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Reviewed by:
  • Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts
  • Pamela O. Long (bio)
Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts. By Joe Flatman. London: British Library, 2009. Pp. 160. $55.

Books produced in non-standard sizes with lavish illustrations often are taken to be (and often are) what we call “coffee table” books, produced for a prospective audience of casual page turners who ignore a vapid text. It would be a shame if this beautifully illustrated work on ship images in medieval illuminated manuscripts (most in the British Library) were taken in this way. Joe Flatman’s insightful analysis could serve as an excellent primer to manuscript illumination and as a model for interpreting pictorial material in a way that integrates analysis of the meaning and content of the images with an understanding of the society that produced them.

The book is divided into four chapters. The first introduces manuscript books and their patrons and readers. It treats the types of books that contain maritime images, ranging from Bibles (depicting Noah and the Ark, and Jonah and the whale) to herbals and bestiaries to travel narratives and romances. Flatman discusses the complex medieval ways of reading texts and images, and their relationship to levels of literacy. He shows that simple modern dichotomies like “text” and “image” or “literate” and “illiterate” are inadequate for the analysis of more complex realities.

“Water, Creation and Damnation” treats the ways in which “the whole marine zone, on board and on shore, inland and far out to sea” functioned as “a powerful complex of symbols” (p. 47). The ship itself was given personal characteristics, including a gender. The Bible transmitted powerful symbolic images, with the sea often representing insurmountable chaos or, especially in the New Testament, miraculous marine events such as Christ walking on water. Fresh water had strong positive connotations, symbolizing life, birth, and baptism. Saltwater (and the seas and oceans) symbolized a wilderness or, at worst, the realm of Satan. Coastlines possessed symbolic meaning as boundaries between good and evil. Flatman moves from water symbolism to that of travel, both actual and imaginary, and mapmaking. [End Page 618] He explores the negative value of curiositas (idle curiosity) and the positive values of stabilitas (spiritual stability), and the ways in which the increasingly extensive experience of travel in the Middle Ages led to the growing attraction of curiositas.

Diverse shipbuilding traditions and their technological differences are the focus of the third chapter. Those that Flatman includes reflect the northern orientation of the book, undoubtedly also the primary orientation of the manuscript holdings of the British Library. He divides medieval vessels into four shipbuilding traditions—Viking, cog, hulc, and punt, and adds a fifth, the carrack. Curiously, the “punt” (a flat-bottomed river boat with a square-cut bow developed on the Thames) does not receive explicit treatment. Nor does Flatman treat the common Mediterranean vessel, the galley, a large ship propelled by both oars and sails. He describes the development of the Viking and cog traditions as complex and overlapping, known through both pictorial and archaeological evidence. The discussion of technical features of the vessels is aided by the glossary of marine terminology, essential for non-experts, at the beginning of the volume. (Since most of the marine technical terminology is relevant to this chapter alone, I would prefer to have it discussed within the chapter itself.)

Flatman explicates the ambiguity of the evidence for the hulc tradition—vessels characterized by “an odd, double-ended form with no visible endposts; reverse-clinker-laid hull planking running in a uniform curve parallel both to the sheerline and the bottom of the hull and ending on a horizontal line well above the water line” (p. 87). Non-experts can discover what each of these terms means by looking in the glossary. He also describes the development of the carrack with its skeleton-first hull construction as associated with the use of the gunpowder artillery on shipboard.

The final chapter, “Narrative, Space and Place,” treats a variety of activities on inland waters, in coastal ports and harbors, and on shipboard. Rivers were the main arteries of transportation in the Middle Ages and were also used for washing laundry, swimming...

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