35 In 1281, John Pecham, Archbishop of Canterbury, promulgated his Ignorantia sacerdotum ( On the Ig- norance of Priests ). A clarion cry to all clergy under his authority, the Ignorantia condemned the woeful state of priestly education and training in England during the late-thirteenth century, asserting that the ignorance of priests leads people into doctrinal and moral error and cheats them of a true understanding of God. Pecham’s decree did more than just condemn his subordinates’ ignorance, however. It also set forth the framework for the systematic teaching of priests—and by extension the people to whom they ministered—in the basic literacy of Christianity. Over the course of the following century, a number of learned priests put quill to parchment in an effort to provide their less knowledgeable brethren with books explaining these fundamental principles of the Christian faith. Chief among these texts was the Oculus sacerdotis, or The Eye of the Priest, written in the 1320s by an English clergyman named William of Pagula, vicar of Winkfield, a small parish in Berkshire in south-central England. 1 Te above paragraph encapsulates the basic background information I give to my students when introducing them to Ohio State’s manuscript copy of Pagula’s infuential fourteenth-century text. But as signifcant and interesting as its historical context and textual content may be, in most cases in which I might use this manuscript to teach, the substance of its text actually counts for very litle. Writen entirely in Latin and never before edited or fully translated into English, the manuscript’s tex- tual contents remain inaccessible to most students; and even if they are fuent in medieval Latin, they would still have to contend with the manuscript’s paleographical idiosyncrasies, the absence of mod- ern punctuation, and the complex system of lexical abbreviations used by the scribes who penned the text. On frst glance, then, it would seem that for general teaching purposes OSU’s copy of the Ocu- lus sacerdotis is nothing more than an inert esoteric object, a historical curiosity, an “empty” text. If this is the case, a fundamental question arises: What is the point of using a manuscript like this in the class- room? As a curator who frequently teaches with medi- eval books in upper level courses such as “Medieval Manuscript Studies,” as well as in course-integrated sessions across the university’s humanities curricu- lum and in occasional instructional scenarios tar- geting primary, junior high, and high school audi- ences, it is my job to fnd ways to help students see past these linguistic and textual obstacles and teach them to recognize that there is more to read and examine in a book than its textual content alone. Its very physical qualities and appearance, I try to demonstrate, serve as active texts encompassing their own peculiar language of signs and symbols telling us about the circumstances and process of the book’s own production, the culture in which it was born, the people who made and read it, and the history of its use and transmission. By using a man- Seeing through the ‘Priest’s Eye’: Teaching Medieval Codicology and Book History through William of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis Eric J. Johnson The OhiO STaTe UniverSiTy