17
The Historiography of Romanesque Manuscript Illumination
The term “Romanesque” conjures images of rounded arches and contorted figural sculpture, and a glance at any modern survey text underscores the primary place of architecture and relief in the presentation of Romanesque art. Manuscripts, on the other hand, seem to be included almost as an afterthought. As this chapter documents, this has long been the case. A historiographic examination of manuscript illumination of the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveals that considerations of style only slowly gave way to other concerns. In the process, Romanesque illuminations have gone from being disparaged medieval curiosities in the nineteenth century to valued historical artifacts in the present. I offer as a case-study one well-known illuminated manuscript, the Life of St Edmund in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (MS M. 736), whose reception and treatment in the modern period is emblematic of the history of Romanesque manuscript illustration as a whole. This focus will be supplemented by broader analyses that highlight additional issues and important literature in the field.
The St Edmund manuscript (hereafter called the VSE – Vita Sancti Eadmundi) is a collection of texts and 32 full-page miniatures that tell the story of England’s ninth-century martyr king.1 The earliest modern mention of the manuscript was in the 1814 sales catalogue of the John Towneley Collection, in which the book is described as “Life of St. Edmund, King of the East Angles, a most curious and valuable manuscript upon Vellum, executed about the year 1100 and illustrated with a series of singularly curious paintings emblematic of Edmund’s History, Legend and Miracles.”2 In 1817, the great bibliophile Thomas Frognall Dibdin referred to the VSE as a manuscript “of extraordinary interest and curiosity” (which suggests he knew of the book only from the Towneley sales catalogue).3 In 1841 the VSE was sold to an eminent collector, Robert Holford, and soon discussed in print by Gustav Waagen, first professor of art history in Berlin and director of its Gemäldegalerie.4 Although Waagen considered it “a rich and well-preserved specimen of the Old English art of the twelfth century,” at the same time he disparaged the style of the miniatures, speaking of the clumsy compositions and the “childish” execution of the forms with their long proportions and meager limbs (fig. 17-1).
As Hindman et al. have demonstrated, most nineteenth-century writers clung to the Vasarian paradigm in which medieval art was the unfortunate interlude between classical and Renaissance art.5 This is evident in one of the earliest English publications devoted to reproducing medieval manuscripts, Henry Shaw’s Illuminated Ornaments: Selected from Manuscripts and Early Printed Books from the Sixth to the Seventeenth Centuries (1833). The introduction was written by the authoritative Sir Frederic Madden, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, whose highest praise was for Cimabue and Giotto; consequently, Italian Renaissance manuscript illuminations were most prized. Notably, Madden subdivided the Middle Ages into smaller categories. For the early period he used such geographic, ethnographic, or political terms as Visigothic, Franco-Gallic, Irish or Hiberno-Saxon, Lombardic, or the period of Charlemagne. But from the eleventh century on the terms are simply chronological – eleventh century, twelfth century, and so on. This basic schema, with minor differences, reappeared in other mid-nineteenth century works.6
Nor was this a specifically English perspective. The most ambitious nineteenth-century attempts to reproduce medieval manuscripts were by two Frenchmen: Jean-Baptiste-Louis-George Seroux d’Agincourt in 1823 and Comte Jean-François-Auguste Bastard d’Estang from 1837 to 1846. In Seroux d’Agincourt’s comprehensive history of art, which began with a consideration of architecture, all manuscript painting from the eighth through thirteenth centuries was lumped together and characterized as being replete with bizarre figures and extravagant compositions; it was “the interval in which art appears to have reached the most miserable state.”7 In a more specialized work on manuscripts, Bastard d’Estang used terms similar to those of his English contemporaries: Merovingian and Lombardic for the early Middle Ages, century divisions for the later material.8 Bastard d’Estang was motivated primarily by the idea of preserving and disseminating the heritage of French culture, and other nineteenth-century treatments of medieval art were also rife with nationalistic concerns.
FIGURE 17-1Charity of St Edmund, from the Life of St Edmund. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M 736, fol. 9r: Charity of Edmund.
Despite the introduction of the term “Romanesque” into learned discourse about architecture toward the beginning of the nineteenth century,9 it was some time before the label was applied to manuscripts. This is evident in Paul Lacroix’s encyclopedic Les arts au moyen age et à l’époque de la Renaissance (1871).10 For architecture, a chapter subheading is called “Age de transition du roman au gothique,” though sculpture after the year 1000 is only divided into various regional schools without reference to Romanesque or Gothic. The first of two chapters on manuscripts was devoted to palaeography, then considered the most important aspect of manuscript study. Such terms as Lombardic and Gothic appear, but not Romanesque. The second chapter focused on miniatures, and it is apparent that a fairly clear sense of the chronology and stylistic development of medieval manuscript painting was already taking the shape familiar today, although the terminology still reflected clear biases against certain medieval material. The explicit goal “is to signal the principal phases of perfection and decadence” in medieval painting, and it is evident that by the 1870s Gothic was a far less pejorative term than it had been earlier in the nineteenth century. After a consideration of painting under Charlemagne, there is a section on “the decadence of the miniature in the tenth century,” a period of utter debasement in art that only began to emerge from its fascination with grotesques around the third quarter of the twelfth century. This was “the birth of gothic art” that was noted for “beautiful manuscripts of the time of Saint Louis.” Furthermore, Lacroix’s nationalistic perspective is evident in the comparison of French manuscript painting with its “delicacy and taste” to the “most naive compositions” of German illumination.
