Listen, O Isles, unto Me: Studies in Medieval Word and Image in Honour of Jennifer O’Reilly (review)

Elizabeth Mullins and Diarmuid Scully’s new edited volume is a Festschrift for Jennifer O’Reilly, professor emerita at University College Cork, whose work focuses on “the spiritual implications of images,” especially the relationship of image and exegesis. O’Reilly’s scholarship examines the ways in which “medieval Irish and Anglo-Saxon [peoples expressed their] understanding of scripture ... in word and image.” Mullins and Scully structure this collection according to O’Reilly’s principal historiographical interventions. The twenty-seven contributors provide a total of twenty-five chapters to this volume (two articles are co-authored), and frame their interventions in terms of O’Reilly’s work on a particular image, theme, methodology, or group of texts. The book itself stands at the intersections of the disciplines of paleography and art history, the subjects of exegesis and praxis, and fields of history and theology. The book itself grew out of a conference held to honor the retirement of O’Reilly at University College Cork and Glenstal Abbey, Murroe, Co. Limerick on 14–15 August, 2008. The contributions to this volume are divided into three collections of roughly equal length, each dealing with a specific aspect of O’Reilly’s prolific scholarship.

There is not an essay in this volume that can be found wanting for analytical rigor or innovative application of O’Reilly’s historiographical contributions. As this is an edited volume, it is difficult to extrapolate a unitary thesis from it, but the contributing scholars are univocal that “In order to ... appreciate the full force of [an] image, [we must trace the] intricate trail of exegesis and allusion that connects the early medieval image with its biblical and patristic antecedents” (105). The principal temporal focus of the volume is pre-millennial (specifically the eighth and ninth centuries), the principal locational focus is Ireland and Britain (albeit in their European context), and the principal topical focus is the legibility of images and their referential potential. The editors have done a commendable job of distilling O’Reilly’s historiographical influence into three over-arching and related themes, viz., the insular inheritance of exegetical traditions (§ 1), insular contributions to that subject (§ 2), and the inclusion of exegetical concerns in works of art (§ 3).

The first section, entitled “Inheritance and Transmission” and containing eight essays, locates Irish and Anglo-Saxon exegetical works in their European context—both in terms of inheritance of classical topoi and subsequent transmission of their understandings of these matters into Continental Europe. Framing this discourse as constituent to a pan-European exegetical community militates against the (admittedly) out-moded historiographical commonplace of “insular exceptionalism.” Classical topoi provided a rhetorical means of explaining Britain’s conversion to Christianity in a Providential light. These transmarine cultural influences brought with them an exegetical tradition that viewed Britain’s conversion as a spiritual conquest (chapter 1). But a physical graphicacy accompanied these compositional topoi—for example, the iconography of the fish in inhabited initials—which found particular purchase in an insular environment (chapter 4). These exegetical antecedents were later re-imported to the Continent, if the compositions of insular itinerant monastics are to be believed (e.g., the Salzburg Verbrüderungsbuch, in which the language of amicitia and confraternitas rhetorically ties the abbots of Iona to the bishops of Salzburg) (chapter 6). All essays in this section agree that Ireland and Britain were constituent parties in a pan-European religious community. Though geographical outliers, Ireland and Britain were equally beholden to and contributive to an exegetical community that spanned the Continent.

The second section deals with religious praxis (especially monasticism) in Ireland and Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries. This section, entitled “Monasticism in the Age of Bede,” reflects the great deal of work O’Reilly has done on Bede as an author and historian, and is the most logically cohesive section in the...