The ‘attentive word’ could be an alternative title for this physically slight work of scholarship. The ear is second, with the attentive word / That arms and nourishes the mind.’įeo Belcari, in a passage from his 1440 drama Abraham and Isaac, is quoted at the end of Michael Baxandall’s classic 1972 study, Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, which similarly contends with the tension between image and word, though at a time when it was the word on the cusp of ascendancy. This new dawn, does not, as before, stream through stained glass windows, but glows dimly from our LCD screens: ‘The eye is called the first of all the gates / Through which the intellect may learn and taste. The Word, which has, since the Reformation, ruled triumphant, is being rapidly replaced. In contrast, under a quarter of British children read a book daily. In 2022 British children spent an average of four hours a day on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, all overwhelmingly visual media. It is a tension that is especially pertinent, 14 years on, as communication becomes ever more visual. It was not the response I expected, but it did point to an enduring and dynamic tension between the relative value of the visual and the literary. They were underwhelmed: ‘It’s good, but I’d swap it all for a single legal text from the period.’
When the Staffordshire Hoard was revealed in 2009, I contacted a noted Anglo-Saxon scholar, anticipating a response of excitement hitherto unknown among specialists of a distant period in which every discovery is precious.
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