"Who painted the lion, tell me who?" – the Wife of Bath, in Geoffrey Chaucer, *The Canterbury Tales* (c. 1390)
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The Margin; the Unnamed Archive; the lowest layer of the Quarry SUBJECT: The adversary In a medieval book the text sits in the middle of the page and the gloss sits around it: commentary, explanation, the voice of authority telling the reader what the text means. A gloss can be a gift. It can also grow until it surrounds the text, and then crowds it, and then speaks over it, until the reader can no longer find the words in the middle for the words around them. Christine wrote her book in answer to a gloss. A cleric called Matheolus had written a long and learned complaint about the vices of women, and it was being read and copied and cited, and Christine opened it one afternoon in 1404 and wondered how so many learned men could agree. The tradition she answered – Matheolus, the Romance of the Rose, six centuries of scholarly asides – did not stop because she answered it. In the Shard, it is a force. The residents call it the Gloss, and its ...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.