A survey of the nineteenth-century scholarship on Romanesque manuscript illumination reveals several points of contact with the intellectual trends that animated studies of architecture and sculpture.11 These reveal the nationalistic and regional motivations of many authors, and the general opprobrium accorded to medieval art in general and to eleventh- and twelfth-century art in particular. In large measure this was the continued legacy of Vasari’s authority, but it also reflected contemporary concerns. The monarchical and statist impulses that drove a good deal of French scholarship tilted authors toward periods that were rich in royal products. They thus emphasized the ninth century under the Carolingians (one of the manuscripts of Charles the Bald is, notably, MS lat. 1 in the Bibliothèque nationale), and the thirteenth century under Louis IX. In England, medieval book illumination was viewed negatively as a largely Catholic and foreign enterprise, in contrast to the “native” British ethos that was exemplified by medieval examples of naturalism.12 Consequently, late medieval painting was valued more highly than that of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which likewise in England was a weak period for royal patronage of manuscripts.
Nationalistic motivations resulted in monumental efforts to collect, preserve, and publish the documents of national patrimonies throughout Europe. Thus the VSE was included in an 1897 volume of the English Rolls series. Whereas the pictures had once attracted the attention of Dibdin and Waagen, the text of the Miracles was of primary interest to Thomas Arnold, who was responsible for collecting all available materials about St Edmund’s Abbey.13 Despite his intention to give “an exact account of the contents,” Arnold offered a brief description of only a handful of the illuminations.
Public and scholarly awareness of the VSE was assured at the beginning of the twentieth century by its inclusion in the ambitious folio volumes of 250 plates published by the New Palaeographical Society.14 In keeping with preferences for naturalistic and classicizing art, post-Carolingian products were assessed rather negatively. The VSE is described as “executed in a peculiar style,” while works of the thirteenth century, on the other hand, are “refined,” “graceful,” and “beautiful.” Despite the overall negative view of the twelfth century, and the Society’s primary interest in palaeography, Sir George Frederic Warner, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, did provide a meticulous analysis of the textual and pictorial contents of the VSE, which serves as the basis for the Morgan Library’s current records.
The relationship between palaeography and art is likewise seen in one of the first scholarly works dedicated to a study of manuscript illumination. In his 1885 Les manuscrits et la miniature, Albert Lecoy de la Marche, of the National Archives, sought to place manuscript illumination on the same scientific footing already accorded palaeography. His intellectual approach, clearly derived from palaeography’s methods, emphasized stylistic characteristics in delineating “schools” of miniature painting. Lecoy de la Marche also was among the very first to transfer the term Romanesque to manuscript painting of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
In his account, miniatures from the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Romanesque periods constituted a “first phase” characterized by a hieratic style that communicated spirituality and symbolism in books made by and for churchmen. Romanesque illumination was notable for a slow expansion of subject matter, progress in drawing and the imitation of nature, and above all the development of luxurious and fantastic initials filled with grotesques. While there is little objectionable in his descriptions, the style is still regarded negatively in comparison to Gothic art, which Lecoy de la Marche hailed as the second, “naturalistic” phase.15 The relation is summarized in an analogy (attributed to Léopold Delisle, the prolific curator of the Bibliothèque nationale), in which Romanesque is characterized as a chrysalis in winter wrapped in a sheath awaiting the spring.16 For Lecoy de la Marche, as for most writers of the nineteenth century, Romanesque manuscripts suffered by having neither the patina of late antique and early Christian manuscripts nor the incipient naturalism of Gothic manuscripts as precursors to the Renaissance.
In the first third of the twentieth century two phenomena contributed to the appreciation of Romanesque manuscripts: an increase in encyclopedic survey texts and also in specialized museum and library exhibitions. Both modes of presentation shared a fundamental similarity in approach in the continuing struggle to define and classify Romanesque art.
One of the most ambitious surveys was the Histoire de l’art edited by André Michel. The second part of volume one was dedicated to “Romanesque art” and contained a chapter on manuscript painting in northern Europe by Arthur Haseloff.17 According to Haseloff, the new Romanesque period began in the middle of the tenth century and lasted until about 1100, roughly coinciding with the period of the Ottonian rulers in Germany. English manuscript illumination also flourished in this period until it became more continental around 1100, a date that also saw a marked change toward the Gothic style in France. Haseloff’s approach expanded upon that of his nineteenth-century predecessors; after briefly discussing the political and historical circumstances, he remarked on manuscript illumination in general before treating individual schools. Haseloff tried to provide a positive assessment of the Romanesque period’s lack of interest in naturalism, and he even addressed the issue of the relationship of texts and images, though he was primarily interested in tracing stylistic sources and developments, categorizing manuscripts in terms of schools, and tracking the intricacies of the historiated initial.
