Medieval manuscripts without illustrations or illumination rarely attract the attention of art historians. They are the privileged domain of palaeographers and philologists, and by and large are valued according to the quality of the text they contain and preserve. Many of the standard editions of medieval texts that scholars work with go back to the nineteenth century or even earlier, when it was common practice to combine texts from multiple medieval manuscripts in order to come up with a version that was deemed free of ‘contamination’; this, however, produces an artificial and sterile text that does not actually exist in any medieval document.

But what about such medieval manuscripts as material testimonies? Viewing a manuscript is actually important not just for accessing medieval versions of texts but also for seeing how written texts were staged, how they were presented, how they visually engaged with their reader/viewer. Their materiality, which inevitably interferes with their performative qualities, contributes to their meaning and the meaning of the texts they contain. That materiality includes elements such as the mise en page, the selection of texts, the aesthetic qualities of a text in the light of its material context and so on. My focus here is on precisely this ‘stagecraft’ genius of named and anonymous scribes, as well as on the visual manipulation of the script, and how such mechanisms were employed in order to articulate eloquent messages and to convey profound meaning.

The constant fascination of anonymous artisans and named artists with the visualization of the script across the ages cannot be overstated. The iconicity of the alphabet persisted and assumed different forms and conceptual frameworks along the way. Throughout history, the visual properties of the letter have constantly been manipulated, and medieval precedents have always been a ‘goldmine’ from which modern and contemporary artists draw inspiration; to recognize this one need only view a Hellenistic carmen figuratum or technopaignion , a hybrid poetic genre invented and practised by playful poets of the third century BC, alongside the Calligrammes of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), and George Seferis (1900–71); or the Latin translation and visual rendering of the hexameter poem Phaenomena (Appearances) on constellations and celestial phenomena by the Greek poet Aratus (third century BC), alongside the work of contemporary artists around the world.