Take an Apple: Grasping the World in Manuscripts of 'L'Image du monde'

Abstract

Gossuin de Metz's thirteenth-century French encyclopaedia, L'Image du monde, is punctuated by references to figures, diagrams which accompany the text and supplement its descriptions of the cosmos and humanity's place in it. These diagrams are also figures of thought, employing scalar thinking in order to encourage readers to imagine the unthinkably large universe with reference to much smaller everyday items. As he describes the Earth's spherical shape, Gossuin calls on the simile of an apple: people walk around the earth's surface, he says, just like flies on an apple. Later, as he discusses the extent of the world's surface that is inhabited, Gossuin invites his readers to take an apple – figuratively and physically. They are both to imagine an apple, but also, if possible, to hold one, to chop it up and peel it, so that they can better understand the Earth's surface by interacting with the skin of the apple. The figures of the manuscript tradition of the Image represent these concepts in a variety of intriguing ways.

To issue an invitation to take an apple is not, however, a neutral suggestion, since it echoes the temptation of the serpent to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. While Genesis does not designate the forbidden fruit as an apple, vernacular French texts most often use the word 'pomme.' The Image is transmitted in around 100 manuscripts; several of these are larger compilations that also include vernacular narratives about the Fall. These are L'Estoire d'Adam (The History / Story of Adam) in Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal 3516; De Adam et de Eve feme (Of Adam and of Woman / Wife Eve) in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France français 1553; Del seinte croyz et de Adam nostre premere piere (Of the Holy Cross and Adam our First Father – also known as Seth or the Holy Rood) in Cambridge, University Library Gg.1.1; and Le Roman de Saint Fanuel (The Romance of St Fanuel), in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France français 1768 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France nouvelles acquisitions françaises 10036. This article explores these narratives in their context
alongside the Image, and argues that the apple is not only a figure of thought enabling imagination across scales of space, but also scales of time.

The apple is in fact a reminder of the need for scalar thinking in the first place: the impulse to understand the world via approximation, comparison, and typology, mediating the hugely cosmic through the small and mundane, stems from the Fall and its aftermath. According to Augustine's influential commentary on Genesis, the transgression of the Fall resulted in the need for mediation to
approximate to, but never fully achieve, the comprehension of the created world. Gossuin's invitation to the readers of L'Image du monde to take an apple is, then, at once an everyday appeal to the mundane as a means to comprehend the cosmic and an allusion to the origin story for this sort of figural thinking across scales.