The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination, & Reception, c. 1340–1400 by Beth Williamson (review)

REVIEWS 295 Charry suggest that prophesy became a means of blotting out the memory of rivals. Charry suggests that Georgievicz and Fox “represent the alien, the stranger and the outsider as figures to be erased from the future” (87). Thus from this perspective Georgievicz and Foxe were able to conceive of a more optimistic tomorrow free of Islam. Phillip John Usher’s “Prophetic Architecture : Agrippa d’Aubigné in Paris” shows how French Protestants used material culture of Parisian architecture to imagine a darker tomorrow by depicting Parisian buildings as symbols of Catholic decadence and coming judgment. Usher focuses on Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques (ca. 1616), an epic poem that describes the hardships faced by Protestants in the War of the Roses and moves forward to the punishment of Catholics by God in the Final Days. In this context , Usher notes how d’Aubigné’s descriptions of the Paris architecture-scape became evidence and symbols of Catholic decadence and false belief. And as such, architecture became the means through which French Protestants read their future triumph over their catholic adversaries. Brady and Butterworth’s collection of essays will likely have something of interest for everyone curious about early modern depictions of the future. But the broad range of topics in this volume also dilutes its unity. Forshaw, Iliffe, and Langman’s essays on the history of science do constitute an excellent subgroup , but other articles, predominantly literary-based analysis of futurity in early modern texts, make up a less coherent assemblage of themes. ANDREW FOGLEMAN, History, University of Southern California Beth Williamson, The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination, & Reception, c. 1340–1400, Bristol Studies in Medieval Culture (Woodbridge : The Boydell Press 2009) 212 pp. Beth Williamson’s monograph explores a set of late medieval images collectively called the Madonna of Humility, which depict the Virgin Mary seated on the floor with the Christ-child in her lap. She immediately and repeatedly sets her research up in opposition to that of her predecessors who, rather than studying examples of the Madonna of Humility on their own terms, searched for a missing prototype. Williamson, instead, presents her approach as one that understands these visual texts as part of “cultural translation” and that explicitly takes its cue from Clifford Geertz’s “thick description.” Ultimately, her goals are not only to understand the meaning of the images in their own right, but also to propose a new, interdisciplinary methodology for examining visual texts. After a brief introduction, the monograph follows a tripartite approach as suggested by its subtitle: Development, Dissemination, and Reception. In the initial three chapters that make up Part I, Williamson examines the earliest examples of the Madonna of Humility. While the first chapter introduces a number of examples of the image, its main preoccupation is with laying a more thorough foundation for Williamson’s study than accomplished in the succinct introduction. Here, she asserts that the very designation (Madonna of Humility) should be understood not as a title, but as “a reference to a mental or spiritual characteristic of the Virgin Mary” (15), while also arguing against previous attempts to search for a lost prototype. Chapter 2 then focuses on the Madonna of Humility fresco in Avignon’s Papal Palace (the proposed site of origin for this REVIEWS 296 image-type). Williamson’s close reading of the image leads her to put forth a new origin: fourteenth-century Books of Hours and missals from the region around Metz (despite some admitted difficulties with dating). The third chapter then studies three “first-generation” Madonnas of Humility from southern Italy that demonstrate the importance of reading these images as cultural translations based on their specific contexts. Part Two, Dissemination, narrows in on two geographical areas in which the Madonna of Humility flourished: the Kingdom of Bohemia (specifically the Prague court of Charles IV) and the city-states of Tuscany. Chapter 4 provides Williamson the opportunity to explicate how Charles’s personal preferences and piety, combined with his artistic and spiritual experiences, led him to adopt a version of the Madonna of Humility replete with Apocalyptic symbols. The author then shifts to Siena and Florence in chapter 5, revealing how that region ’s...