Speculations on the Visibility and Display of a Mortuary Roll

The curator Don Skemer described the separation between the world of books and the world of archives as a deep abyss, with curators of literary texts on the one side and keepers of public records and documents on the other.^[1] In many ways, Western medieval scrolls and rolls inhabit both of these worlds, although some rolls have more of an affinity with one world than the other. Skemer contended that cataloguing and display practices in museum and library collections distinguish sacred and secular rolls such as Exultet rolls and other liturgical texts, prayer rolls, textual amulets, genealogical chronicles, works of drama, poetry, and music from administrative records such as charters and diplomas, statute rolls, and other practical texts more easily categorised as documents. Yet the particular characteristics of certain types of rolls, especially mortuary rolls, as objects with elements that fluctuate between the personal and the authoritative, the ephemeral and the archival, between original and copy, require that scholars not only cross Skemer’s abyss, but that they also draw expertise from other fields in order to address broader questions about the relationship between scroll and codex and the persistence and use of the roll form over the course of the Middle Ages.

In this chapter I consider the facture and display of the mortuary roll of Elisabeth ‘sConincs (d.1458), Abbess of Forest (Vorst), to speculate on collective viewing practices and contexts for illuminated mortuary rolls in the late Middle Ages (figs 6.1–6.6).^[2] Largely unfamiliar to non-specialists and rarely publicly displayed, mortuary rolls have been valued primarily as unique historic documents that identify travel routes, confraternity networks, and other religious institutional relationships; specific instructions for their physical engagement and display after facture are not fully known. As a result, text-based projects and comprehensive surveys and transcriptions of mortuary rolls dominate the field, and the relationship between their visual elements and the forms and stages of physical handling and engagement have attracted less discussion. In order to consider these viewing and engagement practices in greater depth, it is important to expand thinking beyond clearly defined, polarised perspectives about their operational contexts. Dichotomies such as production versus function, makers versus users, spiritual versus material commemorations, practices of display versus engagement and permanent versus transient memorials, are all problematic because they propose distinctions that segregate the mortuary roll’s tightly intertwined actions, processes, networks, and material elements. As I will show, mortuary rolls in their very nature transgress such divisions, and require appropriately attuned reflection which is expansive in its approach. Thus, as a way into this subject, this study argues for anachronistic thinking about the illuminated mortuary roll’s past material and performative operations in its referencing of medieval—and also present day—display practices and art works.

Likewise, approaches from different scholarly fields, including medieval and contemporary art history and material culture studies, are crucial to this analysis. My close examination of the ‘sConincs roll suggests that, like many mortuary rolls, its decorated elements— an illuminated frontispiece and obituary letter—existed separately before their attachment to its textual elements, consisting of hundreds of signatures, to form a single roll. The initial independence of these elements and their later attachment and interdependence inform my reflections on forms of collective engagement with the roll, forms that encompass facture, handling, viewing, prayer, and preservation in a range of display and storage contexts. Recent research on diverse subjects provides methodological and conceptual tools that inform my ideas: research on forms of physical and visual engagement with illuminated prayer rolls, genealogical rolls, and Exultet rolls; commemorative practices in communities of religious women; and ideas of collective authorship that address gender and class.^[3] Finally, consideration of the durational and performative dimensions of display in both medieval mortuary rolls and scroll forms appearing in contemporary art makes it possible to assess mortuary rolls as mobile, dynamic, material objects, as well as static carriers of text and image.^[4] The chapter begins with a close study of the ‘sConincs mortuary roll and the physical, geographical, and durational aspects of its facture and display, and is followed by a brief overview of the conventions, history, and legacy of the roll format and its uses. A comparative study of the scale, content, and forms of handling and engagement of other medieval illuminated rolls, together with reflections on contemporary art and museum display practices, propose a new range of possible contexts for the mortuary roll’s use.

Mortuary Rolls and the ‘sConincs Roll

A mortuary roll is an unusual object, less familiar than most other Western medieval manuscript roll forms because limited numbers survive, and perhaps also because of its diverse range of purposes as an obituary notice, a record of prayer exchange between religious communities, and as a commemorative object. At most, a mortuary roll can consist of three parts: an image of a recently deceased person on a deathbed or in a funerary scene (known as the frontispiece), an obituary letter (the encyclical), and signed, often dated promises of prayers from different religious communities (called tituli), joined together and rolled around a wooden dowel or cylindrical rod (fig. 6.2).^[5] Some mortuary rolls begin with richly designed frontispieces, or contain illuminated letters in the encyclical, but others have no ornamentation. Some contain long poems and literary reflections on death, while others contain formulaic statements; some are unfinished or exist only as fragments, the direct or indirect result of their reuse or partial destruction, especially after periods of reform in northern Europe.^[6] The most substantial part of the mortuary roll was a collection of tituli in the form of a list. A genre in its own right originating in legal and financial contexts, the list or register was also used in literary works such as Piers Plowman to represent a distinctive mode of writing that accounts for labour through enumeration.^[7] Thus the signed promises can be understood to represent forms of labour and currency.

