ABSTRACT
Explicit Enchiridion magistri Alani de conquestu nature editum: this is the scribal signature in a fifteenth-century manuscript marking off the end of the prosimetrum more commonly known as Deplanctu Naturae (The Complaint of Nature) by Alain de Lille or Alanus ab Insulis. 1 Among the 133 manuscripts of this twelfth-century text (1160 to 1170), at least twenty-two designate it as Enchiridion, a handbook, manual, guidebook, on the subject of the laws of Nature. The complaint targets man’s deviations, explicitly the sexual perversions in, between, and among men that are sometimes grouped under the elusive rubric of “sodomy.” 2 Though generally regarded as a contribution to the “effective campaign against sodomy,” the Complaint has elicited surprisingly few responses to its most controversial subject. Even so, the words “Pereai sodomita” (“Let the sodomite perish”) appear as early as the thirteenth century, penned as a coda to a Toledo manuscript and added to several French and Italian copies. 3 At least a handful of scribes made their responses explicit, cheering on the campaign in which their labor was already enlisted. These scribes are situated in a history of textual production and create the situation of reception, for they are in a literal sense at an initial position in the chain of dissemination. Histories of textual reception—readings, uses, influences in trajectories that include current interpretations—are bound up with nitty-gritty histories of production, including the ink of scribes and of the various inscriptions and imprintings that materially “convey” what we normally like to call a text. The Enchiridion, manual of the laws of Nature, becomes a weapon in the hands of scribes as well as subsequent readers; as an arsenal for the war against so-called perversion, the text capitalizes on the connotations of its name, in Greek, εγχειριδίον, something held in the hand, especially for attacks, a dagger, a knife. The etymology makes explicit the violence implied by the name Enchiridion and by the status of a text used as “an effective weapon.” One could argue that any manual implies some degree of violence, perhaps symbolic, because it is used as a disciplinary technique that dictates rules and laws. Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword and sometimes it is one.
