Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reformations of the image
- 1 Lollard iconographies
- 2 Thomas Hoccleve's spectacles
- 3 John Lydgate's refigurations of the image
- 4 John Capgrave's material memorials
- 5 Reginald Pecock's libri laicorum
- Epilogue: words for images
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
2 - Thomas Hoccleve's spectacles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reformations of the image
- 1 Lollard iconographies
- 2 Thomas Hoccleve's spectacles
- 3 John Lydgate's refigurations of the image
- 4 John Capgrave's material memorials
- 5 Reginald Pecock's libri laicorum
- Epilogue: words for images
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Summary
The manner of seeing decides what can be seen, or, at least negatively, decides what can not be perceived of the divine.
Jean-Luc MarionWhen Thomas Hoccleve addresses the relationship between images and texts he begins with the eyes. He emphasizes that, on the most basic level, reading and writing rely on seeing. After decades of copying texts, medieval clerics often faced spending their final years with ruined vision and a diminished capacity for continued scribal work. Unsurprisingly, the strain of such work on the eyes was a common grievance of professional copyists. One cleric gripes that “writing weighs one down. It brings dimness to your eyes, curves your spine, twists your ribs and your stomach, sends pain shooting through your kidneys,” and so on. Hoccleve, a lifelong bureaucrat and Privy Seal scribe, was also intimately acquainted with the ocular effects of textual labor:
What man that three and twenti yeer and more
In wrytynge hath continued, as have I,
I dar wel seyn, it smertith him ful sore
In every veyne and place of his body;
And yen moost it greeveth, treewely,
Of any craft that man can ymagyne.
Fadir, in feith, it spilt hath wel ny myne.
His body bears the marks of his scribal work. As he explains, hours of staring “upon the sheepes skyn” lead to an aching back, an upset stomach, and, most notably, ruined eyesight.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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