The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B. iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (review)

The famous illustrated Anglo-Saxon Hexateuch finally receives a long-needed book-length treatment from the young art historian Benjamin C. Withers. As he says, it is "one of the most ambitious examples of projects of book design of any era" (p. 4), uniting translations of the first six books of the Old Testament by Ælfric and others with a massive picture-cycle of 500 colored illustrations of various episodes, running from Genesis through Joshua. This is a thoughtful, erudite study bristling with new approaches, insights, and much food for thought, while leaving plenty of room for further work. His ambitious goal, impossible to attain though worth pursuing, is "to write a history of how a manuscript like Claudius B. iv was read" beginning by examining the "forms which produce meaning" and "the mechanisms that make it available." Leaning heavily on Michael Camille and Roger Chartier for theoretical support, generally productive, sometimes leading to obscure muddles, Withers presents Claudius B.iv as a unique physical artifact which causes a particular reaction conditioned by an audience's "horizon of expectations" (including access, mediation, class, and literacy). Withers's talent as a sensitive reader of pictures, his willingness most of the time to be concrete, detailed, and specific, and his resourcefulness as a codicologist lend the book its strong bones.

The book is informally divided into two roughly equal parts of four chapters, the first focusing on production, the second on reception (see pp. 13–16), though the divisions are far from watertight.

The first chapter considers the two scribes' and the single artist's working methods. The true art of this book lies not so much in its makers' skill as in their ability to plan and execute a complex mass of textual and visual data in clear, consistent form over more than 150 large folios. The artist is responsible for placement of the pictures before the text was written in. Withers sees the quires as "flexible blocks" and within them scribes and artist can adjust their spacing to accommodate an overall plan. Quire divisions do not correspond with the beginning or ending of Biblical books, the careful organization of text in relation to image "trumping" the literary organization of the texts themselves. The images are confined within consistent well-defined frames usually divided into separate narrative panels and registers ordering, correlating, and subordinating story-elements and blocking out the placement of the text. "As a deliberate choice, the placement reveals how the narratives were to be read or viewed" (p. 27), highlighting continuity or encouraging pause and reflection, in effect marking the makers of the book as editors

The second chapter tries to find a new way to date the manuscript using codicology rather than "style" as the touchstone. Francis Wormald famously dated the manuscript after 1035 on the basis of what he saw as its degenerate "Viking style." The consensus to the present day is "second quarter of the eleventh century." Ker's date of the writing tends a little earlier, "s. XI ¹." Withers attempts to date it by comparing codicological features of other manuscripts that might be more precisely datable, namely two manuscripts known to be from Christ Church, Canterbury that show overall similarities of design and construction to Claudius B.iv: an illustrated Prudentius, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 23 and the Harley Psalter (BL Harley 603). Like Claudius B.iv, these are collaborations of a number of scribes with artists; they attempt variously to integrate text and pictures, and sometimes reserve unruled spaces for pictures, and all three, unusually for the eleventh century, use lead point. They are evidence of a tendency in Canterbury over the course of the century "to develop a system for constructing...