In one of several medieval volumes of the Handbuch der Kunstwissenchaft, Julius Baum offered a more refined division of Romanesque art than that found in similar works.18 Now the term was split into three separate categories: Early, Middle, and Late Romanesque, each treated according to regional schools. Baum directly tackled the meaning of the word romanisch, acknowledging but not adequately explaining the connection to Rome. Instead, he relied upon a noxious assessment by Georg Dehio and Gustav von Bezold that the earliest and highest flowering of the Romanesque style occurred in Germany and in those adjacent lands regenerated by German blood, spirit, and knowledge.19 When Baum turned to specific analyses of individual works or schools, however, his language was free of such sentiments, and he provided, like Haseloff, meticulous analyses of stylistic connections that would not be out of place in more recent surveys. On manuscripts like the VSE, he wrote, “the earlier style is represented by the St. Albans Psalter and Bury Bible with their long, stretched out figures, turned mostly in profile and sometimes exaggerated, and whose parallel arrangement makes them appear conspicuously and uniformly agitated.”
The exhibition of medieval manuscripts organized by the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1908 marked a watershed in the appreciation of Romanesque art.20 In his introduction to the catalogue, Sydney Cockerell wrote that this exhibition was meant to surpass the 1904 Paris exposition devoted to “Primitifs Français,” which was limited to French manuscripts from the thirteenth century and later. The London show had its own nationalistic bias in highlighting English products (though not to the exclusion of French and Italian works); the fact that England produced so many illuminated manuscripts from the seventh through thirteenth centuries likely motivated the more comprehensive chronological scope of the exhibition. Cockerell wrote that several twelfth-century manuscripts, including the VSE, “show a mastery of technique and an energy of imagination which cannot be too much admired. It may be well to point out that the very last of them was finished about seventy years before the birth of Giotto.”21 So much for Vasari, at least temporarily.
That Cockerell’s point was taken is evident from a review of the exhibition by Roger Fry, the champion of modernism. For Fry, who was so concerned with the formal qualities of painting, twelfth-century English work presented the greatest achievement in manuscript illumination, the perfect fusion of “barbaric” color and “traditional” classicism.22 The formalist analysis in this review sounds very much like an appraisal of the Fauves, whose first exhibition had been just three years earlier; it is no coincidence that Romanesque art was increasingly valued by avant-garde artists seeking to subvert the classical heritage.23 Nonetheless, Fry’s description of the VSE, which included references to “childish delight” and “primitive feeling,” shows that while Romanesque style was beginning to be appreciated, the rehabilitation of the period’s products was not wholesale.
In 1927 the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris mounted a major exhibition of material from the early medieval through Romanesque periods. In the catalogue, Philippe Lauer provided a general history of manuscripts before the Romanesque, including a lengthy section on the Carolingians, presumably because of the library’s rich holdings in that area.24 The tenth and eleventh centuries under the Ottonians are not included in Romanesque, nor is English painting of the time (a result, perhaps, of a nationalistic perspective). While Lauer spoke of “the romanesque age,” “romanesque art,” and “the romanesque style,” nowhere does he actually use the term “romanesque manuscript.” This suggests that, unlike “Gothic,” “Romanesque” was not yet universally employed as an umbrella term for the period between the Carolingians/Ottonians and the Gothic. More important is Lauer’s explicit recognition that French Romanesque painting is characterized by a lack of unity, an assessment implicit in earlier treatments of the multiple schools of painting during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
It was in 1927 also that the VSE was purchased for the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. In his introduction to a 1933–4 exhibition catalogue of Morgan manuscripts, Princeton’s Charles Rufus Morey provided an overview of the history of manuscript illumination that in many ways was much in keeping with contemporary European ideas like those of Baum: “As time goes on, racial force asserts itself, and the figures become more savage and Teutonic, finally evolving that strong, solid type which passes into Romanesque sculpture.”25
By the middle of the twentieth century, scholars had largely accomplished what their nineteenth-century predecessors had sought to do: map the stylistic and regional contours of Romanesque art. This is evident in some of the specialized investigations of illuminated manuscripts from this period. Among the earliest was Albert Boeckler’s Abendländische Miniaturen bis zum Ausgang der Romanischen Zeit. In his treatment of the VSE, Boeckler grouped the manuscript with a series of drawings in a manuscript (MS 120) belonging to Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the so-called St Albans Psalter.26 In his analysis of these works, Boeckler characterized them as “monotonous” because of the uniformity in composition and the stale repetition of figures that displayed little movement. In addition, “rarely does a fan-like, fluttering piece of drapery break loose. The movement remains stiff and clumsy with regard to the intensely vehement gestures as well.”27 Such descriptive language, especially the alliteration in German, is exquisite, though the perception is hardly more favorable than earlier attitudes about the VSE. Moreover, it would constitute the norm for decades to come.28 Only in the middle of the twentieth century did writers begin to describe the style of the VSE and other Romanesque paintings without negative value judgments.
