The Illustrated Beatus: a Corpus of Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, vol. 4: The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (review)

Reviews 249 Parergon 20.2 (2003) Part Three, ‘Culture Wars’, looks in depth at the impact of classical Greek education and culture on Julian, Basil and Gregory. All three spent their formative years in Cappadocia and all were educated in Athens at a similar time. The impact of classical Greek culture on their philosophical and religious approaches was markedly different. Part Three bears the least relevance to the theme of Cappadocia and shows that the impact of life in Cappadocia on the actions and thinking of the three main figures discussed is difficult to establish. Van Dam has worked closely with the texts of Julian and the Cappadocian Fathers and succeeds in providing much useful analysis and discussion of Roman Cappadocia and the issues which confronted its population in the fourth century. It is difficult to establish the impact of Cappadocia on Basil, Gregory and Julian due to the nature of their surviving texts. Roman rule and Greek culture appear as somewhat foreign in this region and province as a result which may be a somewhat artificial impression due to the nature of the source material. This book will be of interest to Patristic scholars and social historians alike. Attempting to establish important fourth-century figures such as Basil, Gregory and Julian in a regional Cappadocian context is a difficult task, but Van Dam has largely succeeded in achieving this. One minor error is the claim (p. 108) that the emperor Jovian escorted the body of Constantius II to Constantinople in 361 when it was the emperor Julian who did this. Peter Edwell Department of Ancient History Macquarie University Williams, John, The Illustrated Beatus: a Corpus of Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, vol. 4: The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, London/Turnhout, Harvey Miller Publishers, 2002; cloth, pp. 356; 418 b/w illustrations; RRP EUR130.00; ISBN 0905203941. The Spanish Beatus manuscripts are strikingly distinct from most illuminated books produced in the early medieval period. They are both colourful and iconographically unusual, highlighting the isolation of the Asturian region from both Roman and Gaulish influences. The Beatus manuscripts are also unrivalled in their pictorial richness, containing more than 1500 illustrations in the surviving codices. Another striking feature is the consistency with which they were illustrated, as they adhere to a model established in the earliest works, 250 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) containing 108 canonical images: 68 from the Apocalypse narrative, seven from the Commentary; eight being prefatory material depicting the Evangelists and the Gospels, 14 of the Genealogy of Christ and, finally, 11 from Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel. Beatus, the original compiler of the commentaries that accompany this version of the Book of Revelation, was an eighth-century monk, famed for being the sole voice of orthodoxy during the Adoptianist heretical crisis that dominated the Church in Spain after the defeat of the Visigothic kingdom by Islamic forces early in the eighth century, defying Eliphandus, Archbishop of Toledo. He seems to have received little recognition for his role by contemporary Spanish writers, although Alcuin and other Carolingian clerics were distant supporters. Beatus lived in the Liébana valley, which had been settled by refugees from Southern Spain, who probably brought with them books from Toledo and Seville which he was able to draw on. This book by John Williams is the fourth volume of a larger five-volume project that aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the surviving 26 Beatus manuscripts and fragments produced in Spain between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries. It follows the format already familiar to those who have used the fine surveys of illuminated manuscripts produced in the British Isles, also brought out by Harvey Miller Publishers, although it does not include a list of illuminations found in each manuscript as part of each catalogue entry. It is, however, far more comprehensive than these volumes, as it focuses only on the work of a particular set of manuscripts and includes a complete photographic record of each work’s illuminations, as well as noting their broader decorative programmes. Reading this part of a larger work is like entering a conversation late. The reader is expected to have access to the preceding volumes...