of regularly moving the Giant Bible from the church to the

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47 ‘Twelfth-century evidence, both textual and manuscript, suggests that some form of dovetailing of Office and refectory reading of the bible became the norm not only in communities that followed the Benedictine rule (including the Cistercians) but also among the Carthusians and communities of regular canons’ (Webber, ‘Reading in the Refectory’, 23-24); cf. Diane Reilly, ‘The Cluniac Giant Bible’, 175-176.

48 Reilly, ‘The Cluniac Giant Bible’, 175-176.

49 Christopher A. Jones, Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 149.

50 Webber notes that both Bernard of Cluny and William of Hirsau mention the need for an assistant

‘to help the weekly reader carry the book to-and-fro between the refectory and the choir, if required’

(‘Reading in the Refectory’, 29, footnote 71). For original references, see Bernard, ‘Ordo cluniacensis’, in Marquard Herrgott, ed., Vetus disciplina monastica (Paris: Typis Caroli Osmont, 1726; reprinted Siegburg: Schmitt, 1999), 252; and William of Hirsau, Consuetudines Hirsaugensis, PL, Vol. 150, Cols.

927-1146D, at Col. 1028.

refectory, it looks as though the Fécamp community simply decided to copy a second Giant Bible – one for the church, and the other for the refectory. ⁵¹!As noted earlier, there are two Giant Bibles from the Fécamp corpus, Rouen 1 and Rouen 7, both containing a large collection of biblical texts designed for lectern reading, and both replete with navigational reading aids to facilitate the searching and finding of select books and chapters.

Moreover, upon comparison of the chapter tables and chapter numbers in each of these two Giant Bibles, there is evidence to support the theory that the readings from the Office were continued in the refectory during meal-times at Fécamp. To explain, Rouen 1 was copied between 1060 and 1080 and contains a complete copy of the Old Testament and a partial copy of the New Testament (it is missing the Gospels, as previously mentioned); Rouen 7 was copied later, sometime between 1100 and 1150, and contains the Old Testament and the Gospels (the text cuts off at mid-point fol. 204v, suggesting that the volume may have originally included the remainder of the New Testament). Despite the fact that both Rouen 1 and Rouen 7 contain similar biblical texts, they originally had different chapter table systems. While both books feature chapter tables at the opening of each new biblical text, the texts are divided according to a different thematic structure, and the chapter numbers fall in different parts of the text: Exodus, Chapter 5 in Rouen 1 is different from Exodus, Chapter 5 in Rouen 7, for example.⁵²

What is interesting – and significant in the context of this study – is that a twelfth-century scribe has gone back through the older Bible, Rouen 1, and not only corrected the text, but also crossed out the original chapter numbers and replaced them with numbers that correspond to the system present in Rouen 7. Essentially speaking, sometime in the twelfth century, Rouen 1 received a chapter number

‘make-over’, which synchronized the chapter numbers between the two Fécamp Bibles. We can see this phenomenon in the following two images. The first example presented below is taken from Rouen 7 (fol. 6r) and shows the beginning of Genesis, chapter 30 (marked by the rubricated roman numeral XXX):⁵³

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51 For other examples of monasteries with two giant Bibles, see De Hamel, The Book, 81.

52 Compare the original chapter lists presented on Rouen 1, fol. 17r and Rouen 7, fol. 19v-20r.

53 The modern biblical reference is Genesis 12:5, ‘Cumque uenissent in eam…’.

Fig. 26 – Rouen 7, fol. 6r: Genesis, chapter XXX

If we now turn to the same passage in the older Fécamp Bible, Rouen 1, the original chapter numbers for that section of text have been crossed out (chapters 65-67), and Chapter 30 (marked XXX) has been added to the left margin, with a small paragraph mark indicating the start of the passage in the text block.⁵⁴ With this change, the text of the new Chapter 30 in Rouen 1 directly corresponds to the text of Chapter 30 in Rouen 7 (‘Cumque uenissent in eam …’):

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54 An even later hand has since crossed out the twelfth-century correction in favour of modern biblical references. So chapter XXX, for example, has since become chapter XII.

Fig. 27 – Rouen 1, fol. 4v: Genesis, chapter XXX added to the margin (corresponding to Rouen 7)

The efforts on the part of the twelfth-century corrector to ensure that the chapter numbers in both Fécamp Bibles corresponded to each other, adds further weight to the hypothesis that readings from the church were sometimes continued in the refectory and that both Bibles were used concurrently. With two Giant Bibles featuring matching chapter numbers, the readers of Fécamp would have had a much easier time linking up the Office readings with the refectory readings. According to this system the refectory lector could simply pick up the text in the refectory Bible where the Office reader left off in the church Bible. The matching navigation systems in these two Giant Fécamp Bibles thus demonstrate a commonsensical technique of book design that would have greatly helped the community to complete the selected readings designated by the liturgical cycle.

On a final note, there are textual grounds to argue that Rouen 1 was the copy stationed in the church of Fécamp, and Rouen 7 was the copy stationed in the refectory. This is based on the fact that Rouen 1 does not contain the Gospels, which were a major component of the refectory reading schedule. Also, as there was likely a separate Gospel Book stationed in the church (as I will show in the following section), it seems probable that the Fécamp community would have placed the Giant Bible without the Gospels in the church. Rouen 7, on the other hand, contains most of the Old Testament as well as the Gospels, which suggests that this book would have been

more useful in the refectory context, where, as noted, readings were largely drawn from the Gospels and supplemented by other biblical texts.⁵⁵

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