As long as style was the primary consideration of scholars of Romanesque art, three interrelated concerns dominated discourse in the field. First, to what extent could Morellian connoisseurship distinguish the hands of different artists? Second, what were the sources and channels of stylistic transmission between artists and regions? And third, when did Romanesque style begin and end?
Perhaps the supreme example of the first two issues is the treatment of the artists of the Winchester Bible, especially by Walter Oakeshott (fig. 17-2).29 Scholars generally agree that some of the same artists worked on the Winchester Bible in the 1160s and the frescoes in the chapter house in Sigena, Spain, in the 1180s. Analyses of individual hands led to broader theories about the itinerant nature of professional lay artists in the twelfth century: their freedom of movement, contrasted with the cloistering of monastic artists in previous centuries, enabled such artists to absorb styles from different regions and to spread them throughout Europe. Above all, the motor that propelled Romanesque style was contact with Byzantine art, often through the intermediary of Norman Sicily.30
Explicating the relationship of Western European art to Byzantine models had long been a central preoccupation of twentieth-century scholars,31 including Otto Pächt in the magisterial study on the St Albans Psalter written in collaboration with C. R. Dodwell and Francis Wormald.32 In a wide-ranging iconographic and stylistic analysis of the miniatures, Pächt identified sources in Anglo-Saxon, Carolingian, Ottonian, and Byzantine art, though he pinpointed the most important models in the Italo-Byzantine sphere. For Pächt, the confluence of iconographic and stylistic models in Italy led him to state that “the conclusion seems inescapable that the founder of the St. Albans school of painting had experienced that art in the flesh and that he had gone through a period of Italian training of some sort.” Based on a stylistic analysis of this artist, dubbed the Alexis Master, Pächt assembled an oeuvre that included the miniatures of the VSE.
FIGURE 17-2 Elkhanah and his wives; Hannah (I Samuel), from the Winchester Bible. Winchester Cathedral Library, fol. 88r. Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Chapter of Winchester/Winchester Cathedral Library.
At the heart of such analysis is the idea that individual artists can be identified and distinguished, and that entire periods can be similarly characterized and distinguished from others. Such a Hegelian view posits that there is something definable specifically as “Romanesque,” which partakes of the particular zeitgeist of that period and cannot, by definition, be “Gothic.”33 This premise compelled scholars to define precisely when Romanesque art, including its manifestations in manuscript painting, could be said to begin and end. Basic disagreement well into the twentieth century about what the term meant with regard to book painting and which historical periods composed “the Romanesque” did not stop scholars from accepting the validity of the Hegelian imperative and continuing to proffer working definitions.34
This overriding desire for categorization and definition resulted in a view of Romanesque art that privileged certain objects – like the Winchester Bible – that were understood as conforming to and shaping the prevailing norm and that marginalized others that fell outside the parameters of the paradigm. A case in point is a British Museum publication devoted to Romanesque book painting, in which D. H. Turner stated: “If we want to assign arbitrary dates to the beginning and end of the Romanesque period – and a style knows, of course, no exact limits – 1049 and 1180 are convenient.” 35 The fact that such categorization was incompatible with stylistic concerns did not give Turner pause. The dates chosen are grounded in historical phenomena: the Gregorian reform of the church and the ascendance of Philip Augustus to the throne of France. The latter date was meant to indicate the second “fundamental characteristic[s] of Romanesque…. [I]t was art in the creation of which France did not play the centralizing role she did in the Gothic period.” In other words, what characterized Romanesque art was that it was not French Gothic art, the teleological end to which Romanesque was destined. For Turner, as for so many scholars, “Romanesque” was an abstract, almost Platonic idea whose essential characteristics were formal and stylistic. Consequently, such objects as Montecassino manuscripts are described as “too freakish to be regarded as a true manifestation of Romanesque” – despite the fact that they conform to Turner’s chronological timeline and to his characterization of Romanesque as a decidedly ecclesiastical period (fig. 17-3).
Carl Nordenfalk provided the classic articulation of this stylistic approach in a lengthy essay in the popular Skira series, which brought generous color reproductions to the familiar survey format.36 Although Nordenfalk was one of the twentieth century’s most astute and prolific scholars of medieval manuscripts, in his wide-ranging survey of Romanesque illumination stylistic analysis remained the crux of the matter. His comparison of two eleventh- and twelfth-century illustrations is a tour de force of stylistic analysis:
Fundamental to the High Romanesque style is a consistent effort to build up form by means of separate compartments or panels, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle…. Most of these [units] are given the form of rounded-off triangles, circumscribed by soft “V” folds whose contours are duplicated on occasion. Here and there we find a group of nested “V” folds.37
Nordenfalk also treated at length the development of the exuberant initials common in Romanesque manuscripts, and, in an important departure from previous overviews, provided an extensive consideration of the principal types of manuscripts, including the illustrated saint’s life, of which the VSE was one example.
