The carmina figurata of Rabanus Maurus: poetry, cross and geometry

Among the most surprising books of the Carolingian Middle Ages is the De laudibus sanctae crucis, “In Praise of the Holy Cross”, composed by Rabanus Maurus at the beginning of the ninth century. The work brings together twenty-eight poems in which each page is a grid of letters laid out with absolute regularity. Within them geometric shapes, crosses, angels and animals isolate groups of letters which, read separately, form new verses: this is the technique of the carmina figurata, the figured poems.

The author and his school

Rabanus Maurus, born in Mainz around 780, was a pupil of Alcuin of York at Tours, then master and abbot at the monastery of Fulda, and finally archbishop of Mainz from 847 until his death in 856. Tradition has called him praeceptor Germaniae, teacher of Germany, for the breadth of his work as teacher and compiler. The De laudibus was composed in his youth, by about 814, and later dedicated to various recipients, including the emperor Louis the Pious and the pope.

How a page works

Each poem is written on a grid in which every line contains the same number of letters, as in a table. Coloured figures are painted over the grid: the letters falling within a figure make up independent verses, the so-called versus intexti, while the background text continues without interruption. Beside each poem a prose explanation clarifies the theological meaning of the shapes, the numbers and the letters chosen.

The figures are not mere decoration. In one poem the cross is formed by the names of the virtues; in others appear the four evangelists with their symbols, the seraphim and cherubim, the mystic Lamb. In one of the most famous Rabanus himself is shown kneeling at the foot of the cross, his figure made of letters forming a prayer; in another the emperor appears with shield and cross.

Numbers too play a precise role. The number of letters per line, the number of lines and the position of the figures are chosen according to symbolic values explained in the commentary, following a tradition that saw arithmetic as a way of contemplating the order of creation. Reading a page therefore requires patience: one reads the continuous text, then the woven verses, then the explanation.

An ancient legacy

Rabanus did not invent the genre. The Greeks knew the technopaegnia, poems shaped like objects, such as the Egg, the Wings and the Axe attributed to Simmias of Rhodes, or the Syrinx attributed to Theocritus. In Rome, in the age of Constantine, Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius had composed poems with woven verses in the shape of monograms, ships and altars, dedicating them to the emperor. Rabanus knew this tradition and brought it to a complexity never reached before.

The book circulated widely: numerous manuscripts survive, including celebrated copies in the Vatican Apostolic Library and the Austrian National Library in Vienna, many of them executed with great care in their colours. It was printed as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, a sign of the interest that humanists continued to feel for these feats of virtuosity.

The De laudibus sanctae crucis is a meeting point of poetry, arithmetic, painting and theology. Every letter counts twice, in the running text and in the figure that isolates it, and the page becomes an object of meditation as well as of reading. Few books show so clearly how far medieval culture regarded the very form of writing as sacred.