Some readers, however, could not help themselves. Touching while reading was not just a quotidian action, the pages naturally accruing everyday grime: it could also mark moments of emotional pique. The names or accompanying images of wrong-doers or devils are found scraped and scratched at, stabbed and smudged out. Other images have been loved into oblivion, particularly holy figures, who are often rubbed away to a blank nothingness through repeated caresses. To avoid such accidental desecration of holy text, when reading from the Torah, Jews used a yad (די, literally ‘hand’), a short metallic pointer often tipped with an actual miniature sculpture of a hand to follow the text at a respectful distance.
As well as scuffing and dirtying them, the fingers were also useful tools for memorizing information from the pages of manuscripts. The Italian music theorist Guido of Arezzo (c.991–1033) used the hand to outline his innovative techniques for learning song. Codifying a hexacord, or six-part, system of musical notation that had developed through various Greek, Roman and early medieval iterations, Guido assigned each note within this sextupled system a name: ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la, still alive today in the modern solfège method. He then positioned each of these notes at one of 19 points spread around the joints of the fingers.
An Italian diagram of Guido’s arrangement, found in a manuscript still held at its original home in the medieval abbey of Montecassino in Italy, shows the notes spread about the hand, moving in a spiral pattern from G at the tip of the thumb, down via the notes A and B to the palm, before then moving through C, D, E and F across the base of the fingers, up the little finger repeating G, A, B, and then spiralling across the top of the fingers back into the centre. Such a system could help an individual in the complicated memorization of particular tunes in relation to their respective scales, and it may also have allowed for teachers to sign notes at their pupils across space, correcting their notation by sight as they rehearsed new hymns.
If Guidonian hands helped singers retrieve a past tune or chant from their memory or to notate it in the present, similar hands were also used to intuit future events. Chiromancy, the act of divining things to come from someone’s hands, was a prominent magical practice in the ancient world and was adopted in the medieval West through translations of detailed Arabic sources, much the same route as many important medical texts. Unlike works on health, however, which advocated understanding broad humoral dispositions and the spread of diseases across the body, chiromancers drew attention only to the minutiae, tiny differences in the lines and markings on different parts of the palm and fingers.
One 13th-century English manuscript illustrates a magical hand covered all over with text to help find the primary points of a chiromantic reading. At the palm the three main lines or creases which form something of a triangle at the center of the hand could be read for indications of life and death, whether the hand’s owner would be honorable or cowardly in battle, or if they would die by water or fire.
The propensity of small mounds of flesh elsewhere on the joints of the fingers intimated that the person would have multiple children and escape illness with ease. And the length of fingers or the curved appearance of nails could be clues as to a number of other characteristics, from a susceptibility to leg wounds and a budding intelligence to copious income and a murderous temperament.
A whole system of elaborate miniature signs flourished across these hands. The appearance of cross shapes at the base of the fingers spelled unexpected doom. A symbol like a crossed-out letter “C” prognosticated that a man would rise to become a bishop, while a doubled “oo” sign suggested an imminent loss of testicles for the bearer or their younger brother. How seriously medieval people took these supposed divinations was surely, as today, a matter of great variation.
Some sources describe the practice simply as a silly game and misleading witchcraft, but the inclusion of palmistry points that evaluated the honor of one’s advisers or the faithfulness and virginity of a future wife hint that the readings could carry with them a degree of seriousness, should they be so interpreted. If inclined to look more closely, men and women would see that at the end of their arms they were carrying around tools for reading, singing and even a road map for their entire life to come plotted out on their own bodies.
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Although Guidonian singing spirals or chiromancy diagrams are valuable to us because they preserve intricate medieval systems of thought, the existence of such frameworks is bittersweet. For they remind us that there must have been countless social customs of signs and symbols once alive in the Middle Ages, entire sophisticated gestural dialects that have since completely vanished.
Some of these lost affectations are opaquely hinted at through fragments of written description. The influential Northumbrian author Bede (c.673–735), for instance, wrote in the 720s of a sophisticated method of numerating digits on the fingers which allowed different combinations of folding, closing and bending of two hands to sign individual numbers all the way from 0 to 9,999. We can imagine craftsmen or traders gesturing prices in this way across busy markets, or sailors signalling at sea across the deck.
