Early Engravers and their Public: The Master of the Berlin Passion and Manuscripts from Convents in the Rhine-Maas Region, ca. 1450-1500 (review)

Those of us who work in strictly compartmentalized collections benefit from regular reminders that the way in which our collections have been physically carved up (and sometimes literally so) between print and manuscript, and often with items further removed as art objects to a Prints and Drawings collection, can hamper a view of early book production as much as enhance its focus. David McKitterick's Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order (Cambridge, 2003) has recently provided just this reminder from a broad perspective, and it is rewarding now to be able to welcome a specialized study of a particular area of overlap between methods of book production — that of illustration.

Nearly thirty years ago Sandra Hindman pointed out (in Pen to Press, [Baltimore], 1977) that there were numerous examples of hybrid books — manuscripts with woodcut or engraved prints added, printed books with decoration added by hand, and of course blockbooks with their engraved text — and she drew attention to the phenomenon of books deliberately created as manuscript-and-print hybrids, that is manuscripts prepared to allow the incorporation of specially-produced printed images. Hindman observed that this material was understudied.

So it appears largely to have remained until the recent appearance of Peter Schmidt's Gedruckte Bilder in handgeschriebenen Büchern (Cologne, 2003), a detailed study of the phenomenon in southern Germany. Schmidt is now joined by Ursula Weekes's fascinating complementary survey, which looks at a series of these manuscript-and-print confections that were produced in the Lower Rhine-Maas area.

Weekes protests justifiably that it is the departmentalization of expertise that has pushed the study of these books to the margins. Art historians have studied single-sheet prints at the expense of the context of book illustration, and scholars of manuscripts and incunabula have often felt themselves to be on unfamiliar territory looking beyond the books to the world of the often textless printed single-sheet. Weekes tries to get these contexts restored from the start, as her introduction discusses the distribution and varying uses of the single-sheet print during the fifteenth century and the contemporaneous changes in the production of illuminated manuscripts such as the growth in the market for detached miniatures. Looking at her specific area of interest, she observes that the manuscripts produced in the Rhine-Maas region accompanied by prints are small and devotional in nature, as are the illustrations (the books described by Schmidt also fall largely into this pattern). We learn of the market for the books among people, notably women, enthused by the contemporary revival in religious devotion (and one is reminded here of the production, much later of course, but in not dissimilar circumstances, of the Little Gidding harmonies).

The book falls into three parts, dense with information and observation, and there is space here to pick out only a few themes. The artistic context of the prints comes first — the workshops that produced them and their interrelationships and inspirations. When and where did the artists work? Did they interact directly with the compilers of the manuscript texts? What was the influence of the production of painted and grisaille images on the engravers and cutters? And what was the relationship with the blockbook makers? There are clear influences between the makers of these differing kinds of book, and in both directions. There is a fascinating discussion of the way that the printing of these small images, which often fall into distinct cycles, such as the Life of Christ, was sometimes carried out so that octavo quires could be produced with images on the recto leaves, leaving the versos blank for text. Evidence of offsets suggests that the sheets of such productions were folded into quires soon after printing rather than being stored as unfolded sheets, as we have been...