Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts by Joe Flatman (review)

REVIEWS 250 oversight in Elizabeth I and Her Age. The glossary of names is helpful for those who are not willing to use the internet, but an index of topics, themes, personalities, events, etc., would make the book more navigable and would make finding the appropriate documents faster. According to the editors, their “first desire was to understand Elizabeth herself , a ruler who was arguably the most intelligent, adept, and influential English monarch of the modern era” (xix). At least one early review criticized the editors for failing to capture her private voice. I would like to defend the editors on two grounds: first, the editors goal was to represent Elizabeth the ruler (“ruler” is in significant apposition to “Elizabeth herself”); second, Elizabeth expressed in her own words in speeches, prayers, poems, letters and proclamations , is always already Elizabeth the political figure. From her birth and expedient bastardization by Henry VIII, to the threat she posed to Mary’s crown; from her becoming the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, to the defeater of the Spanish Armada and finally her old age as Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth I has been and remains a highly contested character whose meaning was anxiously teased out by countless intersecting narratives. The private, apolitical Elizabeth yearned for by scholars and hobbyists is currently unattested in the textual detritus of the era, and is perhaps a part of the same fantasy that yielded Cate Blanchett’s intimate portrayal of Elizabeth on film. For those who would rather study the formation of that mythos rather than indulge in it, Stump and Felch have selected an impressive array of texts from an equally impressive spread of perspectives. The collection of materials gathered here is an essential reference for those who study the Elizabethan period. ALEXANDRA ZOBEL, English, UCLA Joe Flatman, Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts (London: British Library 2009) 160 pp., ill. In Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts, Joe Flatman asks how one should read the “surprisingly authentic maritime scenes” found in manuscript illuminations (10). Flatman acknowledges that illuminations were signs within a symbolic system inhabited by medieval people. He suggests that those signs related to the maritime world show a remarkable amount of realism because the sea, waterways, and ships comprised a significant part of medieval life. To demonstrate the correspondence between illuminations and medieval life, he sets maritime illuminations within a historical and archeological framework. In his opening chapters, Flatman describes medieval illuminations as signs that needed to correspond to life in order to allow the “knowing reader” to interpret the scene. He compares this artistic medium to modern advertising which uses everyday situations as a context in which to create meaning. He argues that this context for signs reaffirmed the social class structure of the later Middle Ages where the leisured upper class viewed inland waterways as beneath them and the increasingly wealthier and more powerful middle class understood these arteries as the source of wealth. Besides reinforcing class, these symbols related to the marine zone demonstrated the symbolic view that medieval Europeans had of certain places. Salt REVIEWS 251 water represented evil and chaos. In twelfth-century manuscripts, biblical scenes in manuscript illuminations showed sea monsters, storms, and other catastrophes at sea. Noah and the Flood, and Leviathan, the sea monster mentioned in Job, Psalms, and Isaiah, were regular themes in illumination. In contrast , manuscript illuminators depicted overwhelmingly positive scenes for fresh water activities. This dichotomy, reinforced in texts written by Bernard of Clairvaux and other twelfth-century figures, on the dangers of curiosity, decreased over the next three centuries as attitudes toward travel changed. In the second half of his book, Flatman uses the archeological record to demonstrate the correspondence between the ships represented in manuscripts and those found in digs. Such details as the starboard side placement of the rudder on Viking ships and the median placement on Cogs were evident in both archeological finds of ships and manuscript illumination. From details in manuscripts that matched the archeological finds, Flatman concludes that manuscript illumination that included ships and shipbuilding could be taken as representative of ship types. He indicated that conclusions about later types of medieval ships can be...