In 1988, I first read an essay by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak published in the collection, Women and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe; ever since, I have been a follower of her work. [1] Over the past two decades, her sigillographic studies have unfolded into a rich meditation on what I like to think of as "the seal- effect"--meaning a study of how the widespread dissemination of sealing (that is, impressing an incised metal matrix onto heated wax) in northern Europe over the eleventh and twelfth centuries reorganized an economy of desire, value and exchange. Her research shows that an understanding of the "sealing process" cannot be confined simply to a history of representation or to the forensics of diplomatics, nor can the seal-effect be constrained by binaries still haunting many medieval paradigms: orality-literacy, public-private, authentic- inauthentic, liturgical-bureaucratic, living witness-archive.
Over the long twelfth century, the seal-effect, as Bedos-Rezak shows, mobilized and constituted epistemologies and ontologies of what counted as presence and absence, immanence and transcendence, and who decided. Put another way, the seal-effect posed the question of indexicality to its users. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), whose philosophy of semiosis strongly influences the conceptual approach underpinning her research, understood indexicality paradoxically as both trace and deixis (that is, touch and its emptying out). Because the indexical conjures an archeology of media (for example, clay, wax, film, silicon, code) and because an understanding of medium- specificity has become so contested in our so-called postmedium age, this book is crucial not only for medievalists, but should also be required reading for scholars of visual representation regardless of periodization, for information scientists who are now busily reclaiming diplomatics, and for students of political theology and sovereignty concerned with genealogies of incarnational thinking and the flesh. [2] When Ego was Imago could also go to the movies. As I was writing this review, I had the chance to see Tree of Life (River Road Entertainment, 2011), the most recent film by Terrence Malick. His extended cinematic meditation on medium, indexicality, and ontology ponders questions similar to those raised by Bedos-Rezak.
The dense and intricate argument of this book defies easy summary. Let me attempt some highlights: based on intensive study of charters from northern France (1050-1300) and her extensive comparative knowledge of diplomatics, Bedos-Rezak is able to map how the practice of sealing documents disseminated widely among non-royal elites; indeed, by the mid-thirteenth century, even English serfs were conveying small plots of arable and pasture by sealed charters. Michael Clanchy has estimated that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of such peasant conveyances were made in the over-heated land-market of the thirteenth century. [3] According to Bedos-Rezak, sealing practices reorganized epistemologies over the period of her study. She tracks this change by noting how the target for placing the seal changed positions from direct application on the document to its suspension from the document by means of a cord or thin strip of parchment. Gradually the language used in validation clauses describing such sealing practices also changed to reflect these shifts. Variants of the word for imprinting (impression) described the fixing of the seal directly on the document, and versions of the verb "apponere" came to be the formula when seals were attached. In Flanders, Brabant and Hainaut, territories of energetic early adoption of sealing among non-royal elites, the appended seal had replaced the applied seal by 1110.
Does the difference between applied and appended seals matter? It is here that Bedos-Rezak's multi-modal analysis shines. At stake is how the plasticity of the medium of wax was imagined and how changing notions of plasticity came to form changing notions of subjectivity. [4] Bedos-Rezak argues that the language of impression points to the indexicality of sealing where touch (the seal-matrix pressed by its owner into the hot wax on the document) produced what was called an imago, the sign of presence of the sealer. She calls this semiotic concept a mode of incarnational thinking and one that paradoxically depersonalized the sealers to produce them as signs. The word character began to travel in the sealing discourse of the twelfth century in order to describe graphic elements of a seal, such as coats of arms or a stereotypical portrait inscribed on the seal matrix. Bedos-Rezak next notes that this language of sealing (impression, imago, character) begins to find its way into theological debates over the real presence in the Eucharist waged over the mid- eleventh century. Sealing practices were good to think theology with.
Bedos-Rezak untangles how sealing practices and redefinitions of the Eucharist came to constitute each other among circles of "chancery- scholars" (117). Their bureaucratic work and theological thinking were closely bound. Her tracing of this intersection between chancery and school underscores the protean importance of such medieval clerical bureaucracies. Joel Kaye has told a complementary story for the fourteenth century in his study of cleric-bureaucrats at the university who transferred their intimate everyday knowledge of fiscal management in a time of deepening and crisis-ridden monetization to their comprehension of natural philosophy, especially relativity, mathematics, and the geometry of exchange. These same "calculators" were also responsible for transforming the ongoing debate over the Real Presence in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. [5] This generative layering of clerical bureaucracies with theologies of transubstantiation broached by Bedos-Rezak invites ongoing attention from medievalists.
