Tutivillus, the literate demon

Tutivillus or Titivillus is a demon associated with writing and literacy. In the Middle Ages he was painted on church walls and carved on misericords, bench ends and corbels; he trod the boards as a character in the Towneley Judicium and Mankind; he introduced errors into scribes’ work copying texts and his exploits were described in sermons, conduct books and poems. You can see him lurking beside a monk’s desk in the picture I used for my profile photograph, an expression of concentration on his face, a stealthy claw laid by the ink well (it’s a fourteenth-century image I took from here; the original source is unfortunately not given). Later he haunted printing presses, causing typesetters to make mistakes.

I am very fond of Tutivillus and wrote my MA dissertation about his representations in mediaeval English church art and sermon exempla. Exempla were illustrative stories drawn from folklore, the Bible, everyday life, the writer’s own imagination; they can be found in sermon collections referred to by priests, conduct books and didactic treatises. There are two about Tutivillus. The most common relates how a priest, deacon or saint sees Tutivillus perched high up in a church noting down the idle gossip of parishioners who are chattering rather than paying attention to the Mass; the people talk so much that he must stretch out his parchment with his teeth in order to fit all the words on it; in many versions the parchment breaks, Tutivillus bangs his head on the wall or pillar of the church and the priest laughs and warns the congregation, who usually repent and oblige the demon to erase what he has written. In the other exemplum Tutivillus is again seen in a church by a man of God, but this time the devil is creeping through the choir with a bulging sack over his shoulder. He explains that he is gathering up all the ‘syalablys & woordys, ouerskipped and synkopyed, & verse & psalymys þe whiche þese clerkys han stolyn in þe qweere, & haue fayled in here seruyse’ (from the Alphabetum Narrationum: An Alphabet of Tales) and stuffing them into this sack. In some versions, after they die the offending monks are sent to Hell where they must carry sacks full of the words they mispronounced in saying Mass and thus stole from God.

I burbled on at length on various aspects of all this in my dissertation, but what I found most fascinating was that both these stories dramatise a spoken sound becoming a visible written mark on a page, a process which must have seemed astonishing to people encountering it for the first time in a culture moving from the oral to the literate. I particularly liked the idea of mumbled words attaining a three-dimensional form and weight and lying on the church floor like lumps of half-chewed bread for Tutivillus to slip into his bag. To me it is all of a piece with the mediaeval love of allegory, of taking abstract qualities and clothing them, with transubstantiation, with approved and transgressive language, with St Augustine’s theory that a person’s mind creates an image of the word when he or she hears it. But this post is already far too long and tortuous, a bit like Tutivillus's parchment, ha ha.

You can see a carving of Tutivillus on a bench end in Charlton Mackrell here and craning in solicitously to hear the tittle-tattle of two ladies of the mid-fourteenth century here, his parchment in his right hoof. Anne Marshall has posted surviving wall paintings here; I have posted her picture of the one in Little Melton, Norfolk, above (a faint Tutivillus can just be perceived standing on the bench to the right).