The Books and the Life of Judith of Flanders by Mary Dockray-Miller (review)

Mary Dockray-Miller’s ‘patronage biography’ of Judith of Flanders makes an important contribution to the study of the political and cultural roles of high-status women on both sides of the Channel in the early Middle Ages. Drawing on a variety of scattered and methodologically challenging sources, Dockray-Miller constructs a highly readable and richly resonant narrative. This is a seminal study of Judith, and will hopefully help to pave the way for a contextual and comparative study of the literacy, power, and patronage of Anglo-Saxon women and their continental counterparts.

The marriage of Judith of Flanders (‘Countess’ Judith) in 1051 to Tostig Godwinson consolidated an alliance between the most powerful family in England and her father, Baldwin IV. She is chiefly known to Anglo-Saxon scholars as the owner of four deluxe gospel books, commissioned in England, c. 1065. The frontispiece to one of these depicts a crucifixion scene, frequently reproduced, in which Mary, with a strikingly bold and confident gesture, reaches up to staunch the wound in the side of Christ with her sleeve. Judith herself is depicted as a small, kneeling figure embracing the base of Christ’s tau cross, but is nevertheless visually paralleled to Mary (Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.709).

The inclusion in Dockray-Miller’s study of previously unpublished, high-quality colour reproductions from Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Aa.21, and from Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, cod. Casin. 437, is an additional bonus. The Fulda Gospels also include Judith in a frontispiece illustration, this time representing her in an intimate and unmediated relationship with Christ. Judith, here standing relatively tall and upright, is shown, like Christ, with a book, which she is either giving to or receiving from him.

Judith’s gospel books are generally thought to have been executed at York. Dockray-Miller argues strongly in favour of Peterborough. The Fulda Gospels, however, were illustrated in Flanders, where Judith took refuge after Tostig was driven out of Northumbria in 1065 and subsequently killed at Stamford Bridge while attempting to seize the throne from his brother, Harold. Somewhat similarly, her second husband, Welf IV of Bavaria, whom she married in 1070, backed the losing side during the Investiture Controversy, and was deposed from his dukedom in 1078, recovering it only after her death in 1094. Judith, however, gained an enduring reputation at Weingarten Abbey as the pious and generous donor of many precious treasures (golden crosses, reliquaries, and chalices, altar-hangings and vestments adorned with gold, jewels, and embroidery, and so on). She is even named in later sources (erroneously, Dockray-Miller concludes) as the donor of the Abbey’s most prized possession, the relic of the Holy Blood.

Dockray-Miller describes Judith as a ‘middle-tier aristocrat’, who ‘consciously and successfully deployed artistic patronage as a cultural strategy in her political and marital manoeuvres in the eleventh-century European political theatre’ (p. 2). Despite the failed campaigns of her two husbands, Dockray-Miller argues, Judith’s strategy of asserting her social status through artistic patronage was successful, and allowed her to overcome any implications of defeat.

Noticeably, Judith’s wealth seems to have served more to assert her own social status than to shore up the power and prestige of her successive husbands. Dockray-Miller argues persuasively that she gave the Monte Casino Gospels to the Dowager Empress Agnes in 1072 to supplement Welf’s diplomacy. But Judith is not known to have donated any of her treasures to Weingarten Abbey during her lifetime, despite its close links with Welf’s dynasty. Durham, according to Symeon, received many splendid gifts from Tostig, as well as from Judith, but only one of these, a set of gold and silver crucifixion sculptures, is described as a joint donation. So, too, Judith’s gospel books were designed for display in her household and private chapel, although, to understand their full effect...