Haptic Virtuality: Touching Illuminated Manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose and the Faits des Romains

In the second volume of her groundbreaking Touching Parchment (2024), Kathryn M. Rudy radically hypothesizes the professional reciter of texts, the “prelector,” as a dramatic and tactile mediator between secular manuscript and medieval audience. Many of the traces of physical interactions left on illuminations in (especially “courtly”) books can, according to Rudy, be attributed to this figure, whose practices are otherwise minimally attested in the documentary record. Exploring the implications of this hypothesis, my talk examines copies of two widely transmitted texts of late medieval French literature: the Roman de la Rose and the Faits des Romains. These manuscripts display numerous signs of readerly touching. I argue that the (professional?) reader’s touch activated or actualized the latent ideological potential of these texts, whether in terms of the ethics of “courtly love” in the Rose or the politics of empire in the Faits. I propose the concept of haptic virtuality – a nod to film theorist Laura U. Marks’ “haptic visuality” – to account for how touch was a mode of active reading with social, ethical, and political ramifications.

Henry Ravenhall is a specialist in medieval French literature and manuscript culture and retains an active interest in medieval Occitan language, narrative, and lyric. Broadly speaking, he is interested in approaches, both theoretical and empirical, that rethink medieval texts in relation to manuscript materiality. I'm keen to develop methodologies that make the most of the explosion of digitized manuscripts online, such as my work on textile curtains in medieval French books.