The fundamental complexity of the mortuary roll lies in its material quantification of this immaterial labour and currency—of devotional acts and networks—making it both a spiritually binding document and a portable memorial, conveying the news of a death and eulogising the dead, but also consolidating contractual relationships between communities of the dead and the living. A diverse group of individuals from different social classes contributed to the making of a mortuary roll: the Abbot or Abbess, Prior or Prioress, who may have commissioned the roll; the precentor or head of the scriptorium who was responsible for the preparation of the roll; the illuminator; the almoners who supervised the roll bearer during their visit; the roll bearer who collected the signatures; and hundreds of signatories from religious communities, along with members of the communities themselves, who promised and returned prayers.^[8] The roll bearer was a consistent agent in its facture, responsible for carrying a mortuary roll from one religious community to another and collecting signatures of promised prayers. Ordinarily male and not a member of a religious order, he left each community with a record of his visit and the promised prayer exchange in the form of a mortuary brief, a small note the size and shape of a bookmark, like a receipt.^[9] As the collection of signatures grew, so did the length of the roll. Mortuary rolls recorded spiritual confraternities and the names of individual members of a confraternity, or other individuals to be remembered in prayer, so that when the roll was returned to the abbey or religious house, the names of the dead might conventionally be added to confraternity books and libri memoriales (memorial books).^[10]

Scholarship on mortuary rolls has focused on transcription, assessments of quantitative and qualitative data, and comparative studies of other rolls or manuscripts. This work has shown that mortuary rolls are useful for identifying individuals and relationships between religious houses; where the signatures are dated, dates and locations can be used to map out travel routes and reflect upon potential modes of travel. The most critical publications on the subject range from Jean Dufour’s monumental five-volume survey of documented and existing mortuary rolls in Western Europe, to Lynda Rollason’s exemplary consideration of the highly complex Durham Ebchester-Burnby roll (Durham, DCL, MS B.IV.48; mostly after 1464), a roll requesting prayers for William Ebchester (resigned 1456; d. 1462/3) and John Burnby (d.1464), Priors of Durham, and related material at Durham.^[11] Research on the mortuary roll of St Bruno (d.1110), founder of the Carthusian order, explores its long history, from its lost twelfth-century original on parchment to its sixteenth-century dissemination in print.^[12] Over time, as institutional and spiritual networks changed, the production and value of mortuary rolls diminished for different reasons. Reused for later mortuary rolls or recycled as a result of iconoclastic practices, many only survive as fragments or as incomplete rolls, as an isolated illuminated frontispiece or an encyclical, or as a partial series of signatures.^[13] As the form of the mortuary roll fell out of use, surviving examples became valued as rare collectors’ pieces rather than as vehicles for and records of prayer exchange. Thus, although the textual and visual elements of the mortuary roll were in many ways uniform, or at least consistent with established forms and practices, rolls now exist in a variety of material states, which make questions about the stages of their making challenging to resolve.

When each signature is dated and located in chronological order, these rolls are objects that can reveal a great deal about the timing of their assemblage. But in other respects, they are enigmatic. For example, it is routinely difficult to know what purpose they served after they were returned to a religious house and their tituli (signatures) had been entered into chapter books. They may have been stored away indefinitely, or elements such as illuminated frontispieces may have been displayed in some way: either momentarily shared between individuals or collectively viewed during an anniversary Mass.^[14] Alternatively, as Rollason illustrates with the series of stitch-holes in the bottom edge of the Ebchester-Burnby frontispiece (detached from the encyclical letter and signatures), frontispieces, and in some cases encyclical letters could be reused in later mortuary rolls made for other religious heads, detached from tituli that were archived or used as waste parchment and reattached to new encyclicals or new membranes.^[15] Close examination of the mortuary roll of Elisabeth ‘sConincs raises such questions about fragmentation and completeness in regard to viewing practices.

Rare as an illuminated mortuary roll still attached to its original roll holder, the ‘sConincs roll commemorates the death on 19 July 1458 of Elisabeth ‘sConincs (or Elizabeth Sconincx), Abbess of Forest Abbey, near Brussels. Measuring on average eighteen and a half centimetres wide and nearly thirteen metres long, it is composed of nineteen pieces of vellum; including the frontispiece, the encyclical letter, and seventeen membranes containing hundreds of tituli. Its dates, signatures and membranes have been counted, measured, partially transcribed and listed by M.R. James among others.^[16] Radiocarbon dating has linked the roll holder (fig. 5) to the time of the manuscript’s assemblage.^[17] From 6 September 1458 to 8 July 1459, the roll bearer Johannes Leonis collected for Elisabeth and her dead religious sisters 390 signatures of promised prayers from religious communities, ranging from abbeys and monasteries to hermitages. Over the course of the year, he made four return journeys out from Forest Abbey, travelling as far as Bruges, Bonn, Utrecht, Cologne, and Lille, returning for the last time on 8 July 1459, eleven days before the anniversary of the abbess’s death.^[18] At each religious community, the mortuary roll was signed with the formulaic promise—oravimus pro vestris, orate pro nostris, ‘we’ll pray for your dead if you pray for ours’—or some variation on these words. In this way, the roll presents the viewer with an offer demanding reciprocity. The signatures occupy both the front and back surfaces of the roll, chronologically running from the third membrane to the last, before continuing onto the back of the third membrane and not the first (the frontispiece), or the second (the encyclical). This supports the idea that the frontispiece and perhaps the encyclical were not attached to the roll until after all of the signatures were collected. If so, like the frontispiece, the decorated encyclical could have been a copy of an obituary letter, and it could also have been made separately to the rest of the roll.^[19]

