Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections by Hamburger, Jeffrey F., William P. Stoneman, and Anne-Marie Eze et al. (review)

The Boston area is rich in collections of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts. Their contents and treasures were highlighted in the major exhibition, ‘Beyond Words’, held between 12 September 2016 and 16 January 2017, after more than a decade of planning. No fewer than nineteen different institutions contributed to this exhibition, which brought together more than two hundred and fifty items from these collections. The contributors ranged from the obvious — the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — to the small and unexpected — the Armenian Museum of America and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The book, like the exhibition, is arranged thematically, divided between three host institutions: ‘Manuscripts from Church and Cloister’ (Harvard University, Houghton Library), ‘Manuscripts for Pleasure and Piety’ (Boston College, McMullen Museum of Art), and ‘Italian Renaissance Books’ (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). Within each of these themes, the editors contribute a series of short essays introducing each of the nineteen subsections. There is also a longer, introductory essay by William P. Stoneman and Anne-Marie Eze on the history of the various collections, showing how and why, from the later nineteenth century, these institutions came to acquire their rich and varied selection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

There are many fascinating items in this catalogue. Probably the earliest are six leaves from a seventh-century Luxeuil manuscript of the Moralia of Gregory the Great, now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (item 12). From Wellesley College comes one of the leaves from the thirteenth-century Beauvais Missal (item 74); Lisa Fagin Davis provides an authoritative account of the sad history of this manuscript, which was cut up and dispersed in the 1940s and 1950s. She also describes recent exciting work that has identified more than 100 leaves spread across six countries, and has produced a digital reconstruction of the parent manuscript. Item 80 is a ‘charming’ cutting produced by the so-called Spanish Forger in the early twentieth century, now the object of study in his own right. There are numerous beautiful Renaissance liturgical books and Books of Hours, as well as a handful of important early printed books (pp. 64–66, 235–49).

The entries are contributed by no less than eighty-three international scholars, many of whom are leaders in their field. The space devoted to each manuscript is generous, often running to a whole page in this large-format volume with its two-column page layout. Almost every entry includes a colour facsimile of a representative page, or of initials from cuttings and fragments. The entries are aimed at an educated, but not necessarily specialist, audience, based on the latest research. The extensive bibliography includes some very up-to-date material, including two 2017 items by Bryan C. Keene and recent entries in Peter Kidd’s ‘Medieval Manuscript Provenance’ blog.

On the whole, the entries are relatively consistent in approach, though some are inevitably much longer than others. The only significant area where some inconsistency is noticeable is in the treatment of provenance. Item 194 — an important fifteenth-century copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Harvard University, Houghton Library, Typ 5) — is described as having ‘distinguished provenance’, for example, and the text of the entry discusses its donation to the convent of San Marco in Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici. But its later history, including its ownership by Sir Thomas Phillipps, is not mentioned. Some entries do not mention provenance at all.

This inconsistency flows through into the summary descriptions at the beginning of each entry. A significant number of entries record only the acquisition of the manuscript by the current owner, whereas others give a fuller summary of the provenance history. In neither case, though, does the ‘general index’ cover this information; only the text of...