strangeness a context; to begin that process, I want to look closely at
an exemplary image, a page from a manuscript of Gregory the Great's
letters made in the German city of Trier in the 980s for Egbert,
Trier's archbishop [Plate I].

This image, made almost four centuries after Gregory's death, at-
tests to the pope's importance in the early Middle Ages. Because his
letters were valued as statements of church doctrine and as models of
epistolary style, they were collected into a registrum, a register; this
painting served as a frontispiece to a copy of that text. It shows Gre-
gory working on one of his influential Bible commentaries. As was
typical for early medieval authors, the pope does not write the text
himself but dictates to a secretary, who transcribes the words with a
stylus onto a wooden tablet that has been hollowed out and filled with
wax. The early Middle Ages had no other inexpensive writing mate-
rial: Parchment or vellum, the treated skin of animals (on which this
miniature was painted), was a difficult-to-prepare luxury; paper was
unknown; and papyrus was almost impossible to obtain in northern
Europe because the plant from which it was made grew only in
Egypt. According to an early medieval biography of Gregory, one day
the scribe, puzzled by Gregory's frequent breaks in dictation, used his
stylus to pierce a hole in the curtain that separated him from the pope
and saw the white dove of the Holy Spirit perched on Gregory's
shoulder and speaking words of divine wisdom into his ear.

For my subject, the relation of word and image in early medieval
art, this painting is almost too good to be true. A luxurious picture
used to illustrate a book, it depicts the theologian whose association
of images with words was central to the medieval understanding of
art. This miniature indicates the crucial place of the word in the Mid-
dle Ages, for its subject is that word, both oral (the voices of the dove
and of the dictating Gregory) and written ( Gregory consults an open
manuscript on the lectern in front of him while he holds another
closed book in his right hand; the scribe writes on the wax tablet). But
the picture also has as its theme vision, the sense without which art
does not exist: The scribe, baffled by the absence of words from the
pope's mouth, cannot solve the mystery with his ears, the organs of
hearing; he is forced to pierce the curtain in order to use his eyes, the

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