Attached to a leather cover, the first membrane of the ‘sConincs roll is a frontispiece consisting of an upper and lower register featuring spiritual figures above earthly ones. The upper register presents named images of the Virgin and Child, to whom the abbey was dedicated, St Benedict on the left, the order to which the nuns belonged, and St Elisabeth on the right, the Abbess’ patron saint. The frame’s upper edge has been trimmed, cutting into the upper two of four evangelist symbols in the spandrels (fig 6.2). The lower register features an image of a dying abbess and members of her community at Forest, along with two priests who conducted the daily religious rituals in the convent. A group of nuns may represent the living community or the other dead mentioned in the roll; damage to the nuns’ faces and to other parts of the frontispiece does not seem intentional or related to its use.^[20] Illuminated in gold, specific elements unify the two registers and focus viewing: the staff held behind the head of the Abbess Elisabeth in the lower register echoes St Benedict’s gold staff in the upper register; likewise, the religious figures’ haloes and attributes are balanced by the gold background below, along with representations of enlarged liturgical instruments (cross, censer, incense-ship, monstrance, holy water bucket), which reference aspects of the Mass and death ritual.^[21] The frontispiece aligns heavenly and earthly realms, appropriate for an object used to encourage and embody the exchange of prayers by the living for the dead.^[22] An expensive, deluxe image, the ‘sConincs frontispiece exhibits what Herbert Kessler and Caroline Walker Bynum refer to as an object’s ‘overt materiality’: the capacity for painted religious sculptures, reliquaries and other objects to draw attention to embellishments with precious materials such as gemstones or gold.^[23]

The ‘sConincs roll’s frontispiece follows the conventions of most later medieval frontispieces: a series of vertically sequential registers, usually at least two, starting with a spiritual figure or set of spiritual figures representing the institution’s order and saint, followed by either a deathbed scene (with the head oriented to the left), a funeral, an interment, or all three scenes beneath it. Not all mortuary rolls have illuminated frontispieces, but the Ebchester-Burnby roll includes elements common to many that do: three vertically ordered architectural registers, which begin with an image of the Heavenly Jerusalem, above scenes of the death of a prior with a soul being carried to heaven, and burial.^[24] Collectively, these prefatory images evoke the prayers and Masses considered crucial for expediting the soul’s journey through purgatory.^[25]

The conventional format for the frontispiece allowed it to be altered and reused, and its separation from the signatures even when stored together is not uncommon.^[26] Other remarkable frontispieces demonstrate both the consistency of the register format—featuring institutional and individual patron saints above a deathbed and/or funeral scene—and the range of forms of depiction. The mortuary roll of Lucy de Vere, founder and prioress of the priory of St Cross and St Mary at Castle Hedingham (c.1225-1230), has one of the earliest surviving mortuary roll frontispieces: an image of the crucifixion and the Virgin, followed underneath by an image of Lucy de Vere’s soul being carried to heaven by two angels, and below it, a funeral.^[27] The mortuary roll from the Abbey of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon (1439-1441) presents an image of the martyrdom of St Bénigne above recumbent abbots Etienne de La Feuillée (1430-1434) and Pierre Brenot (1435-1438).^[28] Almost a century later, the extraordinary mortuary roll of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster (c.1532), features an image of Islip among labels naming his virtues, followed by images of his death, funeral, and chantry chapel.^[29] Putting aside debates about the Islip roll’s status as unfinished or preparatory, its drawings retain these longstanding iconographic elements common to mortuary roll frontispieces. The only part of Islip’s encyclical to survive is the decorated letter U (inhabited by a coronation) of Universis, and on the right side an image of a monk passing a roll to a layman, perhaps intended to represent a roll bearer, whose role in the object’s facture is usually acknowledged in the encyclical text.^[30]

Like frontispieces, encyclicals also adhered to a conventional format and formulaic language, often modelled on other obituary letters.^[31] The ‘sConincs roll’s encyclical begins with a decorated letter inhabited by a Virgin and Child, announces the death of the Abbess Elisabeth, and includes the following request: ‘We earnestly beseech you that you may favourably and kindly wish to receive the bearer of the present roll, namely Johannes Leonis, when he comes, so that we may reciprocate our gratitude to you and yours in similar circumstances’ (fig. 6.3). As servants of the dead, roll bearers may have been caricatured as vultures of death, but communities were expected to accommodate them.^[32] The making of the frontispiece, encyclical, and tituli at different times represents only some of the participants engaged in the making of the roll. Critically, it is important to acknowledge that at different stages in the assemblage of mortuary rolls, religious and lay men and women in elite and lower ranks collectively viewed, made, and handled parts of the roll, or played a part in these activities. They did so through material actions related to commissioning or illuminating the frontispiece and encyclical: collecting signatures, signing the roll, and also after signatures were collected through engaging in prayer.^[33] The ‘making’ of the roll did not end with its return to the abbey a year later, but continued through the celebration of anniversary Masses, the practice of which will be addressed later in this chapter.

Over time, the ‘sConincs roll lost its original significance as a binding institutional record and as a constituent element of institutional memory. Forest Abbey was deliberately burned in 1582 and another fire took place in 1764 before the institution was finally suppressed in 1796, so although the mortuary roll survived it is not known precisely when it left the community and when its primary original function changed.^[34] By 1899 it was purchased from the sale of Henry Yates Thompson’s Ashburnham Appendix manuscripts where it entered the Crawford collection and eventually the Rylands, but there is a significant gap between the abbey’s suppression and the manuscript’s sale.^[35] It is not known why and how the ‘sConincs roll survived unscathed. Questions remain about the roll’s visibility within the abbey around the time it was made, the physical contexts for its display, handling and storage in 1459, and its immediate aftermath. As previously suggested, it could have been in permanent storage, possibly periodically consulted, or it could have been unfurled and put on display occasionally for anniversary Mass celebrations dedicated to Abbess Elisabeth. The viewers (including makers and audiences) of mortuary rolls had no reason to record facts about use and display. Our knowledge about the historic visibility and forms of physical display, handling, and engagement of the ‘sConincs roll may be limited, but broader conceptual considerations about it as a form can allow us to speculate on these matters.