And it is not surprising either that Bede, a monk, was aware of such arrangements. Given the strict regulations placed on speech in some monastic settings, systems of gesture were integral to the smooth running of a religious institution like a monastery. Take the 10th-century monks of the Abbey of Cluny, an influential foundation in eastern France from which the hôtel of Alexandre du Sommerard, later the Musée de Cluny, took its name. These men put particular weight on the self-abnegation of religious life, advocating a new and focused form of monasticism which preferenced prayer over much other normal human behavior. Fasting, celibacy and extremely long periods of sung devotion characterized this French tradition, as did a strictly maintained silence thereafter.
Not speaking was designed to avoid sins of the tongue, as well as to channel the monks’ prayers more thoroughly in imitation of the angels, who were thought by the Cluniacs only to sing. This was easier said than done, however. Cooking, writing, tending the land, these were all things that could not stop simply because a foundation’s inhabitants refused to engage in the un-angelic act of conversation. Almost as soon as the silent practice took root, a process of signalling sprang up that helped the monks go about the necessities of daily life. How this monastic finger-chatter might have worked in reality is hard to re-piece, but a rare sign lexicon preserved in a handful of contemporary manuscripts describes around 118 symbols for places, people and things that monks would have needed to know. Among others, we learn that:
For the sign of a dish of vegetables, drag one finger over another finger, like someone cutting vegetables that he is about to cook.
For the sign of a squid, divide all of the fingers from each other and then move them together, because squid are made up of many parts.
For the sign of a needle, strike your fists together, because this signifies metal, and after that pretend that you are holding a piece of thread in one hand and a needle in the other and that you want to send the thread through the eye of a needle.
For the sign of the Holy Virgin, draw your finger along the forehead from eyebrow to eyebrow, because that is the sign for a woman.
For the sign of something good, whatever it is that you say is good, place your thumb on one side of your jaw and your other fingers on the other side and then draw them down gently to the end of the chin.
For the sign of something bad, place your fingers spread out on your face and pretend that it is the claw of a bird grasping and tearing at something.
The more of this kind of distant descriptive evidence we discover, the more we see that gesticulations and hand gestures were a fundamental aspect of medieval religious life, even for those not part of communities vowed to perpetual silence. Islamic scholars of the period discuss the clarity that moving the hands could bring to the words of clerics when preaching, and during the observance of the Christian Mass priests were taught to raise their arms high and apart in a gesture that deliberately echoed the arms of Christ, stretched wide at the crucifixion. Folding one’s hands closed in front of one’s chest was an equally respected and potent movement in many religious settings, designed to accompany thoughts and prayers, and to encourage the faithful to at once rend their souls and embrace God close to their hearts.
Such symbols surface, too, in objects of popular religious culture. Touching a reliquary was a sure-fire way to mark one’s presence at a shrine, as well as to physically absorb the spiritual and bodily benefits of a relic’s immediate presence. But reliquaries could, in a sense, touch back. Some were formed not just as elaborately decorated boxes but in the shape of fully realized forearms, complete with hands frozen in signs of benediction. This is not necessarily because they contained within them a piece of sacred finger or arm, humerus or ulna. They could hold any holy remnant. Instead, it was their gestural potential that was prized, allowing them to be waved over the congregation as if they were the actual blessing hand of the saint themselves, spreading the holiness contained in the object’s core across banks of the assembled faithful.
A link between hands and health had long held strong currency in the medieval Muslim world.Hand gestures could bind secular communities together in much the same way. In the legal world the raising of both hands or resting them on holy scripture to testify was, as in some courtrooms today, of equal importance to any verbal authentication that could be offered when giving testimony. Marriage contracts also hinged on the “handfasting” of a couple, their betrothal signified by the clasping of their hands together. So popular was this gesture as a symbol of love that pairs of conjoined hands, just like hearts, became a popular feature of amorous tokens, keepsakes and rings.
One extremely well-preserved 14th-century brooch was excavated from a field in Cheshire. Made of gold and exquisitely detailed, it is formed of two sleeved arms whose hands meet in a tight clasp at the bottom. The gold on the back of this particular piece has been left undecorated so as to show off its valuable, shiny surface, but other examples sometimes preserve details of small flowers—perhaps, poignantly, forget-me-nots, a flower that had considerable significance to medieval lovers—and even inscriptions intended from one lover to another, often in Anglicized French: pensez de moy, “think of me.”
