Selective Reading at Fécamp: the Scholastic Question 168

that contain navigational reading aids. This discovery is particularly significant given the striking parallels that these books present to those produced in the scholastic milieu of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The presence of navigational reading aids in Fécamp manuscripts, produced by monastic scribes long before the scholastic age, challenges current understandings of when and where these features originated and developed. While scholars have acknowledged that these features

existed in earlier manuscript traditions, many assume, nonetheless, that they became

‘redundant’ in the centuries preceding the scholastic period, largely because they were unnecessary for the type of devotional reading common in the monastery.¹ However, the presence of these features in manuscripts produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries at the Abbey of Fécamp counters this assumption: not only do these Fécamp books show that navigational reading aids were used in the centuries prior to the scholastic age, but also that they were relevant and even necessary for reading in the Benedictine monastery.

! It is also important to acknowledge that scholars who focus on later scholastic manuscripts argue that the regular presence of navigational reading aids in manuscript books were just one component of a larger scholastic ‘package’ that developed in the twelfth century. This package also included alphabetical indices, concordances, distinctions, and plenty of room for marginal and interlinear glosses.

Although some of the Fécamp manuscripts include similar navigational reading aids, they do not feature the ‘entire scholastic package’ – so to speak. What this present study calls for, however, are clearer distinctions between ‘newer’ features of the late twelfth century (alphabetical indices, distinctions, and concordances, for example), and the much older features that simply continued to be added to the page in the scholastic period (chapter tables, running titles, and paragraph marks). It is important to recognize that these navigational reading aids were not new to the twelfth century, nor were they even ‘re-discovered’ or ‘revived’ after a period of redundancy, but instead they are demonstrably part of a steady and unbroken tradition of medieval book design and production.

The distinction between ‘old and new’ is particularly crucial for manuscript scholars who use the book’s visual characteristics to estimate the time, place, and context of its production and use. For future scholars of the book, it is important to understand that if a manuscript contains a chapter table and a running title in combination, for example, it does not necessarily mean that it was produced by an urban scribe working in the scholastic milieu (and made for a student reader engaging in quaestio and disputatio), but that it may have also been produced much earlier in a Benedictine scriptorium for a devotional reader.

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1 Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compliatio’, 122.

Of course, the assumption that navigational reading aids are indicative of a scholastic use may stem from the collective focus that scholars have placed on readers and manuscript production in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As shown in chapter three of this study, there is a trend in current scholarship to situate navigational reading aids within many of the wider developments taking place in urban schools in this later period. As a result, chapter tables, running titles, and paragraph marks have become synonymously linked to this specific cultural and intellectual context.

I argue that there is a need to re-define and re-conceptualize navigational reading aids independently from a specific context of use. Instead of casting these features as ‘scholastic’, it is better to use a more general label, such as ‘features of the medieval book’ and define them in similarly general terms: they are visual tools that were applied to different types of texts, within different contexts, and for different kinds of readers, and they can be found in books produced throughout the Middle Ages.

This need to re-conceptualize the terms also applies to selective and non-sequential modes of reading, which have been similarly equated with the scholastic context. Just as navigational reading aids have often been defined as ‘scholastic book features’, so too have selective modes of reading been understood as ‘scholastic modes of reading’.² However, Fécamp readers also engaged in selective modes of reading, within a context that did not traditionally involve scholastic methods of debate and inquiry, which makes it important to clarify that ‘selective reading’ does not necessarily mean

‘scholastic reading’.

Of course, in view of the popularity of selective reading in the urban schools of the late twelfth century, it makes sense why some scholars have equated this selective approach with ‘scholastic reading’. It also makes sense why most scholars have not equated selective reading with the monastery, given the general assumption that lectio divina was the only mode of devotional reading exercised there – and this approach conspicuously stands in stark contrast to the scholastic model. Hamesse typifies this common dichotomy when she writes: ‘The new scholastic reading was totally different from the monastic model, which had been focused on a slow, rigorous comprehension of all of Holy Writ’.³ What the case study from Fécamp has shown, however, is that

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2 Hamesse, ‘The Scholastic Model of Reading’.

3 Hamesse, ‘The Scholastic Model of Reading’, 104; Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 72; Studzinski, Reading to Live, 15.

some Benedictine communities engaged in two distinct modes of reading, and it is not lectio divina, but the second mode of reading – one that involved a selective and non-sequential approach – where significant parallels can be found between the monastic and scholastic context. With this discovery, there are grounds to conduct further investigations into the relationship between monastic reading and manuscript production and many of the ‘new’ developments taking shape in the twelfth-century scholastic milieu.

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3. What Shapes a Reading Experience?

Over the course of this study, I have shown that there are significant commonalities between manuscripts produced at Fécamp and those produced in the later scholastic context; I have also demonstrated that these manuscripts were designed to support the same type of selective and non-sequential reading. We have seen that the form (i.e. the books) as well as the method of reading (i.e. selective modes) are largely the same between the Fécamp context and the later scholastic milieu. Despite these significant similarities, however, it would be incorrect to assume that the Fécamp readers in the eleventh century and the student readers in the thirteenth century shared the same reading experience. What still needs to be accounted for is the goal or purpose of reading in each context. What motivated the individual to read in the first place? And how did this shape the reader’s experience?

As argued by Parkes and Hamesse, for the most part students and scholars in the later scholastic milieu read their books on a selective basis in order to prepare for academic discussion and debate (quaestio and disputatio), while others, as argued by the Rouses, used this method of reading to prepare sermons for preaching. I have claimed that the Fécamp readers engaged in selective modes of reading to accommodate various activities and ceremonies that comprised traditional Benedictine programmes of worship, including the celebration of the Mass and Divine Office, readings at meal-times, as well as the readings performed at the evening gathering of Collation. Despite the fact that the monks read some of their books in parts, and jumped from text-to-text to match the events stipulated by the liturgical calendar, these reading opportunities were still centered within a programme of divine reading and religious worship. Just like the practice of lectio divina, these reading opportunities were driven by a desire for spiritual purity, spiritual knowledge, and communion with God.

Although the Fécamp monks and later urban scholars may have followed the same mode of reading, and their books may have looked similar in many regards, their motivations to read were quite different, and for this reason they would have had very different reading experiences.

Above all, it seems that one’s motivation to read was largely context-driven.

For the monk, following a daily programme of spiritual worship in the cloister would have informed his approach to the text; similarly, a student sitting in a thirteenth-century classroom would have been influenced by this particular context in how he approached the text. These observations underline the importance of taking into account not just the visual appearance of a reader’s book, nor just his method of approach, but also the reader’s context and his motivation to read, when piecing together how and why one reads. Like pieces of a puzzle, when these components are combined together, we obtain a more complete picture of how an individual or community engaged in reading.

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