Scrolls and Mortuary Rolls: Form and Physical Engagement

As a form, the roll has a long history, and its survival relates to the practical purposes that made it so necessary for certain kinds of contents. Most frequently referred to in Latin as a rotulus (roll or scroll), rolls preserved writing on a series of pieces of papyrus, parchment, or paper stitched or glued together, often wound around a roll holder (an umbilicus); when unrolled, they could be horizontally or vertically read.^[36] Ancient Egyptian papyrus rolls preceded Greek and Roman rolls, with parchment rolls increasingly produced from the third century.^[37] Important early twentieth-century studies of the roll form describe the gradual transition from the roll of Antiquity to the codex of the Middle Ages, as the ‘triumph’ of the codex over the roll in the fourth century.^[38] In his classic study Illustrations in Roll and Codex, Kurt Weitzmann proposed that the codex brought with it the emancipation of the image from the text in the form of the frontispiece.^[39] Debates about the reasons behind the transition from roll to codex continued in the work of Colin Roberts, T.C. Skeat, and William Harris, but the tendency to promote the codex over the roll denigrated the roll format as if it were outmoded technology.^[40]

More relevant to this chapter is the roll’s survival rather than its decline. By the later Middle Ages, the roll became the more established format for specific types of religious and secular texts. Michael Clanchy found ‘more history than logic’ in the range of document styles in the later Middle Ages, describing the variations as adaptations of materials and formats rather than planned innovations, adaptations that were part of ‘bureaucratic routine’.^[41] Clanchy also identified the use of parchment in itself as an attempt to preserve words for posterity in the late Middle Ages, noting that ‘to write on parchment was to make a lasting memorial … Parchment documents were valued in a way that no modern literate can appreciate.’^[42] He noted that in the twelfth century, the increase in popularity of the Latin term rotulus to describe a record in roll format implies that the roll became the more established form for specific types of texts, both religious and secular.^[43] In a world dominated by codices, but with other formats produced alongside, scholars have argued that the roll format had an ‘archaisising function’ and a ‘quasi-public authority’ linked to its symbolic, functional purposes and official uses: special practical or legal, ceremonial or liturgical functions.^[44] More recent understandings assert that the purpose of a specific text dictated the choice of format.^[45] Mary Agnes Edsall has called for a rethinking of assumptions about the authoritative associations of the roll form, arguing for its ubiquity in the face of the ephemerality of smaller extra-official or non-official and non-luxury rolls.^[46] Debates about private versus public or congregational displays of different types of rolls have tended to settle into an understanding that medieval rolls were used for several distinct purposes and contexts: some legal and others liturgical; some private and intimate, yet others publicly displayed; some were intended to be more portable and ephemeral, yet others portable but permanent.^[47] Mortuary rolls test and transgress such neat and clear distinctions.

Conceptual and material affinities between mortuary rolls and other vertical rolls (transversa charta) such as official and private statute rolls, genealogical rolls, prayer and amuletic rolls, and Exultet rolls, can inform speculation about the mortuary roll’s potential uses and forms of display. Like statute rolls, mortuary rolls were binding documents, records of spiritual networks and promises of prayer exchange; like genealogical rolls, they confirmed spiritual and earthly inheritance and succession (of institutional leadership). They were designed to protect souls, like prayer rolls; in their request for collective prayers; they also possessed a liturgical function, like an Exultet roll. Although prayer rolls and textual amulets can be found in ancient cultures and were geographically widespread—and genealogical rolls also have a long history—the production and survival of some rolls were not so common. Official governmental rolls (Exchequer and Chancery, Pipe Rolls) and private statute rolls were a unique form of legal administration in England. Exultet rolls were produced in Southern Italy from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, and most mortuary rolls were made in central and northern France and Catalonia from the eighth century, with more widespread production found later in England, Belgium, Germany, and Austria.^[48] These four types of rolls were also used in different ways: consulted when needed, read or sung aloud in citing a claim, or deployed in a performative context.^[49]

A consideration of the purposes of these four roll types—statute, genealogical, prayer, and Exultet rolls—and their potential forms of handling and engagement, is useful when speculating about possible engagement practices and contexts for the mortuary roll. First, the statute roll (statuta Angliae) was a genre of legal literature encompassing the compilation of statutes, royal documents, legal treatises, and other records written in Latin and Anglo-Norman French, produced in codex form, but also in many different physical and textual forms—including roll forms—from the late thirteenth century. Private or non-official statute rolls were produced for ecclesiastical and secular landowners, merchants, and lawyers up to the early fourteenth centuries in the form of stacks of parchment membranes arranged in archival order and stitched together at the head, like other legal rolls such as Exchequer rolls, rather than assembled head to foot in a continuous roll of substantial length, like genealogical, prayer, and Exultet rolls.^[50] The purpose of the genealogical roll was largely didactic, but also authoritative and consultative in its vertical tracing of the lineage of Christ, royalty, or nobility, and in the case of royal and aristocratic genealogies, could be linked to claims and rights to power; genealogies concurrently appeared in roll and codex forms throughout the Middle Ages.^[51]

Like genealogical rolls, prayer rolls or amuletic rolls were also vertically read. They were protective or apotropaic objects: unrolled, visually examined, and read aloud; very occasionally placed around the abdomen during childbirth; rolled up and stored in containers; and suspended from chains and worn around the neck or in a pocket.^[52] Instructions contained in the roll directed forms of physical or tactile engagement.^[53] In this way, individuals used prayer rolls like Books of Hours: physical actions linked to devotional experience such as rubbing or marking could alter both books and rolls, but the flexible size and form of the prayer roll made possible a more corporeal, intimate experience in its physical binding to or wrapping around a part of the body. In some cases, drinking the watered-down ink taken from a prayer roll was thought to aid an affliction.^[54] The folding or rolling of a textual amulet made them bi-directional, both vertically and horizontally legible.^[55]