Touch also played a role in less amorous ceremonies of fealty. A person might swear allegiance to their king or caliph by intoning an oath of obedience, but this was only officially cemented in the conjoining of hands between the two parties. Gestures of this sort seem to have played a particularly prominent part in many royal customs, continuing into the Middle Ages from earlier classical traditions. As God’s representatives on earth, rulers went through elaborate ceremonies that involved both being touched and touching others.
A 3rd-century sculpted relief at Naqsh-e Rostam, a necropolis near the ancient city of Persepolis in Iran, shows an enormous image of the Sasanian King Ardashir I grasping a symbolic ring of rule handed to him by the Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda. Later Middle Eastern investitures of the Mamluk sultans and Abbasid caliphs would see the ruler hold or be girded with a curved, Bedouin-style sword. European monarchs too were anointed on the forehead with holy oil by archbishops or other senior clergymen during their coronations, recalling the biblical model of the much-revered warrior-king David by the prophet Samuel in the Old Testament.
And by the later Middle Ages the touch of a monarch themselves, especially immediately after such coronation rites, had reciprocally transformed into a much-prized thing. So charismatic was this touch that in certain cases it was even thought to have the ability to heal various illnesses through royal caress. Scrofula, a form of tuberculosis of the lymph glands causing large sores and swellings around the neck, was a disease that became so associated with this type of monarchical healing that it took the Latin name morbus regius, the “regal disease” or, sometimes, the “king’s evil.”
From the 11th century onwards its French and English victims were granted special audiences with their respective monarchs to receive this miraculous cure. Records are hazy as to how precisely such healing touches were given: some royals may have employed a lingering stroke of the face and neck, while others may have made do with a simple pat on the head. Either way, the hands of the king carried an intense power to cleanse severe sickness.
Cleaning these royal hands themselves could be even more complicated. A link between hands and health had long held strong currency in the medieval Muslim world. The Qur’anic dictum that the body should be purified before prayer gave rise to regular ritual ablutions, involving the washing of the hands, feet, face and sometimes the whole body. For some this may have been a trivial point of spiritual etiquette, but for others the washing of the hands could be a site for real creativity. In around 1206 the Arabic scholar and engineer Ismail al-Jazari (1136–1206) completed his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, the most elaborate in a series of technical manuals stretching back to 9th-century Baghdad, which outlined how to build a range of mechanical automata, functional machines often featuring moving beasts and figures.
Some illustrated copies of the Book of Knowledge accompany al-Jazari’s detailed text with colorful diagrams that bring these creations to life, labelled to correspond with his extensive notes on construction. Alongside an elephant clock, a floating four-piece musical band, an automatically locking castle gate, a model for mechanized blood-letting and many other pieces, one of these manuscripts’ folios shows a machine that al-Jazari was commissioned to build by his patron, the Artuqid king Salih.
The King, al-Jazari writes, “disliked a servant or slave girl pouring water onto his hands for him to perform his ritual ablutions.” To help, the inventor created an elaborate contraption in the shape of a large canopy. When the King pulled a lever, the hydraulic power of the water stored in its hidden upper tank made a bird at the top of the device sing. Water then poured steadily into a basin from a jug supported by a hollow mechanical copper servant who also held a mirror and a comb for him to use as he washed. Another bird then drained the finished water away, before, finally, the servant automatically lowered her left hand in a finishing flourish to offer the King a towel to dry himself.
Lavishing such meticulous attention on these sovereign hands made sense. Alongside the officiating priest giving wide-armed blessing to his congregation and the surgeon feeling his way across the body of a patient with his finger-like tools, the king was among only a few medieval individuals whose appendages were invested with the awesome power to transform.
Hands in the Middle Ages let the world in. Their touch gave shape to experiences and objects, people and places, enacting everything from the playful spank in a game of Hot Cockles to the momentous binding grasp of marriage. Writing in the 5th century, Saint Augustine theorized that the hands of men and women functioned in their own right as what he called verba visibilia, “visible words.” Although no medieval hands survive today to speak this gestural language to us, we are lucky that it still lingers in artistic objects and the traces of customs: sealing contracts, scratching devils, teaching music or commanding life and death.
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From Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages. Used with the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Co. Copyright © 2019 by Jack Hartnell.