By the end of the twelfth century, Bedos-Rezak traces an important shift in the semiotic concepts of sealing. The sealing process loses its indexical force and touch as the guarantee of presence is no longer what matters or authenticates. Instead, the seal attains the status of icon and its diplomatic work is achieved by its being imagined as a replica situated in a discursive chain of rules and networks--its virtuality guaranteed by the Real Presence. The transformation for which Bedos-Rezak argues will remind the reader of the work of Hans Belting, the art historian, who has emphasized the reorganization of visual field in the medieval West brought about by the seriality of the frame as it materialized in the painted panel. [6] By the thirteenth century a juridical-optical discourse "frames" seals and displaces touch (although the touch of impressing the seal matrix into wax obviously continued).
What interests me about this book is how it opens up a gap or lacuna between indexicality and iconicity, a gap of importance for medievalists and contemporary students of semiosis. Michel Foucault pointed toward such gaps and their possibilities in his classic study, The Order of Things. [7] First, the indexicality of sealing never let go, as the afterlives of waxen ex-voto artifacts reminds us (cf. note 4). And second, is it possible that iconicity had already rent the indexical seal at the event of its dissemination in the eleventh century? Sometimes, however, I did not think that this study delved deeply enough into the gap, especially into the underside of orthodox claims about the Real Presence that were so crucial to fabricating a virtuality for sealing. When chancellor-scholars fabricated the Real Presence as a semiotic limit-case that could undergird the materialization of personal authority and identity in the episcopal seal (101), they argued as followed: "the material sign became representative less because of its relationship to a conceptual ideal than for its capacity to embody its referent's ontological characteristics" (128). The prescholastics conflated signifier and signified on the side of immanence and incarnation; thus, a guarantee for episcopal experiments with sealing. But when we come to Lanfranc (c. 1005-1080), chancellor-scholar extraordinaire, we find, I think, that he supplements semiotics to guarantee the Real Presence. In his famous treatise on the Real Presence aimed at refutation of Berengar of Tours, he filled the gap with sovereignty as a way of enabling the conflationary reduction of this mode of incarnational thinking. He not only painted Berengar with the usual epithets of theological polemic-- labeling Berengar adversary of the catholic church (catholicae Ecclesiae adversario, 29), sacrilegious violator of oath (sacrilegus violator, 31), and heretic (haereticus, 32)- -Lanfranc also pioneered an accusation of treason against him (jurare perfidiam, 40). [8] He sutured the Real Presence to sovereignty. This aspect of the debate over the Real Presence raises a broader question about how sovereign power came to guarantee incarnational thinking of the Real Presence and how it came to pin the virtuality ("a presence, while not real, was actual", 107) supporting sealing practices. By the time of the Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae (1187-89), when forging an English royal charter (by seal or text) was deemed a crime of lèse-majesté, perhaps we need to think of treason as the limit-crime of virtuality. [9] Bedos-Rezak astutely observes that "it is as if absence were required for the question of identity even to become conceivable" (111). The body that becomes excessively present in the doctrine of the Real Presence is perhaps not Christ but the sovereign--the one who decides on the state of exception and the one who names the enemy. Thus, the storied intellectual violence of the late eleventh century takes on a deepening sinister edge (158).
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Notes:
1. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, "Women, Seals and Power in Medieval France, 1150-1350," in Women and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 61-82.
2. For example, Bedos-Rezak's work touches upon some of the following critical investigations: the special issue on "Indexicality: Trace and Sign" edited by Mary Ann Doane for the journal Differences 18:1 (2007); Luciana Duranti, Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science (Chicago: American Society of Archivists, 1997); and the work of Georges Didi-Huberman, a source of inspiration for Bedos- Rezak: Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of A Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Debates over incarnational thinking and the flesh are exemplified in the following works: Jan-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Jacques Derrida, On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things trans. Luca D'Isanto and Kevin Attell (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2009); and Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
3. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066- 1307 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 35.
4. I found the following reflections on plasticity very helpful in thinking through the arguments of Bedos-Rezak: Georges Did-Huberman, "Ex-Voto: Image, Organ, Time," L'Esprit Créateur 47 (2007): 7- 16.
5. Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
6. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art Trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 353-354.
7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 30.
8. An English translation of Lanfranc's Liber de corpora et sanguine Domini (c. 1063) may be found in The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation, vol. 10, trans. Mark G. Vaillancourt (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2009); Vaillancourt keys his English translation to the Latin text to be found in the Patrologia Latina 150: 407-442.
9. Glanvill, The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill, trans. G.D.G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 177.