Unlike the varied forms of physical engagement and handling associated with the types of rolls above, as liturgical texts intended for ceremonial display, Exultet rolls had one form: they were consistently collectively viewed by a congregation and designed for that purpose. Consisting of hymns and prayers, music, and images, Exultet rolls were used in the consecration of the Paschal candle in the Easter liturgy. A critical part of a larger ceremony, the Exultet roll was a performative object: as the deacon sang and unfurled the roll from an elevated pulpit, the images were often—but not always—integrated upside down in the text, so that they appeared right side up before the congregation. Kelly links their survival and continuing manufacture through the nineteenth century to their status as extraordinarily precious and flexible objects, their form sumptuous and able to accommodate new texts or music.^[56]

To a greater or lesser extent, performative dimensions underlie all of the above roll forms and perhaps this dimension played a part in their survival. We know that rolls existed alongside books, booklets, and folded pieces of parchment and paper throughout the late Middle Ages and beyond: representations of rolls point to this complementary coexistence. Skemer identifies perhaps the best visual depiction of this in the Workshop of Robert Campin’s Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) (c.1427–32), its partly unfurled prayer roll and Book of Hours occupying the Virgin’s table, signifying the popularity of both in private devotional practice.^[57] As symbols, when represented with books, rolls often represented the Old Testament or the Judaic foundations of Christianity. Rolls represented the ancient past and ruins in Eumnestes’s chamber in Spenser’s Faery Queen (1590/6), where: ‘all was hangd about with rolls,/ And old records from ancient times derivd,/ Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolls,/ That were all worm-eaten and full of canker holes.’^[58] By 1600, the scroll remained a critical prop, a dramatic symbolic object, as in Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus when he hands over to Satan (Mephistopheles) the ‘deede of gift of body and of soule’, with its list of conditions read out loud: ‘I of necessitie, for here’s the scrowle, Wherein thou hast giuen thy soule to Lucifer.’^[59] These representations reveal the continued relevance of the roll form as temporal markers in late medieval and early modern works of literature and visual art, with the capacity to reference the authority and the legacy of the distant past, acts of everyday personal devotion in the present, authorised institutional or personal claims to ownership, or other forms of relationship to be perpetuated in the future. As charged symbols or as background clutter, as domestic objects regularly handled or as records gathering dust in storage, the roll form possessed a motility and range of applications which contributed to its historic tenacity as an object.

Visibility, Display and Storage

If these late medieval and early modern representations of different kinds of rolls characterised them in a variety of states and conditions that alluded to their handling or storage, it is important to consider their performative contexts and engagement practices as several rather than singular, and as varied and temporal rather than fixed. Similarly, the making and viewing of the ‘sConincs roll entailed several contexts and agents, including the illumination of the frontispiece and the writing of the encyclical letter, the collection of signatures over the course of a year, and the practice of prayers after the roll was returned. However, it is a type of object without a continuous historical purpose or references to how it was viewed after signatures were collected.

Lacking the circumscribed liturgical purposes of Exultet rolls and the written instructions found in some prayer rolls, the ‘sConincs roll calls for more expansive approaches in order to understand its viewing contexts after its return to Forest Abbey. An anachronistic or comparative historical approach can address the mortuary roll’s performative durational dimensions by expanding the range of potential forms of encounter with the roll. But unlike some anachronistic approaches that suggest that medieval and contemporary rolls or their museum display practices and contexts are analogous, I will use this approach, as Hal Foster suggests, ‘as a vantage point from which to revise the (distant) past’.^[60] The ‘vantage point’ of the present does not pretend to diminish historical distance, but rather helps us to acknowledge how current display practices restrict viewing encounters to a single fixed view which focuses on textual and visual elements, rather than presenting them as mutable objects that were handled and encountered in a variety of ways. These fixed views of historic rolls stand in stark contrast to the more relaxed (although still regulated) environmental conditions of contemporary art galleries, which present the roll form as a three-dimensional object with particular material and aesthetic qualities, whether as an autonomous sculptural object or part of a larger installation. Reflection on the different display practices for medieval rolls and rolls in contemporary art helps us to acknowledge the differences between conventional contexts for encountering rolls in the present and in the past. Taking these differences into consideration, along with observations on the scale, purpose, and forms of handling and engagement of other medieval illuminated rolls, we can acknowledge the roll’s material, three-dimensional characteristics and its capacity for changing states (and multiple views) through unrolling, making it possible to propose a range of scenarios for collective engagement with the mortuary roll. In this section, therefore, observations on museum display practices for medieval rolls and for roll forms in contemporary art, followed by a discussion of forms of handling and viewing other medieval rolls, will inform my thoughts on potential viewing contexts and storage for the ‘sConincs roll.

