The Visual Culture of Baptism in the Middle Ages. Essays on Medieval Fonts, Settings and Beliefs ed. by Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens and Miguel A. Torrens (review)

The Visual Culture of Baptism in the Middle Ages. Essays on Medieval Fonts, Settings and Beliefs is an edited collection of eight essays that originated from a series of sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo at Western Michigan University and at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in 2005 and 2006. The sessions were sponsored and organized by the directors of the Baptisteria Sacra: An Iconographic Index of Baptismal Fonts (BSI)—a research project at the University of Toronto. The Baptisteria Sacra is an online iconographic index of baptismal fonts from the early Christian period to the seventeenth century, which has documented over 18,000 baptismal fonts from around the world. The collection highlights current scholarship and methods concerning baptism in the Latin West and the liturgical vessels used in the ritual covering a time period from the early eleventh century to the early sixteenth century. It joins a growing number of edited volumes that focus on new critical perspectives and new technologies in order to expand and reassess previous scholarship.

In their introductory essay, the editors introduce us to the world of “fonters” (a term coined by Colin Drake in 1999), a small, specialized group of scholars working primarily on baptismal fonts located in Europe. They note the challenges to studying these vessels, many of which are either in active use or lost. In both cases, the object is frequently inaccessible to scholars for study. Similarly, baptismal fonts are frequently removed not only from their original spatial context, but also from their use as a liturgical object (in some cases reused as garden furniture). To understand the object’s original context, the essays in this volume draw from a variety of sources that include folklore, baptismal records, sermons, civic records, hagiographies, literary accounts, and historical documents. More significantly, as the title suggests, this volume embraces the visual culture of baptism to elucidate the historical and liturgical contexts of the baptismal font and to explore what the ritual of baptism meant to people in the Middle Ages. The investigation of the images that decorate baptismal fonts as well as the depiction of the baptismal rite in sculptural programs both complements and complicates the language used by medieval theologians to define and explain the theological and sacramental concepts of baptism.

Following current trends in scholarship, the editors have collected a group of essays that utilize what they categorize as an interdisciplinary approach in order to challenge and to question “traditional assumptions inherited in scholarship” (2). Although the essays draw from a variety of sources (e.g., art history, the social sciences, literature, and liturgy), they do not present collaborative research; therefore, the volume more accurately presents a multidisciplinary approach. Nonetheless, the focus on the visual culture of baptism privileges art historical analysis. According to the editors’ characterization of the field, scholarship on baptismal fonts has adhered to a more traditional textual- and iconographical-based research model and any move away from this model presents exciting possibilities that may present a more holistic understanding of the objects.

The essays do not appear to be organized in any particular order. Nevertheless, the collection’s first essay by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby serves as a methodological introduction to the volume. Debby presents an overview of Italian Renaissance historiography, from Burckhardt to Baxandall and Verdon in order to analyze baptismal fonts in Tuscan baptisteries dating from the late thirteenth to sixteenth century. Debby claims that the methods employed by Baxandall and Verdon provide a means to “pinpoint the historical cultural context of the baptismal font and to locate it within the church (13).” Debby’s historiographical analysis draws too much attention to an older and less productive model of scholarship that privileged the Italian Renaissance over the Middle Ages. This worn-out...