Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

THE SYMBOLIC READER
n 1929, in the Hospice de Beaune, in France, the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, who had
trained himself in the craft during his service with the Austro-Hungarian army, took a picture of an old
woman sitting up in her bed, reading. It is a perfectly framed composition. In the centre is the diminutive
woman, wrapped in a black shawl and wearing a black night-cap that unexpectedly reveals the gathered
hair at the back of her head; white pillows prop her up and a white coverlet drapes her feet. Around and
behind her, white bunched-up curtains hang among the bed’s black wooden columns of Gothic design.
Further inspection reveals, on the top frame of the bed, a small plaque with the number 19, a knotted
cord dangling from the bed’s ceiling (to call for assistance? to draw the front curtain?) and a night-table
bearing a box, a jug and a cup. On the floor, under the table, is a tin basin. Have we seen everything? No.
The woman is reading, holding the book open at a fair distance from her obviously still keen eyes. But
what is she reading? Because she’s an old woman, because she’s in bed, because the bed is in an old
people’s home in Beaune, in the heart of Catholic Burgundy, we believe that we can guess the nature of
her book: a devotional volume, a compendium of sermons? If it were so — close inspection with a
magnifying glass tells us nothing — the image would somehow be coherent, complete, the book defining
its reader and identifying her bed as a spiritually quiet place.
But what if we were to discover that the book was in fact something else? What if, for instance, she was
reading Racine, Corneille — a sophisticated, cultured reader — or, more surprisingly, Voltaire? Or what if
the book turned out to be Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles, that scandalous novel of bourgeois life
published the same year Kertész took her picture? Suddenly the commonplace old woman is no longer
commonplace; she becomes, through the tiny act of holding one book in her hands instead of another, a
questioner, a spirit still burning with curiosity, a rebel.
Sitting across from me in the subway in Toronto, a woman is reading the Penguin edition of Borges’s
Labyrinths. I want to call out to her, to wave a hand and signal that I too am of that faith. She, whose face
I have forgotten, whose clothes I barely noticed, young or old I can’t say, is closer to me, by the mere act
of holding that particular book in her hands, than many others I see daily. A cousin of mine from Buenos
Aires was deeply aware that books could function as a badge, a sign of alliance, and always chose a book
to take on her travels with the same care with which she chose her handbag. She would not travel with
Romain Rolland because she thought it made her look too pretentious, or with Agatha Christie because it
made her look too vulgar. Camus was appropriate for a short trip, Cronin for a long one; a detective story
by Vera Caspary or Ellery Queen was acceptable for a weekend in the country; a Graham Greene novel
was suitable for travelling by ship or plane.
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users. Tools,
furniture, clothes — all have a symbolic function, but books inflict upon their readers a symbolism far
more complex than that of a simple utensil. The mere possession of books implies social standing and a
certain intellectual richness; in eighteenth-century Russia, during the reign of Catherine the Great, a
certain Mr. Klostermann made a fortune by selling long rows of binding stuffed with waste paper, which
allowed courtiers to create the illusion of a library and thereby garner the favour of their bookish
empress. In our day, interior decorators line walls with yards of books to give a room a “sophisticated”
atmosphere, or offer wallpaper that creates the illusion of a library, and TV talk-show producers believe
that a background of bookshelves adds a touch of intelligence to a set. In these cases, the general notion
of books is enough to denote lofty pursuits, just as red velvet furniture has come to suggest sensual
pleasures. So important is the symbol of the book that its presence or absence can, in the eyes of the
viewer, lend or deprive a character of intellectual power.
Simone Martini’s Annunciation in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. (photo credit 15.1)
In the year 1333 the painter Simone Martini completed an Annunciation for the central panel of an
altarpiece for the Duomo of Siena — the first surviving Western altar dedicated to this subject. The scene
is inscribed within three Gothic arches: a high arch in the centre containing a formation of angels in dark
gold, encircling the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove, and a smaller arch to each side. Beneath the arch
on the viewer’s left a kneeling angel in embroidered vestments holds an olive branch in his left hand; he

