The Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus: A Study of the Original Manuscript, Ghent, University Library MS 92 by Albert Derolez, and: Painting the "Hortus Deliciarum": Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time by Danielle Joyner (review)

Six centuries before Diderot oversaw the twenty-eight text-and-picture volumes of the Encyclopédie, two remarkable individuals—Lambert of the cathedral of Saint-Omer in Flanders, and Herrad of the monastery of Hohenbourg in Alsace—produced works of a similar kind. Each of these manuscripts comprised hundreds of folios and was a complicated mélange of scripture, history, and natural philosophy, refracted through the lens of twelfth-century theology and current events. But, while Diderot gathered articles newly written for a secular work, Lambert and Herrad compiled authoritative religious texts and images to supply their audiences with an orthodox account of God's vast cosmos and a springboard for its continued spiritual contemplation. Derolez's book is the culmination of a lifetime of study, taking us page by page through the Liber Floridus in an archaeological excavation that reveals thirteen distinct phases in its making. Watching the Liber Floridus in construction between approximately 1111 and 1121 makes for thrilling, if technical, reading. Joyner's work is more thematic, based on incomplete copies of the Hortus Deliciarum (c. 1180) made before the manuscript was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War, but Joyner likewise demonstrates the deep intellectual content of the often innovative visual imagery of these salvation encyclopedias. The titles of both these manuscripts involve botanical metaphors, and even in the post-Enlightenment academic world these emphatically medieval Christian works continue to nourish intellectual growth.