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  • The Tree: Symbol, Allegory, and Mnemonic Device in Medieval Art and Thought ed. by Pippa Salonius and Andrea Worm
  • Carole M. Cusack
Salonius, Pippa and Andrea Worm, eds, The Tree: Symbol, Allegory, and Mnemonic Device in Medieval Art and Thought (International Medieval Research, 20), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. xviii, 258; 4 colour, 102 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €125.00; ISBN 9782503548395.

This attractive, lavishly illustrated, large-format volume investigates the tree in the Christian Middle Ages in nine essays and an ‘Introduction’ by the editors. Pippa Salonius and Andrea Worm open with reference to Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae (‘Tree of Knowledge’), part of his masterwork Ars magna (‘The Great Work’) of 1305–08. They note that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printed editions of Llull’s work caused the tree images he employed to ‘become iconic images of arboreal schemata in the context of logic and the systematization of knowledge’ indicative of ‘how evocative the tree was as a structuring device’ (p. 3). This directs the reader to the fact that the collection is not concerned with trees per se, as living plants and part of nature, but rather the ways in which tree symbolism expressed meaning (to map familial relationships, or to point to theological truths by reference to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, for instance).

Marie-Pierre Gelin’s and Ute Dercks’s contributions are concerned with the use of artistic representations of trees within built structures (chiefly cathedrals and other large-scale churches). Gelin examines churches in northern France and England (Canterbury Cathedral, Wells Cathedral, Troyes Cathedral, and others) whereas Dercks focuses on southern France, Catalonia, and Italy (Vézelay, Girona, Modena, and others). The wide distribution of high-quality artistic renderings of biblical tree imagery on churches is clearly conveyed in these chapters. Salonius’s own chapter brings the Tree of Jesse and the Tree of Life together and narrows the focus to two churches in Orvieto, both of which were associated with the Franciscan order. She traces a fascinating Byzantine genealogy for the Orvieto imagery, and her chapter dovetails neatly with Ulrike Ilg’s, which also investigates the Franciscan Order. [End Page 210]

Symbolic uses of the tree in medieval manuscript illustration are the focus in a number of chapters, including those by Worm and Marigold Anne Norbye. The second of these essays considers the high medieval use of the ‘Tree of Porphyry … a plain, traditional diagram that accompanied medieval logic since the sixth century, first in Boethius’s commentary on the Isagoge, and later, in the thirteenth century in Peter of Spain’s Tractatus’ (p. 97). This theme of the tree as organisational structure for a particular field of knowledge is pursued with reference to soteriology in Susanne Wittekind’s chapter, which discusses the Tree of Vices in addition to those trees already mentioned.

One contribution remains to be discussed, that by Barbara Baert and Liesbet Kusters, which examines examples of the visual depiction of the meeting between the resurrected Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden. She mistakes Jesus for the gardener, and when he disabuses her he cautions her to touch him. In illustrations of this dramatic moment a tree is often a prominent motif.

In conclusion, this volume is a valuable addition to the scholarship on late medieval visual practices in architectural and manuscript contexts, and also to the literature on pedagogical and organisational devices employed in medieval intellectual texts. The editors and chapter contributors are to be commended on this achievement.

Carole M. Cusack
The University of Sydney
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