---

raises the index finger of his right hand to indicate silence with the rhetorical gesture common in ancient
Greek and Roman statuary. Beneath the right arch, on a gilded throne inlaid with ivory, sits the Virgin in a
purple cloak fringed with gold. Next to her, in the middle of the panel, is a vase of lilies. The immaculately
white flower, with its asexual blooms and lack of stamens, served as a perfect emblem of Mary, whose
purity Saint Bernard compared to the “inviolate chastity of the lily”. The lily, the fleur-de-lis, was also the
symbol of the city of Florence, and towards the end of the Middle Ages it replaced the herald’s staff borne
by the angel in Florentine Annunciations. Sienese painters, arch-enemies of the Florentines, could not
entirely delete the traditional fleur-de-lis from depictions of the Virgin, but they would not honour
Florence by allowing the angel to carry the city’s flower. Therefore Martini’s angel bears an olive branch,
the plant symbolic of Siena.
For someone seeing the painting in Martini’s time, every object and every colour had a specific
significance. Though blue later became the Virgin’s colour (the colour of heavenly love, the colour of truth
seen after the clouds are dispelled), purple, the colour of authority and also of pain and penitence, stood
in Martini’s day as a reminder of the Virgin’s coming sorrows. In a popular account of her early life, in the
apocryphal second-century Protoevangelion of James (a remarkable bestseller throughout the Middle
Ages, with which Martini’s public would have been familiar), it is told that the council of priests required
a new veil for a temple. Seven undefiled virgins from the tribe of David were chosen, and lots were cast to
see who would spin the wool for each of the seven requisite colours; the colour purple fell to Mary. Before
starting to spin, she went to the well to draw water and there heard a voice that said to her, “Hail thou art
full of grace, the Lord is with thee; thou art blessed among women.” Mary looked right and left (the
protoevangelist notes with a novelist’s touch), saw no one and, trembling, entered her house and sat
down to work at her purple wool. “And behold the angel of the Lord stood by her, and said, Fear not,
Mary, for thou hast found favour in the sight of God.” Thus, before Martini, the herald angel, the purple
cloth and the lily — representing in turn acceptance of the word of God, acceptance of suffering and
immaculate virginity — marked the qualities for which the Christian Church wanted Mary to be honoured.
Then, in 1333, Martini placed in her hands a book.
Traditionally, in Christian iconography, the book or scroll belonged to the male deity, to either God the
Father or the triumphant Christ, the new Adam, in whom the word of God had been made flesh. The book
was the repository of God’s law; when the governor of Roman Africa asked a group of Christian prisoners
what they had brought with them to defend themselves in court, they replied, “Texts by Paul, a just man”.
The book also conferred intellectual authority, and from the earliest representations Christ was often
depicted exercising the rabbinical functions of teacher, interpreter, scholar, reader. To the woman
belonged the Child, affirming her role as mother.
Not everyone agreed. Two centuries before Martini, Peter Abelard, the canon of Notre Dame in Paris who
had been castrated as a punishment for seducing his pupil Heloise, initiated a correspondence with his
old beloved, now abbess of the Paraclete, that was to become famous. In these letters Abelard, who had
been condemned by the councils of Sens and Soissons and prohibited either to teach or to write by Pope
Innocent II, suggested that women were in fact closer to Christ than any man. Against man’s obsession
with war, violence, honour and power, Abelard counterpoised woman’s refinement of soul and
intelligence, “capable of conversing with God the Spirit in the inner kingdom of the soul on terms of
intimate friendship”. A contemporary of Abelard, the abbess Hildegard of Bingen, one of the greatest
intellectual figures of her century, maintained that the weakness of the Church was a male weakness, and
that women were to make use of the strength of their sex in this tempus muliebre, this Age of Woman.
But the entrenched hostility against women was not to be overcome easily. God’s admonition to Eve in
Genesis 3: 16 was used again and again to preach the virtues of womanly meekness and mildness: “thy
desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” “Woman was created to be man’s helpmate,”
paraphrased Saint Thomas Aquinas. In Martini’s time, Saint Bernardine of Siena, perhaps the most
popular preacher of his age, saw Martini’s Mary not as conversant with God the Spirit but as an example
of the submissive, dutiful woman. “It seems to me,” he wrote, reviewing the painting, “surely the most
beautiful, the most reverent, the most modest pose you ever saw in an Annunciation. You see she does not
gaze at the angel, but sits with that almost frightened pose. She knew well it was an angel, so why should
she be disturbed? What would she have done if it had been a man? Take her as an example, girls, of what
you should do. Never talk to a man unless your father or mother is present.”
In such a context, to associate Mary with intellectual power was a bold act. In the introduction to a
textbook written for his students in Paris, Abelard made clear the value of intellectual curiosity: “By
doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we learn truth”. Intellectual power came from
curiosity, but for Abelard’s detractors — whose misogynistic voices Saint Bernardine echoed — curiosity,
especially in women, was a sin, the sin that had led Eve to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge. The
virginal innocence of women was to be preserved at all costs.
In Saint Bernardine’s view, education was the dangerous result of, and the cause of more, curiosity. As we
have seen, most women throughout the fourteenth century — indeed throughout most of the Middle Ages
— were educated only as far as was useful to a man’s household. Depending on their social standing, the