The VSE had already been included in a survey of illustrated saint’s lives by Francis Wormald, whose 1952 article was a catalyst for the shift toward concern with book type and manuscript function.38 Wormald offered an iconographic insight when he compared the Flagellation of Edmund in the VSE to the Flagellation of Christ in the St Albans Psalter, which to him demonstrated the reliance of the vita artist on the representation of the Passion. The ideological implications of this comparison would be brought out by later scholars; Wormald was more concerned with sketching the contours of the vita genre. His conclusion that this type of book flourished from 950 to 1200 as a “mirror for monks, part of the relics of the monastery” would make it the Romanesque book par excellence according to prevailing definitions in the mid-twentieth century.
Beginning in the 1960s, monographic treatments of individual manuscripts became increasingly common. Whereas previous generations of scholars had sought to delineate the major contours of a given region or artistic school (a process that continued for those few schools remaining to be “catalogued”39), scholars began to delve deeper into the place of a particular manuscript within a given group. For example, Elizabeth Parker McLachlan used iconographic and stylistic analyses to disentangle the various hands of the Bury St Edmunds scriptorium and the connections of the VSE to contemporary St Albans manuscripts.40 A summary version of this approach can be found in the magisterial catalogue of English Romanesque manuscripts by C. M. Kauffmann, which, like its counterparts by Elisabeth Klemm and Walter Cahn, contains a synthetic overview, generous pictures, detailed bibliographic information, and a wealth of insights on individual manuscripts.41
FIGURE 17-3 Initial “D,” from a Montecassino Psalter. London: British Library, Add. MS 18859, fol. 24v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.
An increasing emphasis on iconography is seen in studies from the 1970s.42 Iconography had long been a topic of interest among medieval scholars, represented most forcefully by Emile Mâle, who sought nothing less than a complete decoding of the symbolism of medieval art.43 Though later generations of scholars have rejected many of Mâle’s premises – that there is a unified thought process behind all medieval art, or that one must find contemporary medieval texts upon which to base interpretations of specific objects – the impact of the iconographic method can hardly be underestimated. Although more iconographic analysis has been devoted to Romanesque tympanum sculpture than to manuscript painting, work by Adolf Katzenellenbogen, for example, or Walter Cahn demonstrates the possibilities for understanding illuminations through this interpretive mode.44
In the past several decades, such issues as patronage, function, reception, and gender have dominated the field. Studies addressed to these concerns are notable for breaking down disciplinary boundaries and often incorporate more than one interpretive method. Unlike earlier analyses of style or iconography, which sought to assign any given object with a single classification or meaning, studies that embed medieval art in historical and cultural contexts demonstrate that objects can have multiple audiences and meanings that allow for multiple interpretations. Barbara Abou-el-Haj, for example, situated the creation of the VSE in the context of conflict between the Abbey of St Edmunds and both the king and local bishopric over control of the abbey’s holdings.45 According to this reading, the manuscript’s pictures, like the ambitious new twelfthcentury church building and the renewed interest in the hagiographic literature on St Edmund, were products of the monastery’s attempts to assert its rights and promote the authority and power of their saint to fend off royal and episcopal challenges.
Studies of corporate patronage have produced important results especially for Cistercian monasticism. Investigations range from Conrad Rudolph’s analysis of a particular book, the famous Cîteaux Moralia in Job,46 to Yolanta Zaluska’s consideration of the entire scriptorium,47 to Nigel Palmer’s investigation of an important Cistercian library.48 Patronage studies, however, focus most frequently on individuals.49 Recently, considerations of patronage have often been intertwined with feminist perspectives. The St Albans Psalter is a case in point. Although Christina of Markyate had already been linked to the manuscript by Adolph Goldschmidt in his 1895 Der Albanipsalter in Hildesheim, Madeline Caviness has argued that the continued use of the name “St Albans Psalter,” as propagated by Pächt et al., marginalizes Christina in modern discourse.50 Such scholars as Magdalena Carrasco have tried to recover how Christina’s ownership of the psalter might have played a role in the pictorial program and function of the book.51 Most recently, Kristine Haney has denied to Christina any role in the manufacture of the psalter; instead, she combines a traditional study of sources with newer considerations derived from reader-response theory to emphasize how the psalter would have functioned within the “pedagogical, intellectual and devotional practices of the Anglo-Normans.”52 While debate over Christina continues, feminist scholarship can be credited with reintroducing Hildegard of Bingen into the art historical discourse (fig. 17-4).53
Feminists have not been the only ones to challenge the inherited paradigms that have guided medieval art history. Michael Camille’s study of the historical bifurcation of texts and images in scholarship on the St Albans/Christina of Markyate Psalter demonstrates how disciplinary boundaries have hampered a better understanding of this manuscript.54 Similarly, Jonathan Alexander has considered the VSE in his critique of an essentialist ethnic view of medieval art that prevailed in earlier art history; his criticism of Pächt’s assertion that the Alexis Master had to be a Norman calls into question the often unspoken view of artistic style as genetically determined.55
While most studies of the last quarter-century overtly claim to be rectifying some historiographic error, those that make the greatest contributions do so by building on scholarship of the past and keeping the medieval material, not the scholarly discourse, at the center of the argument. Cynthia Hahn, for example, has focused on how the VSE embodied institutional ideas and values not just as a political tool, but as a hagiographic instrument to advance the claim that Edmund was a national saint par excellence.56 In her original article and subsequent book,57 Hahn gauged the meaning of the manuscript by considering the narrative structure of the pictorial program. The issue of narrative is not a new one; in 1962 Pächt published The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England, a work that continues to command scholarly attention.58 But Hahn masterfully integrated a consideration of how narrative works within a framework that elucidates how illuminated saints’ lives functioned as critical components of religious devotion and affective piety. In her reading, manuscripts like the VSE become unparalleled documents for understanding the cultural context of a twelfth-century monastic community and the role its illustrated vitae would have played in the ritual practices of its members.
