Word & Image A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry ISSN: 0266-6286 (Print) 1943-2178 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.

Word & Image A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry ISSN: 0266-6286 (Print) 1943-2178 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/twim20 Reception and interference: reading Jean Molinet's rebus-poems Adrian Armstrong To cite this article: Adrian Armstrong (2007) Reception and interference: reading Jean Molinet's rebus-poems, Word & Image, 23:3, 350-361, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2007.10435790 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2007.10435790 Published online: 01 Jun 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 38 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=twim20 Reception and interference: reading Jean Molinet's rebus-poems ADRIAN ARMSTRONG Northern French culture in the late Middle Ages is marked not only by a proliferation of visual images, but also by the knowledge which these images convey, velY often in the form of figurative discourse. Traditional coded or symbolic visual fornls include heraldly, where tinctures and charges often accumulate particular connotations, and typological stained-glass windows, which establish relationships between episodes from the Old and New Testaments. In the fourteenth ann fifteenth centuries, further traditions develop which endow images with second-order meanings: the frequent use of allegorical tablealLx at court and municipal festivities, the profusion of illustrated didactic literature in which allegory is a dominant mode of expression. I The question of how viewers make sense of such images - clearly a crucial issue for the study not only of visual culture, but also of the transmission of knowledge, in the period - is particularly complex when the images are accompanied by texts. This study seeks to illuminate the epistemic and interpretive challenges posed by the combination of text and symbolic image, by analysing a small but fascinating corpus: the rebus-poems of the major Burgundian poet and chronicler Jean Molinet (I435-I507).2 A rebus-poem is typically a short poem whose text has been partly or wholly replaced by images, which must be converted back into phonemes for the poem to make sense. David Scott has aptly characterized the interpretation of the rebus as a combination of linear and spatial reading, whereby 'the identification and correct pronunciation of the word for the object that the image designates provides the element needed by the word or phrase to complete its overall meaning'.3 While the pictorial component of these texts is their must immediately striking feature, their formal qualities as poetry must not be disregarded. In many instances --'- including Molinet's work, as will become clear below - the images which replace words and phrases are concentrated at the places which most clearly mark the text as verse: at the rhymes, or in line-initial position. If images cannot be easily identified, markers of verse become still more important: readers must consider the compatibility with rhyme and metre of the different possible solutions. As a result of these formal characteristics, rebus-poems solicit an audience's knowledge in highly distinctive ways. Through visual as well as linguistic techniques, they encourage readers actively to select elements from their existing repertoire of knowledge. Indeed, the very process of selection makes this repertoire visible, calling to the reader's mind a kind of inner encyclopedia which normally remains unconscious. The rebus-poem, then, establishes a particular relationship between knowledge and meaning: it relies on 35 0 I - On late medieval illustrated didactic literature, see Alison Saunders, thr Sixteenth~ Century French Emblem Book: A Decoraliue and Ustfol Genre (Geneva: Droz, 1988), pp. 2g-..3. .Michel Pastoureau has devoted numerous studies to the COIlllOlativc rule of heraldry, including L 'Hemline ct Ie sinople: etudes d'IzJraldi~ que mediival. (Paris: Le Leopard d'Or, 1982). Royal entries and their allegorical elements are examined in Bernard Guenee and Fran~oise Lehou:x, Les Entrks r~vales fimlfaises cle 1328 a1515 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1968); more generally, the cultural impor~ tance of sym bolic images is demonstrated by Johan Huizinga, 77ll Waning of the Middk Ages: a sludy r!l the jimns of lift, thought and art in Frallce and tlze Netherlands in the J/' and 15'" centuries, tr. Frederik Hopman (London: Arnold, 192+). Madeline H. Caviness, Slai.ned~(;la.Is Windows (Turnhou!: Brepols, 1996), PP.7g-80, notes semiotic studies of windows. 2 - Jean Devaux, Jean Afo/i1let, indiciai" bOll1guZl;IWIl (Paris: Champion, 1996), exam~ ines Moline!'s prolific output. The present article contributes to a larger research project, based in the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester. This project, 'Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France', is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which has also funded a period of research leave to enable me to complete a series of articles on knowledge in Moline!'s poetry. I thank colleagues who attended the confer~ ences 'Seeing Things: Vision, Perception, Interpretation' (Cambridge, 2000) and 'Les OisealiX de la n'alite it l'imaginaire' (Lyon, 2005) for their comments on versions of this study presented on those occasions. 3 - David Scott, 'The poetics of the rebus: word, image and the dyoarnics of reading in the poster of the 1920S and 193os', ~I'ord & Image, 13 (1997), 270 .78. While Scott's study concerns a different medium and cultural context, it identifies processes of dynamic, repeated reading broadly similar to those I outline below. WORD & U ...1AGE. VOL. 23. N0.3. JULY-SEPTEMBER 2007 +- See Julia Kristeva, pour II/I.t.' Ell1lf.l(J)TlK: RedlrrdlCl st;manu{lIj"(' (Paris: Seuil, 1978: fint edition Iy1l9), pp. ~ 19-:28; ead., R/lIollllioll du langagc puch·quc (Paris: Seuil, 1985: first edition 197"t), p. 207. its audience's knowledge, and mobilizes this knowledge selectively to produce meaning. This relationship might usefully be considered in the terms originally formulated by Julia Kristeva to distinguish between two dimensions of a linguistic text: the phenotext and the genotext. The phcnotext is, in simple terms, the words on the page: a symbolic structure, which communicates information through linguistic and cultural codes. For Kristeva, the phenotext is merely the tip of the iceberg of tf'xtuality: helow thf' waterline is the genotext, the non-linguistic processes which produce signification. The plurality of signiliers engendered in the genotext is edited into a coherent fonnulation in the phenotext; on this basis, Krigteva characterizes the phenotext as surface, and the genotext as volume.-! Lifted out of its psychoanalytic context and reapplied to the rebus-poem, the term 'genotext' encapsulates the sum of knowledge mobilized by the text-image combinations in any given poem. Readers mobilize some of this knowledge to produce a coherent meaning, a 'phenotext', and ultimately discard the rest. Hence the rebus-poem raises important questions, germane to any hermeneutics of the illustrated text. How is genotext converted into phenotext, knowledge into meaning? How, in particular, do iconographic codes function in this interpretive process? My aim, therefore, is twofold. On the one hand, I establish the epistemic principles of the rebus-poem in the work of Molinet, by examining the ways in which they do not so much convey new knowledge as appeal to different types of knowledge which readers already possess. On the other, I demonstrate that the interpretation of rebus-poems is often problematized: visual codes tend to clash, or to produce supplementary, competing meanings (genotext) which resist integration into a coherent reading (phenotext). In the face of such resistance, the models of reading commonly used in analysing text-image interaction reveal their limitations. To exemplifY the issues outlined above, I devote the first part of this study to considering a particularly elaborate rebus-poem, and the ways in which it reveals the limitations of standard interpretive models. My example is an early six.teenth-centUlY manuscript version of Molinet's Ung jJresent foit Ii l'empereur (figure I), a laudatory address to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III (1415-93). Like Molinet's other rebus-poems, this was transmitted alongside his more mainstream political and didactic works in m...