Danielle Fontaine
3/29/12
VAST 231
Audio Essay 3
The Art of Rubrication and Why it Matters Today
Books have come a long way from the days of having to manually handwrite
pages upon pages of manuscripts. From the paperback to the digitalized book, books
have evolved into an entirely different species from their humble ancestors.
Although the books of present day are much easier to read and are far more
accessible, they have lost many of their intrinsic qualities. Gone are the days where
beautiful covers were standard and where distribution practices were at their
prime. One lost distribution practice, rubrication, is an important one to revive.
Rubrication is the underlining of certain letters or phrases, usually in red,
throughout a book. The purpose of this early form of textual highlights was for the
benefit of readers: in such a long book, treatise, or even the Bible, readers had a
built-in placeholder so that they would not lose their place.
Arguably pointless in today’s digitalized reading world, rubrication should be
brought back into the creation of modern-day books. Rubrication adds character to
the blank pages of paperbacks and can help e-book readers to keep track of their
place in a book and in other online documents with ease. Other distribution
techniques, such as illumination and historiated lettering, would further add more
charm to modern books. Illumination is text covered in gold while historiated
lettering is the intricate design or drawing within the first letter of a paragraph.
Rubrication, along with illumination and historiated lettering, would enhance the
reading experience of present day readers.
Although it seems like a pointless flourish, rubrication once held an
important position in the formatting of books from as early as the 13th Century
The emphasis placed on words and phrases could be done in the traditional red,
blue or even green. “Rubrication is an essential part of the textual apparatus of a
medieval manuscript book. Composed by copyists, rubrics serve an important
function of mediation between the text and its readers: they way identify author and
title, mark episodic divisions of narrative texts, or provide a moral commentary”
(Huot 42). Rubrication was a necessary practice during medieval times, as it helped
readers to expand upon the meaning of a text. Not only did this distribution practice
add a beautiful design to early books, it also added helpful place-markers in longer
texts. Rubrication along with other distribution techniques) aided early readers as
they read lengthy manuscripts.
An excellent example of rubrication is the 15th century manuscript from
Nuremburg in the Lafayette College Special Collections. This gorgeous book is halfbound in leather that was stamped in an elegant pattern (fleur di lis, stars, etc.).
Even though rubrication stops about half way through the book, there are
handwritten letters where rubrication should be throughout the rest of the book.
This manuscript exemplifies how helpful rubrication can be in a book of this size. In
modern day applications of rubrication, an equivalent example (in terms of length,
not subject) would be Webster’s Dictionary. It would be much easier to flip through
a dictionary and locate a word’s meaning if definitions throughout the dictionary
stood out in different colors. Rubrication would help students to learn and research
more efficiently, as it would take a lot of time out of trying to locate a subject in a
book or losing one’s place in a long text.
Along with rubrication, the distribution concepts of illumination and
historiated lettering should be brought back into modern day book publishing.
Illumination is the practice of sheathing letters and phrases in gold. This adds a
bright quality that enhances the meaning of the text. Historiated lettering is when
the first letter of a new chapter or of a new paragraph is intricately designed
(Kamath 40). In excerpted sheets of manuscripts from the Lafayette College Special
Collections Missal from the Medieval Manuscripts Collections (a document from the
15th century) many examples of this are evident. These two lost distribution
practices add designs that invite readers to the text (Huot 42-3). These practices
also give books almost mystical characters that are reminiscent of centuries past.
While these distribution practices seem like a waste of time, space, and
money, they would add a lot to the books that we are used to. Similar to children’s
fairytale books, the distribution practices of rubrication, illumination, and
historiated lettering would greatly change the way people read and comprehend
books. “Scholars have long recognized the importance of interlinear and marginal
glosses, notes, and rubrication to the way medieval readers navigated texts. The
thirteenth century saw an explosion of artwork and decoration in marginal spaces,
which could serve as mnemonics, helping readers to remember or to locate quickly
particular textual passages within a manuscript” (Kamath 35). Although rubrication
and other distribution techniques were meant for the medieval world, they are
applicable even in the world of e-books: these practices could change the way we
read books in a digitalized form. Reading a book, such as Chaucer’s The Canterbury
Tales, on a Kindle with rubrication and historiated letters at the beginning of each
chapter in would bring readers back to earlier times. It would give readers a better
understanding of the time period while adding a whimsical aesthetic to the book as
a whole. While the distribution practices of rubrication, illumination and historiated
lettering seem simple and insignificant, they can change the way we read books in
present day.
Danielle Fontaine
4/8/12
VAST 231
Work Cited
Work Cited
Huot, S. "Ci parle l'aucteur": The Rubrication of Voice and Authorship in "Roman de la
Rose" Manuscripts. SubStance, Vol. 17, No. 2, Issue 56: Reading In and Around
(1988), pp. 42-48 Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. <http://0www.jstor.org.libcat.lafayette.edu/stable/3685138>.
Kamath, Stephanie. Periphery and Purpose: The Fifteenth-Century Rubrication of the
Pilgrimage of Human Life. Glossator, Volume 1, Fall 2009. Open Humanities
Press. <http://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/kamathperiphery-and-purpose-8x10.pdf>.
Lafayette College Special Collections. Nuremburg Chronicles of 1493 and Medieval
Manuscripts collection, ca. 1200-1500. Missal. double leaf, illuminated. Legal
documents from the Kirby Museum 10 pieces. Lafayette College ,Skill-032.