Tjamke, Manuscript Communication: V isual and Textual Mechanics of Communication in Hagiographical Texts from the Southern Low Countries, 900–1200 by Snijders (review)

Based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, this a study of some two hundred hagiographical manuscripts of the tenth to twelfth centuries from Benedictine monasteries in the dioceses of Arras/Cambrai, Tournai, Thérouanne, and Liège in the Southern Low Countries. Tjamke Snijders investigates how abbeys in the high medieval period employed hagiographical manuscripts as a tool for communication, and contends that these manuscripts served to both influence and reflect individual monastic policy. The communicative potential of hagiographic manuscripts is considered in terms of layout, composition, intrinsic instability, and monastic context.

In the first part of the volume, Snijders provides an introduction to the historical evolution of Benedictine monasteries and manuscript production during the waves of institutional reform that took place from the late ninth century. She also defines the study’s research parameters and terms, such as ‘writing intensity’ and ‘scriptum’, used in her subsequent manuscript analysis, along with descriptions of illustration, initials, punctuation, and layout.

In Part II, Snijders takes a more quantitative approach, and finds that hagiographical manuscripts from different abbeys did not necessarily follow an abbey’s ‘house style’. Rather, the manuscripts conformed to particular genres, such as single saint libelli and auctoritas libelli or legendaries of numerous saints. Institutional factors influenced the decision to incorporate particular saints’ lives into manuscripts, which were then often actively used as ‘weapons in defence of the abbey’s goals through a combination of contents and layout’ (p. 174).

Part III offers a comprehensive case-study analysis of two monasteries, Anchin and Marchiennes, both located in the episcopate of Arras, and just over 3 km apart. Twenty-eight high medieval hagiographical codices are extant from each monastery, but Snijders shows that they served quite different purposes according to context of use. They were used as tools to shape different collective identities: the older Marchiennes was initially concerned with using patron saint libelli to enhance its standing and legitimise its existence; while the younger and more progressive Anchin was more concerned with networking, and used its manuscripts to establish a group of ideologically homogenous monasteries.

In conclusion, Snijders argues that the various genres of hagiographical manuscripts that emerged in this period laid the foundation for the liturgical and scholastic manuscripts and specialised works, such as the Legenda aurea, of the thirteenth century.