In their current contexts, most mortuary rolls sit in storage, no longer called upon to expedite souls through purgatory. They are assets valued for their material, historic, cultural, and economic characteristics rather than for their role in prayer exchange. They are physically unwieldy objects and few public institutions are in a position to dedicate enough space to display large sections of them on a long-term basis. Like any medieval manuscript, medieval rolls require stable environmental and material conditions provided by secure cases and galleries with controlled temperature, light, and humidity levels. Most mortuary rolls are displayed flat in standard cases that allow a small part of the roll to be shown, as was the case with the ‘sConincs roll in The Sparkle of Dust: Spotlight on the Rylands Archives (John Rylands Library, 1997) and the mortuary roll of Amphelisa, Prioress of Lillechurch (c.1225-30), in All Conquering Death (St John’s College, Cambridge, 2012).^[61] Increasingly, other types of rolls with vertically progressing imagery such as genealogical rolls have been vertically displayed or mounted at an angle, as for example in Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (British Library, 2011).^[62] Longer-term displays of medieval Western rolls include the vertical display of the Genealogica Christi (c.1230) at the Cloisters in New York, and regularly changing views of parts of the Guthlac roll (1175-1215) in a generous table vitrine in Treasures of the British Library (Sir John Ritblat Gallery, British Library).^[63] More recently, in COLOUR: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (Fitzwilliam Museum, 2016), the suspension and extension of a substantial part of the fifteenth-century Ripley alchemical scroll, supported by a specially designed mount, directed attention to the act of unfurling the roll.^[64]

In an exhibition and an online database, the project Medieval Scrolls at Harvard (Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2014) explored the scroll/roll form’s continued use in the age of the codex.^[65] Viewed digitally, rolls are conventionally presented in codex-like sections and fragments, although more projects are underway to replicate scrolling through complete rolls.^[66] As part of this publication, for the first time the ‘sConincs roll has been rendered into a single, scrollable digital roll, expanding its viewing networks and display contexts. However, all of these forms of display physically distance rolls from the viewer, rendering them static and visible only through glass or a screen. Apart from archivists and academics, few individuals encounter rolls as three-dimensional objects through physically handling them.

Stability and distance from human contact are necessary conditions for the preservation and survival of medieval rolls and for any vulnerable artefact or artwork. Conventionally, art galleries and museums rarely support audience interactions that take the form of moving, handling and manipulating historic objects unless they are part of the work or carefully regulated, or a facsimile is provided. From Adorno to Crimp, longstanding critiques of museums as mausolea—institutions that ossify artefacts through preservation and perpetual conservation in attempts to deny the nature of change and decay—draw attention to the impossibility of recontexualising artefacts when ‘original contexts’ are not simply defined or singular.^[67] In Amy Knight Powell’s research on late medieval sculptures of the Deposition of Christ (crucifixes with moveable arms), with her application of the term ‘promiscuous’ to describe objects that were regularly relocated and her understanding of them as ‘dead’, she proposes that we understand their situation in a museum ‘less as a regrettable loss of their original context and “life” than as a perfectly appropriate expression of their carefully engineered capacity to be taken down and to be put up again’.^[68] Powell’s terms are particularly appropriate for a mortuary roll: an itinerant object material in form, but ephemeral and intangible in its purpose of eliciting spiritual actions.

Like Deposition sculptures, the ‘sConincs roll encouraged prayers and regularly changed its location and appearance, opening and closing during its period of facture, and now exists solely as a material object divorced from its earliest users. With belief in the quantitative efficacy of prayers no longer a conventional part of contemporary life, mortuary rolls are not only (like all museum artefacts) institutionally and culturally decontextualised, but they are also challenging to interpret in a definitive way. As a repository of prayer exchange, the mortuary roll brought together material and spiritual worlds through the compilation of tangible, signed promises, and the intangible activity of collective prayer. Collective prayer is a form of intangible cultural heritage, a category defined by UNESCO as the practices and knowledges of a culture and a field of study in itself.^[69] The preservation and presentation of intangible heritage is challenging for institutions not specifically designed for it; conventional display practices that fix to one place objects designed for movement unwittingly limit views of the material object, separating it from its intangible devotional uses and from any form of mobile handling, so that ultimately characteristics such as motility are lost, and its form is obscured.^[70] Thus, a vitrined display of a mortuary roll represents a fractional view of its material form, and nothing of its intangible activities (prayer conducted by prayer networks), rendering it now even more remote as an object with no contemporary presence or familiar purpose.

In contrast to this partial view of a defunct object, roll forms in contemporary art can provide another perspective on the ‘sConincs roll’s durational and performative characteristics. Although obviously radically different to mortuary rolls, rolls in contemporary art works respond to the problem of the roll form’s mutability and performative dimensions because of their capacity to generate more intimate, time-based viewing experiences than are available in most museums displaying medieval manuscripts. Contemporary art galleries regularly facilitate closer encounters with artworks and support the realisation of artworks based on ephemeral and durational activity.^[71] Without protective elements such as glass frames, Perspex hoods and barriers, viewers experience greater physical access to paintings, sculptures, and installations. In this environment, roll forms can be more fully encountered as three-dimensional objects or as moveable performative elements. One of the most iconic performances to include a roll is Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll (1975), in which she slowly extracted a scroll from inside her body and read aloud from it. Another ephemeral artwork to incorporate rolls is Ian Breakwell’s performance Unword (1969/70), which featured the artist tearing through an installation of large rolls of suspended paper. Both performances were characterised by the temporality of their display, their durational and changing forms, and the capacity for rolls to be understood as extensions of and surrogates for the body.

