Manuscripta Illuminata: Approaches to Understanding Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts ed. by Colum Hourihane (review)

This collection of thirteen essays is the latest in the occasional papers series from the Index of Christian Art at Princeton. The essays are the proceedings of a conference – surprisingly, the first organised by the Index dedicated solely to manuscripts – held in 2013 to mark the important publication, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library. In his preface, Colum Hourihane explains that the broad brief to speakers was ‘to advance our understanding of the medieval manuscript’. This may seem vague as a unifying principle; however, the contributors, who are among the most eminent scholars in the field, provide exemplary essays on current research in manuscript studies.

Several authors give detailed descriptions and analyses of individual manuscripts or groups of related manuscripts. These include Adelaide Bennett’s impressive examination of the physical character, contents, and patronage of the Chambly Hours, a remarkably tiny (58 × 40 mm) Book of Hours donated to the Princeton University Art Museum in 2010. The subject of Walter Cahn’s contribution is late fourteenth-century diplomat and provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, and his ‘Dits moraux des philosophes’, a translation from Latin of wise sayings by ancient authors. This, his only substantial work, was widely read and illuminated and is extant in some sixty-eight manuscripts listed by Cahn, nearly all of which were produced in northern France for an aristocratic audience. Patricia Stirnemann’s focus is an Italian manuscript of the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius in the Princeton University Library, MS Kane 44. Made in 1433, the manuscript is one of eight illuminated by the Lombard Master of the Vitae Imperatorum. Stirnemann examines the manuscript’s lavish illumination and concludes that it was made for a person close to Filippo Maria Visconti.

Other essays devoted primarily to single texts include Marilyn Aronberg Lavin’s summary of her recent book on the late fifteenth-century Netherlandish blockbook, the Canticum Canticorum (Song of Songs). Lavin regards it as the ‘Sistine ceiling of woodcuts’ and makes a claim for the anonymous artist (or woodcut designer?) to be named the Master of the Canticum Canticorum. In his essay, Don C. Skemer examines Princeton University Library, MS Taylor 22, which includes an eighty-line verse epitaph by Carthusian John Shirwood for a canon of Exeter Cathedral. The manuscript is illustrated with two vivid death images and Skemer explores the contemporary ‘cult of death’ exemplified by this ‘portable epitaph’.

Other contributors are concerned with issues extraneous to manuscripts’ materiality, or as Henry Mayr-Harting puts it, he is ‘more of a bee than a botanist’. In his study of the iconography and texts of several late tenth-and early eleventh-century Ottonian liturgical manuscripts, Mayr-Harting argues that, contrary to the view that the division between liturgical and private prayer only developed in the twelfth century and later, Ottonians did experience religious interiority. Marc Michael Epstein looks at a range of illuminated manuscripts made for Jewish audiences to establish medieval Jewish ‘typologies of temporality’, where a secret language, a ‘strategy of implied ensuring action’ has been developed in illustration in order to avoid censure or accusations of heresy. In their contribution, Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse elegantly demonstrate the wealth of information concerning manuscripts that can be found in documentary evidence such as wills.

Illumination and artistic style is the prime concern of other authors. Stella Panayotova analyses the style of the so-called Rohan Masters as found in the Hours of Isabella Stuart in the Fitzwilliam Library, Cambridge. Aided by technical analysis, she distinguishes three separate hands – the Rohan Master, Giac Master, and Madonna Master – and argues for their intimate collaboration in the illumination of the manuscript. Lucy Freeman Sandler, on the other hand, eschews the notion of ‘hands’ as she believes that artists were more interested in conforming to a group style than...