FIGURE 17-4 Hildegard of Bingen and Volmer from the “Scivias” [“Know the ways of the Lord”]. Hessisches Landesbibliothek, MS 1, fol. 1r. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Another genre of illustrated book, the bestiary, was especially popular in England. Xenia Muratova has considered these manuscripts not only in terms of style and iconography, but also of text and image and especially of patronage and workshop practice.59 More recently, Ron Baxter has focused on the structure and use of the manuscripts,60 while Debra Higgs Strickland has suggested that people in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of the Crusades, used images of monstrous beasts as a paradigm for constructing negative views of non-Christian “others.”61
The Romanesque period is noted above all for its Bibles. These were the subject of a full-scale study by Walter Cahn, in which iconography and patronage are considered alongside style, artistic production, and regional affiliation.62 Richer results are possible, naturally, in monographic treatments of individual Bibles. In their studies of the Floreffe and Gumbertus Bibles, Anne-Marie Bouché and Veronika Pirker-Aurenhammer have demonstrated the deeply learned and intricate programs that could be embedded in eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts (fig. 17-5).63 Their investigations, though based on traditional iconographic analysis, consider didactic programs and narrative strategies to reveal how visual exegesis would have been understood and used by viewers as an exercise in visual theology.
In sum, recent scholarship offers nuanced reconsiderations of old questions and brings new insights to familiar books like Bibles and missals or to newly considered genres like illustrated commentaries or cartularies.64 Romanesque style is being re-examined to assess how meaning is embedded in form and style and how philosophical and exegetical discourse both inform and are expressed through pictorial means.65 Re-evaluations of the relationship of Western to Byzantine art explore not only the stylistic connections but also the motivations for artists to appropriate and manipulate Byzantine models.66 And, of course, scholars continue to offer interpretations of the iconographic or symbolic meaning of individual monuments, themes, and even Romanesque art as a whole.67
In the nineteenth century, the VSE was considered a curiosity and disparaged because of its figural style. Although exhibitions and new reproduction techniques made manuscripts more available for public and scholarly scrutiny, it was some time before the style and meaning of eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts began to be appreciated and understood on their own terms. Exhibitions involving Romanesque art were and continue to be products of national or local interests. Although there has been a notable shift from concerns with style68 to those of production and function in such exhibitions,69 it seems that Romanesque exhibitions are once again in disfavor compared with early Christian, Byzantine, early medieval, and Gothic art, all of which have been the subject of important international exhibitions in the last several years. On the other hand, such technologies as computers and the World Wide Web are making medieval manuscripts increasingly available on a global scale. As part of a research project on St Edmund, the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research at Western Michigan University has made available 18 color images from the VSE website.70 Even more impressive is the virtual facsimile of the St Albans Psalter produced by the University of Aberdeen, with page-by-page transcriptions and essays by noted scholars that provide an updated version of the original Pächt, Wormald, and Dodwell volume.71
As the Aberdeen site demonstrates, new technology is especially welcome for the ease with which it can bring together scholars from different disciplines. Some of the most important work on the VSE and other English illuminated manuscripts, for example, has been by Rodney Thomson, who is not an art historian.72 Similarly, Mary Carruthers’s intellectual history of medieval memory provides an important perspective for understanding Romanesque manuscripts,73 and scholarship dealing with such media as textiles and sculpture can potentially cast light on the style and function of manuscript illumination.74
FIGURE 17-5 Personification of the Virtues and Works of Mercy, from the Floreffe Bible. London: British Library, Add. MS 17738, fol. 3v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.
Inevitably, scholars will continue to critique the modern reception and interpretation of Romanesque manuscripts and to integrate these objects into broader understandings of medieval art. Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age by Hindman et al., for example, fundamentally alters our view of the modern status of the medieval manuscript, although its focus on England and France perpetuates a longstanding emphasis on those countries; attention to Germany, for example, would have revealed that perhaps the very first modern manuscript facsimiles were produced in Bamberg before 1738.75 Future scholarship will certainly have to direct more attention not only to German material, but also to eastern European works that have received scant attention in Western literature.