The roll or scroll as body surrogate also features in work by the artists Fiona Banner, Gabriel Orozco, and Cornelia Parker, artworks that particularly resonate with several characteristics of the mortuary roll. Cornelia Parker’s installation War Room (2015) represented the bodies of the collective dead through absence, amassing the repetitive elements of identical, mechanical poppy-cuts in scrolls suspended from the ceiling and cascading down the walls (fig. 6.7). The installation commemorated past military deaths on a mass scale, but also collapsed time in its reference to the relentlessness of poppy production and war deaths in the present, past, and future.^[72] In Fiona Banner’s retrospective exhibition Scroll Down and Keep Scrolling, her title piece, a single monumental scroll suspended from an extensive height presented a series of printed images of artworks, representing a body of work made over two decades and alluding to the body of the artist herself (figs 6.8 and 6.9).^[73]

Unlike the large-scale work of Banner and Parker, Orozco’s anti-monumental presentation of both scrolls and their containers relates more closely to the body of the individual viewer, referring to the objects’ mutability and peripatetic states: rolled up and stored, rolled out and vertically suspended for viewing (fig. 6.10). Displayed on walls accompanied by numbered wooden and cardboard containers on tables in the centre of the gallery, Orozco’s abstract collages, made out of circular cuttings from obi (kimono sashes), flipped to show both the obverse and reverse side of the weave, imply a narrative of their movement between display and storage. They have been called ‘waiting objects’, Orozco’s term for temporary objects suggestive of a ritual purpose or system of signals, but ultimately enigmatic.^[74]

All of these works share a number of characteristics with the ‘sConincs roll: their displays were temporary and collectively made for collective viewing; they were commemorative; they were not presented in vitrines, so they could be seen as three-dimensional objects with the capacity for movement; finally, and perhaps most importantly, they registered as body surrogates in different ways. In contrast to conventional presentations of historic manuscripts behind glass, these artworks share space with the viewer, revealing the distance between encounters with historic manuscripts in conventional museum displays and our capacity to imagine encounters with them in the contemporary medieval world. If we understand mortuary rolls as durational objects with performative dimensions, rather than as simple carriers of texts and images, we can come to think of them as body surrogates. Or, in order to recognise concepts of soul-body dualism, as body and soul surrogates, with the roll commemorating the abbess’s earthly achievements and marking her soul’s status in purgatory.^[75]

Medieval Rolls and their Handling

Although other types of medieval rolls did not share the same commemorative purposes, they were also durational objects with performative dimensions. The greatest physical closeness to rolls comes with handling them, and information about the scale and viewing practices of the later medieval rolls mentioned earlier can provide more evidence relevant to speculations about the ‘sConincs roll. Variations in the length of each type of roll are considerable, with some mortuary and prayer rolls as a long as twenty metres. However, it is their widths that are more distinct and critical to establishing the scale of the encounter, with prayer rolls and textual amulets the smallest, ranging in width from a little over one centimetre to around twenty centimetres; official and private statute rolls as well as genealogical rolls range in width from twenty to twenty-eight centimetres and wider; while Exultet rolls have an average width of around twenty-eight centimetres (27.85 cm), with lengths extending to over seventy centimetres (70.36 cm).^[76] Mortuary rolls vary in size from fifteen to twenty-seven centimeters wide.^[77] Individuals rather than large groups tended to consult statute rolls and prayer rolls.^[78] Statute rolls could be viewed either in private or in court to make a claim in land ownership disputes, and smaller prayer rolls and textual amulets could be read or worn for apotropaic purposes: either unrolled and read or worn, physically bound to the body, or worn rolled up and encased, suspended from a chain.^[79] Significantly larger in scale than most prayer rolls, Exultet rolls presented images to congregations through unrolling, vertical movements. As pedagogical tools intended to educate viewers about historical events, ancestral and familial lineage, and pedigree, genealogical rolls are largely thought to have been viewed on tables or desks by groups as well as by individuals, with an authoritative guide progressing through it in sections as it was unrolled.^[80]

With all four of these roll types, the ‘sConincs roll shares characteristics: it preserved and stored its claims to promised prayers as if they were a form of currency or property, like a statute roll; its purpose was to evoke spiritual power through prayer, like a prayer roll; it addressed a group and could have been used once a year, like an Exultet roll. In the frontispiece’s upper and lower registers, the ‘sConincs roll also has an affinity with the vertical designs of genealogical rolls and prayer rolls, commemorating spiritual and earthly relationships and lineage in the representations of patron saints, nuns and priests.^[81] However, it is also different to these rolls: neither monumental nor intimate, neither wholly liturgical nor a bodily accessory, but a commemorative object that collapses time, bringing together past, present and future in its facture and use.

Of all of the ‘sConincs roll’s differences with other roll types, the contrast between images and text in the frontispiece, encyclical, and its signatures is most pronounced. Its components could be viewed by an individual or a small group, but the size of its frontispiece—smaller than an Exultet roll but similar in scale, and its potential separation from the roll—suggests it could have been displayed in a spatially restricted liturgical setting. The frontispiece’s trimmed top edge also suggests its unintentional loss through wear if the top edge was routinely affixed to a wall. When compared to the very worn first two membranes, the frontispiece and the encyclical, the membranes that follow appear less well-handled, which suggests that the tituli were not frequently fully examined. Scholars have largely rejected speculations about the fixing to walls of most genealogical and Arma Christi rolls, because their images and texts are not large enough to register for viewers beyond an arm’s distance, and one might apply this thinking to mortuary rolls.^[82] Again, however, it is important to note that mortuary rolls differ in their collective construction and collective commemorative purpose, with initially separate and potentially detachable elements, and associations with anniversary Masses.^[83] The spiritual network’s collective prayers practised by groups and for groups suggest that the frontispiece may also have been viewed by a group. It is possible that the frontispiece alone could have been temporarily displayed near an altar, attached to a wall, or laid flat on another surface, occupying a role similar to a print nailed to a wall or the sculpted plaques commemorating the foundation of anniversary Masses in the Burgundian Netherlands.^[84] Set into walls near altars, such plaques share with mortuary rolls associations with commemoration, ritual and prayer exchange.

