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Tablets And The Poetics Of The Premodern Post-It

This chapter explores one of the most familiar text-bearing objects of the Middle Ages. Tablets, sized to be hand-held, initiated writers into the world of literacy. Forbearing and compliant, their waxen surfaces offered themselves to both a student’s first attempts at lettering and the confident compositions of a more practised hand. Portable and adaptable to a variety of uses, tablets served as personal companions carried on the body, ready at hand to receive a fleeting thought, an inventory, a calculation, a legal agreement or the first draft of a poem.1 While hand-held formats and girdle-books suspended from belts were the most common, tablets of varying size could be attached to the writer’s person in any number of ways. Charlemagne, for example, was said to have worn a tablet around his neck while learning the alphabet. Tablets, then, lend themselves to everyday writing, but luxury specimens also survive, made of ivory rather than wood and exquisitely decorated to be given as love gifts.2 Locomobile and handy, tablets form close associations with their writers and bearers. In this chapter, I will examine such tablet-assemblages in medieval English, German and French literature that associate wax, wood, ivory, brass, clay and stone with lovers, poets and parents. As we shall see, the material vitality of inscribed tablets intersects with desire and doubt, sin and penitence, ancestry and origins. As personal writing companions, tablets provide an interface to express private matters and communicate intimacy. Fashioned for the single purpose of bearing text, they recycle easily and, in case their material is soft enough to yield to even gentle pressure, particularly lend themselves to ephemeral writing that is traced as quickly as it is erased. But the private, hand-held version is not the only form of the medieval tablet. Literary sources also apply the term to plaques, sheet-like pieces of writing affixed to a surface where they may be read by anyone who passes by. In contrast to books, mounted tablets reveal texts that cannot be closed, and exhibit writing that faces us at all times. I shall argue that such inscribed plaques function as “premodern post-its” which supplement the exterior of a different object with material text. Being merely add-ons, these post-its must permanently confront the threat of being removed again,