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  • Illuminating the ‘Roman d’Alexandre’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264. The Manuscript as Monument
  • Keith Busby
Illuminating the ‘Roman d’Alexandre’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264.The Manuscript as Monument. By Mark Cruse. (Gallica, 22). Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. x + 224 pp., ill.

Few Old French manuscripts are as well known as Bodley 264, thanks largely to the facsimile published in 1933 by the indefatigable M. R. James. This luxurious codex, completed in Tournai in 1344, is in many ways atypical of the wider corpus of manuscripts containing the various constituents of the Roman d’Alexandre. Yet as Mark Cruse shows in his carefully researched and elegantly written book, it can also be seen as representative of the aspirations and aesthetic of the social milieux in which it was produced and for which it was intended. An Introduction reviews earlier scholarship on Bodley 264 before indicating the subjects of the five principal chapters. Chapter 1 argues that Alexander’s universe, as shown in the interplay between text and image in the manuscript, both looks forward to and reflects the ideals of the contemporary courtly world, legitimizing the aspirations and identity of the book’s owners, readers, and listeners. In Chapter 2, Cruse suggests that the many urban spaces defined by and represented in the text and miniatures in Bodley 264 mirror the rise of the city in northern France and the Low Countries in the early fourteenth century. The conqueror of numerous cities, Alexander imposes order and the rule of law on an increasingly diverse courtly and urban society. The manuscript also constitutes a kind of mirror for princes, as Cruse argues in Chapter 3, stressing Alexander’s qualities of justice, military prowess, clergie, and curiosity. These are the formative elements of a great ruler’s power. In Chapter 4, Cruse turns to the apparently unpromising topic of Alexander and the Crusades. Although Alexander’s position in the span of universal history excludes his being presented directly as a crusader, his conquests in what was to become crusader territory enable the authors of the Roman d’Alexandre and the artists and planners of Bodley 264 to show him paving the way for later crusading activity. Chapter 5 is more speculative and deals with the possible scribes, artists, and patrons of Bodley 264, and its reception in fifteenth-century England (based on added rubrics and supplementary texts). A Conclusion neatly ties up the various strands, while an Afterword reflects on the consequences of universal access to the manuscript through online digitization. There is a generous bibliography and an index. The twenty-nine black and white figures and sixteen colour plates are helpful, although the latter are too dark. The scholarship is generally up to date and shows no major omissions. Cruse has done a good job in making Bodley 264 speak. Much of what it has to say it says willingly; some has to be coaxed, teased, or goaded out of it, and just a little has to be forced. If few of Cruse’s conclusions are surprising, his methods and balanced approach provide a model that could profitably be applied to the study of other illuminated manuscripts containing vernacular narratives. [End Page 85]

Keith Busby
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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