However, an image on parchment is not monumentally fixed in the same way as a foundation plaque. The expectation that sumptuous images must primarily have been on public or formal display restricts the range of possible engagement contexts. The modes of display discussed above encompass constricted vertical or horizontal views of scrolls secured under glass or digitally viewed on a screen, as opposed to the original—variably suspended or potentially manipulated—temporary displays of the contemporary scroll and its status as a body/soul surrogate, evoking the simultaneous absence and presence of a body. Such forms of presentation free up viewing practices to include the visual or scopic, the performative and corporeal: ones that involve physical handling; reading alone or singing out loud to a group as performer; or looking at and listening to as viewer. Mortuary rolls therefore elicited several forms of engagement rather than solely one. Yet none of these scenarios includes the equally important idea of storage as display, a legitimate aspect of its history.

Thus my final point about the multiple modes of, and contexts for, physical and visual engagement with the ‘sConincs roll considers the significance of its absence from view. It may have been collectively made and included in a Mass celebration, but even if it was displayed more than once a year, it must have been in storage most of the time. Critically, an object out of sight and in storage was not invisible in the Middle Ages. Even in institutions with libraries, late medieval records and manuscripts were often kept together with other liturgical objects; inventories and catalogues put them at the end of a long list often because of their formal differences, but in some cases, because of their special contents.^[85] As Pierre-Alain Mariaux’s insights into the functions of the treasury suggest, the treasury held objects with simultaneously terrestrial and celestial associations, serving as a threshold between visible and invisible worlds.^[86] The medieval treasury, and to a certain extent libraries too, contained a collection of donations and acquisitions that as a whole represented the religious and lay communities, forming a kind of memorial of institutional history. The ‘sConincs roll may have been just such a memorial, representing an abbess important to Forest: this would in theory help account for its survival. Certain objects in treasuries were reused or transformed, and others conserved or preserved. Many of the highly valuable items in the treasury were there, Mariaux argues, because they were signs of something invisible.

The ‘sConincs roll certainly encompasses signs of invisible actions. Portable and expandable, the mortuary roll addressed and involved nearly 400 religious communities over the course of its facture. By understanding the list of collective signatures as a register of future actions, all of the communities can be understood to fulfill the performative elements of the mortuary roll through the labour of prayer exchange. The roll therefore operates like a binding register, where prayers become both possessions and debts in the exchange: intangible, highly valuable forms of capital in a spiritual economy made material. The frontispiece represents this invisible activity, with the image of the dead abbess and her community both a witness to the collective signatures and a reference to ongoing, collective prayer once the roll was returned to the abbey.

It is tempting to assume that the ‘sConincs roll’s frontispiece could only have been made to be displayed in a formal, devotional setting. Returning to its status as an expensive, deluxe image exhibiting characteristics of ‘overt materiality’, the size and quality of the image, along with its extensive gilding, suggests that it was intended to be shown, with the enlarged liturgical elements emphasising aspects of Mass celebration.^[87] In a candlelit devotional setting, it would have had a spectacular presence, its reflective gold elements mirroring the liturgical instruments in the Mass.^[88] Its display near an altar during the Abbess Elisabeth’s anniversary Mass celebration connected her religious family in prayer to hundreds of other religious communities. However, the idea that the ‘sConincs roll had to be displayed in a devotional context in order to register its visibility should not override the potential significance of its invisibility in storage in a treasury or a similar space, inhabiting a threshold between earthly and spiritual worlds. The roll had an intangible function as a collection of promised prayers and exchange, potentially consulted and displayed for anniversary celebrations, and stored again, like Exultet rolls. Winged altarpieces featuring donor portraits, such as those in Rogier van der Weyden’s Last Judgement of the Beaune Altarpiece (c.1445–1450), present potential commemorative parallels with the ‘sConincs roll and its changing states of visibility in regularly changing display contexts.^[89]

As an obit, a commemorative image, and both the official record of and authoritative contract for perpetual networks of prayer, the ‘sConincs roll is a rich, problematic object to interpret. Speculation about the mortuary roll’s forms of physical engagement and viewing practices, from its announcement of a death and requests for prayer exchange, to its return to the abbey where it could have been displayed to accompany prayer at a particular altar, or stored and protected, or both, suggests that there was no single viewing context.^[90] If we can consider the process of its making as part of its performance, then the roll’s journey and presentation to hundreds of other communities—the collection of signatures, its return, and ensuing prayer exchange—can all be understood to comprise original engagement contexts. After its return, it may also have been largely invisible, probably stored away for a longer period than it was viewed. By approaching the roll as a three-dimensional durational performative object, reflections on its temporality, portability, its momentary display and storage expand perspectives for viewing the mortuary roll in the present. Like any compelling memorial or commemorative work, the mortuary roll can be understood to represent absence, while at the same time functioning as a surrogate for the body of the Abbess and the collective dead. In short, the ‘sConincs roll tests our preconceptions about modes of visibility and display being principally singular, visual, and collective and about the limits we place on the purposes we want images to serve.

Stacy Boldrick is Lecturer and Programme Director for the MA in Art Museum and Gallery Studies in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Publications include Iconoclasm and the Museum (Routledge, forthcoming 2020); Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (Ashgate, 2007 with Richard Clay); Striking Images: Iconoclasms Past and Present (Ashgate, 2013; with Leslie Brubaker and Richard Clay). Curatorial collaborations include: Wonder: Painted Sculpture from Medieval England (Henry Moore Institute, 2002; with David Parks and Paul Williamson) and Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm (Tate Britain, 2013; with Tabitha Barber).