Despite the conceptual expansion of art historical literature in the past 30 years, questions of terminology and definition remain as vexing as they were two centuries ago. Throughout the nineteenth century, authors were slow to apply the architectural and sculptural term “Romanesque” to manuscripts, but by the end of the twentieth the concept had become fixed in the survey books. In the 2001 edition of H. W. and Anthony Janson’s History of Art, manuscript illumination takes a back seat to architecture and sculpture and fits uneasily into the book’s overall definition of Romanesque.76 But the pendulum may be swinging: in Medieval Art, Veronica Sekules abjured “Romanesque” and “Gothic” for art between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. With regard to manuscript illumination, I would argue that “Romanesque” is meaningless and that no single term adequately conveys the richness and complexity of this material. A twenty-first-century scholar may yet devise better nomenclature, but until then it would be wise to combine nineteenth-century chronological terms with the more sophisticated intellectual constructs of the late twentieth-century.
1 For a complete description of the manuscript’s textual and pictorial contents, see the catalogue pages on the Corsair Online Research Resource <http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/>. [For more on the Vita Sancti Eadmundi, see chapter 4 by Lewis in this volume (ed.).]
2 Bibliotheca Towneliana. A Catalogue of the Library of the Late John Towneley, Esq., Pt. 1 (London, 1814), lot 904.
3 The bibliographical decameron, esp. p. lxxx for the Life of St Edmund. On Dibdin, see Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination, pp. 25–6, 38–44.
4 Treasures of Art in Great Britain, vol. 2, esp. pp. 215–16 (Letter XVII).
5 For the nineteenth-century reception of medieval manuscripts, see Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination, which expands considerably on an earlier exhibition and catalogue by Alice Beckwith (Victorian Bibliomania).
6 On the works of J. O. Westwood and Henry Noel Humphreys, see Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination, pp. 123–5, 165–9.
7 Histoire de l’Art, esp. vol. 2, p. 47. This work originally was issued in 24 parts between 1810 and 1823.
8 D’Estang, Peintures et ornements. On d’Estang’s ambitious project, see Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination, pp. 129–32. For French efforts to catalogue national holdings, see Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts, vol. 1, pp. 29–32.
9 Tina Waldeier Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, esp. pp. 132–49.
10 This was a popular abridgement (running to seven editions and two English translations) of Lacroix, ed., Le Moyen-âge et renaissance, with chapters by noted scholars, including two on manuscripts by, respectively, Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac and his son Aimé-Louis, both of the Bibliothèque nationale.
11 [On Romanesque sculpture and architecture, see chapters 14, 15, and 16 by Fernie, Hourihane, and Maxwell, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
12 Rowan Watson, in Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination, pp. 188–92.
13 Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey, esp. pp. xxxvi–xxxix.
14 See Thompson et al., eds., Facsimiles of Ancient Manuscripts, esp. p. 19.
15 [On Gothic manuscript illumination, see chapter 20 by Hedeman in this volume (ed.).]
16 Lecoy de la Marche, Manuscrits, pp. 162–3.
17 For an appreciation of this essay, see Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 31.
18 Baum, Malerei und Plastik.
19 The citation, on p. 125, is to Dehio and von Bezold, Die kirchliche Baukunst, p. 147. On the VSE, see p. 228.
20 The term “watershed” is used by Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination, p. 210.
21 Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts, pp. x–xi.
22 Review in Burlington Magazine 13 (Apr.–Sep. 1908), pp. 128–9. Fry was referring specifically to the Winchester Bible.
23 See Caviness, “Erweiterung.”
24 Lauer, Les Enluminures romanes.
25 Morey, Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts, p. x.
26 Boeckler built to some degree on the work of Millar, English Illuminated Manuscripts, esp. pp. 28–30.
27 Abendländische Miniaturen, 90.
28 As late as 1967, David Diringer (The Illuminated Book, p. 255), could quote verbatim an assessment from a half-century earlier (Herbert, Illuminated Manuscripts, p. 135).
29 Oakeshott, Artists; Sigena; Two Winchester Bibles. See also Ayres, “The Work of the Morgan Master,” and Donovan, The Winchester Bible.
30 See, e.g., Dodwell, The Pictorial Arts, p. 373.
31 See especially Demus, Byzantine Art, and Kitzinger, “The Byzantine Contribution.”
32 Pächt et al., The St. Albans Psalter. Comparable collaborative efforts on Romanesque manuscripts include Green, ed., Hortus Deliciarum, and Gibson et al., eds., The Eadwine Psalter.
33 The classic statement was the influential work of Foçillon (Art d’Occident) translated as The Art of the West in the Middle Ages.
34 Countless twentieth-century overviews admitted the difficulty of defining termini for the Romanesque period. See, for example, Zarnecki, Romanesque.
