The Prayer Book of Charles the Bold: A Study of a Flemish Masterpiece from the Burgundian Court by Antoine de Schryver (review)

REVIEWS 334 enjoyable oeuvre. While he does tend noticeably toward the literary, one significant strength of Sawday’s survey approach is precisely the vast array of sources he cites, ranging from the obvious technical treatises and drawings to poetry, theatrical works, paintings, and philosophical examinations. Regardless of genre and particular scope, Sawday manages to draw out otherwise overlooked commentary on technology. Furthermore, he seamlessly interweaves theoretical approaches far removed from our common imagination of both the Renaissance and a study of technology. Nonetheless, while Sawday’s survey method is generally sufficient, it occasionally distracts and even detracts from the larger argument. For example, he devotes a disproportionate amount time and a more concentrated effort to Milton and the related religious paradigm while thinly and intermittently spreading Montaigne and Da Vinci, again, more recognizably Renaissance figures, across the whole of the work. The reader is sometimes led to wonder whether it is Milton, and not the stated larger topic of Renaissance culture, that lies at the heart of this book—where is the chapter on Montaigne, or Da Vinci, or, for that matter, where is the Reformation? Similarly, time-keeping technology is noticeably under-evaluated. Sawday admits the pre-industrial impact of clocks and sporadically references an anonymous body of “historians of technology” in ambiguously reiterating prior claims that “the development in the course of the thirteenth century of the mechanical clock, and, later in the sixteenth century , of a portable timepiece or watch, marked a decisive shift in the everyday rhythms of life” (76). Yet timekeeping and its revolutionary technology receive a scant two pages and nine lines of exclusive text. Surely such an important and enduringly influential shift merits a bit more consideration. In fairness, he does refer back to clocks and clockworks several times, but never with the level of considered analysis he devotes to other topics. In a world of academics, each a specialist in his or her chosen field, one must admit a certain prejudice in reading works such as this publication. Likewise , the author’s inclinations must be tolerated, if not happily received. Thus, it is in this spirit that I applaud Sawday’s unique and innovative work while simultaneously looking forward to a broader application of this important, emergent method for historical and literary research. Hopefully this will only be the first of such inquiries. CHRISTOPHER M. FLOOD, French, UCLA Antoine de Schryver, The Prayer Book of Charles the Bold: A Study of a Flemish Masterpiece from the Burgundian Court, trans. Jessica Berenbeim (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum 2008) 310 pp., color ill. This posthumous volume by the great art historian Antoine de Schryver offers the reader an unparalleled account of the iconography of one of the finest products of Flemish-Burgundian manuscript illumination. The codicological observations are thorough and enlightening; the iconographic study offers a tremendous amount of stylistic context, most especially through comparison with Jan van Eyck and Dirk Bouts (but also other contemporary manuscript illuminators ). De Schryver is especially helpful in explaining the politics and economics of luxury book production for the Burgundian court: he meticulously illumines the processes by which scribes and artists cooperated in the planning end exe- REVIEWS 335 cution of borders, drolleries, and miniatures. The comparison with contemporary work is especially informative and evinces a vast knowledge of fifteenthcentury illumination. All this is combined with beautiful full-page color plates of the thirty-nine miniatures in the manuscript. The translator has, by and large, rendered the author’s work with precision and dexterity; the volume was a delight to read. It could have used a much more careful editorial eye, however: I came across over about a dozen typographical errors of varying levels of egregiousness. In one instance (the first paragraph of Appendix 2), this led to a momentarily confusing misfoliation of the manuscript. On page 241, in the midst of a delightful and charming discussion of the drolleries surrounding scenes of saints’ lives, the translator makes a series of mistakes in the mention of an image of a hoopoe. The hoopoe appears on the folio (41v) which bears an image of Saint Eutropius healing the maimed, in the midst of a magnificent border filled...