---

young girls familiar to Martini would receive little or no intellectual teaching. If they were brought up in
an aristocratic family, they would be trained as ladies-in-waiting or taught to run an estate, for which they
required only rudimentary instruction in reading and writing, though many became quite literate. If they
belonged to the merchant class, they would develop some business ability, for which a little reading,
writing and mathematics was essential. Merchants and artisans sometimes taught their trades to their
daughters, who were then expected to become unpaid assistants. Peasant children, both male and female,
usually received no education at all. In the religious orders women sometimes followed intellectual
pursuits, but they did so under the constant censorship of their male religious superiors. As schools and
universities were mostly closed to women, the artistic and scholarly blooming of the late twelfth to
fourteenth century centred around the men. The women whose remarkable work emerged during that
time — such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pisan and Marie de France —
succeeded against seemingly impossible odds.
In this context, Martini’s Mary requires a second, less cursory look. She sits awkwardly, her right hand
tightly gripping her cloak beneath her chin, turning her body away from the strange presence, her eyes
fixed not on the angelic eyes but (contrary to Saint Bernardine’s biased description) on the angelic lips.
The words the angel pronounces stream from his mouth to Mary’s gaze, written in large letters of gold;
Mary can not only hear but see the Annunciation. Her left hand holds the book she was reading, keeping
it open with her thumb. It is a fair-sized volume, probably an octavo, bound in red.
But what book is it?
Twenty years before Martini’s painting was completed, Giotto had given the Mary of his Annunciation a
small blue Book of Hours, in one of the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua. From the thirteenth
century onwards, the Book of Hours (apparently developed in the eighth century by Benedict of Anane as
a supplement to the canonical office) had been the common private prayer-book for the rich, and its
popularity continued well into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — as seen in numerous depictions of
the Annunciation, in which the Virgin is represented reading her Book of Hours much as any royal or
noble lady would have done. In many of the wealthier households, the Book of Hours was the only book,
and mothers and nurses would use it to teach their children to read.
A detail of Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena of Padua. (photo credit 15.2)
It is possible that Martini’s Mary is simply reading a Book of Hours. But it might also be another book.
According to the tradition that saw in the New Testament the fulfilment of the prophecies made in the Old
— a popular belief in Martini’s day — Mary would have been aware, after the Annunciation, that the
events of her life and her Son’s had been foretold in Isaiah and in the so-called Wisdom Books of the
Bible: Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, and two books of the Apocrypha, The Wisdom of Jesus, the Son of