35 Turner, Romanesque Illuminated Manuscripts, pp. 7, 25.
36 Grabar and Nordenfalk, Romanesque Painting, pp. 133–206.
37 Ibid., p. 186.
38 Wormald, “Some Illustrated Manuscripts,” esp. pp. 251–2 and 261 for the VSE.
39 Gaborit-Chopin, Le Décoration, is representative.
40 McLachlan, Scriptorium, an unrevised version of her 1965 dissertation with a “Bibliographic Supplement: Relevant Scholarship since 1965.” See also Bateman, “Pembroke 120 and Morgan 736.”
41 Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, esp. pp. 72–4 for the VSE; this was updated in part by Kauffmann’s historiographic review, “English Romanesque Book Illumination.” For German manuscripts, see Klemm, Romanischen Handschriften. For France, see Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts.
42 See, for example, Klemm, Romanischer Miniaturenzyklus; Haney, The Winchester Psalter (based on her 1978 dissertation).
43 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle.
44 Katzenellenbogen, Allegories. Many of Cahn’s essays, originally published between 1964 and 1994, are gathered in his Studies in Medieval Art, with postscripts for each article.
45 Abou-el-Haj, “Bury St Edmunds Abbey.” Another excellent analysis of institutional conflict and manuscript production is Carrasco, “Spirituality in Context.”
46 Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life.
47 Zaluska, L’Enluminure.
48 Palmer, Zisterzienser.
49 E.g., Kauffmann, “British Library MS Lansdowne 383.”
50 Caviness, “Anchoress, Abbess.” Pächt et al., St. Albans Psalter, pp. 135–44, explained the inclusion of the Alexis legend in the psalter with reference to events in Christina’s life, but historical contextualization played only a minor role in his work. [For more on Christina of Markyate, see chapters 6 and 9 by Kurmann-Schwarz and Caskey, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
51 Carrasco, “Imagery of the Magdalen.” See also Nilgen, “Psalter.”
52 Haney, The St. Albans Psalter. This rich work focuses on the psalter’s initials and also provides a historiographic review of the manuscript and medieval psalter illustration.
53 See the remarks by Madeline Caviness, in “Artist,” on the historiographic reasons for Hildegard’s previous exclusion from the art-historical canon. There is now a cottage industry on Hildegard: see, e.g., Saurma-Jeltsch, Die Miniaturen, and Suzuki, Bildgewordene Visionen. [For more on the feminist view of Hildegard of Bingen, see chapter 6 by Kurmann-Schwarz in this volume (ed.).]
54 Camille, “Philological Iconoclasm.”
55 Alexander, “Medieval Art.”
56 Hahn, “Peregrinatio et Natio.”
57 Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart.
58 [On narrative, see chapter 4 by Lewis in this volume (ed.).]
59 See, among others, Muratova, “Les Manuscrits-frères.”
60 Baxter, Bestiaries and their Users. The first chapter includes a useful historiographic review of bestiaries and the Physiologus.
61 Strickland, Saracens. [On the monstrous, see chapter 12 by Dale in this volume (ed.).]
62 Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination. [On patronage, see chapter 9 by Caskey in this volume (ed.).]
63 Bouché, “Vox Imaginis”; Pirker-Aurenhammer, Die Gumbertusbibel.
64 See, fundamentally, Camille, “Seeing and Reading.” On individual books, see Reilly, “Picturing the Monastic Drama”; Teviotdale, “The Pictorial Program”; Sears, “Portraits in Counterpoint”; Maxwell, “Sealing Signs,” a most original and provocative essay.
65 See the essays by Caviness, “Images of Divine Order,” and “The Simple Perception.” [On formalism, see chapter 5 by Seidel in this volume (ed.).]
66 Klein, “The So-called Byzantine Diptych”; Nilgen, “Byzantinismen.”
67 Heslop, “Brief in Words”; Klein, “Les Apocalypses”; Petzold, “Significance of Colours”; Wirth, L’Image.
68 E.g., Porcher, French Miniatures.
69 E.g., Zarnecki et al., eds., English Romanesque Art; Legner, ed., Ornamenta ecclesiae. [On the modern medieval museum, see chapter 30 by Brown in this volume (ed.).]
70 <http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/edmund/>.
71 <http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/index.shtml>.
72 See, among others, Thomson, “Early Romanesque,” and The Bury Bible.
73 Carruthers, Book of Memory; Craft of Thought.
74 Such studies have been done for the Gothic period, but not the Romanesque: Oliver, “Worship of the Word,” and the works of Jeffrey Hamburger; see his essays collected in The Visual and the Visionary.
75 These were made by Johann Graff, subcustodian of the Bamberg Cathedral from 1722 until 1749. For his manuscript copies, see Baumgärtel-Fleischmann, ed., Ein Leben, esp. pp. 166–79. I thank Dr Bernhard Schemmel, Director of the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, for this reference.
76 See also Mazal, Buchkunst der Romanik; Kauffmann, “Romanesque.”
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Margaret Gibson, T. A. Heslop, and Richard Pfaff, eds., The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury (London and University Park, Pa., 1992).
Adolph Goldschmidt, Der Albanipsalter in Hildesheim (Munich, 1895).
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