Practice, Process, and Performance: Shaping a Devotional Habitus in the Margins of Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs

Illustrations and annotation in the margins of manuscripts can offer unique insights into the medieval reading experience. This article explores how Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 373, a manuscript containing Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermones super Cantica canticorum, produced and read in late medieval England, facilitates and reflects a performative mode of reading. While a movement from reading to bodily performance is suggested, this article argues that the opposite movement is also encouraged, as part of a nonlinear mode of reading in which images function both as a starting point and as a point of return for devotional practice.