Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (London, British Library Cotton MS Claudius B.IV) by Herbert R. Broderick (review)

In Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Herbert Broderick provides an in-depth study of the 127 depictions of Moses in British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B. iv. These include some early surviving artistic depictions of Moses with horns. This impressive study ranges from first-century BC Jewish theology to pharaohs’ crowns to the anthropology of horned deities and even briefly ventures into the poetry of Alexander Pope and antisemitism in the American West.

Broderick’s work has had a lengthy genesis: he states that he has been working on this book for over forty years. At several points, the author seems anxious that his approach might now be perceived as old-fashioned. Broderick acknowledges in Chapter 1 that he relies on the methodology of Quellenforschung, as informed by the mid-twentieth-century art historians Erwin Panofsky and Kurt Weitzmann and the early twentieth-century theologian Franz Joseph Dölger. He spends much of the book in dialogue with works such as Ruth Mellinkoff’s 1970 book The Horned Moses in Medieval Art. Although Broderick’s work was first begun decades ago, in many respects it fits extremely well with more recent developments. He makes good use of new digital images to conduct close analysis of the manuscript’s miniatures, and he cites a large bibliography of both recent and older works, particularly engaging with Russell Gmirkin’s work on the Septuagint. Above all, his work is an important contribution to the burgeoning study of the global Middle Ages.

Broderick’s key contention is that the depictions of Moses in Claudius B. iv were based either indirectly or directly on Late Antique models that in turn drew on motifs found in Egyptian art, from the Pharaonic period to the sixth century AD. He justifies grouping art from this wide range of dates by arguing that Egyptian art is “remarkably consistent and conservative” (p. 121). Some scholars may object to this characterization. Nevertheless, Broderick makes an important case that many motifs found in the Old English Hexateuch resemble those found in earlier artworks from the Mediterranean.

In Chapter 2, Broderick argues that Late Antique imagery can be found in many of Claudius B. iv’s images, from the fall of the rebel angels to the Creation to Cain and Abel to Noah’s Ark. He challenges the thesis that the illustrations in Claudius B. iv were primarily based on the Old English text. He compares and contrasts his selection of images with depictions of some of the same scenes in Bodleian Library, Junius 11, the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, Coptic textiles, first-century BC mosaics, fifth-century frescoes, the imagery that can be recovered from the fifth- or sixth-century Cotton Genesis (Cotton MS Otho B. vi), eleventh-century Byzantine Octateuchs, midrashic exegesis, and the Vita Adae et Evae.

In Chapter 3, Broderick begins his examination of depictions of Moses’s horns, which vary in size, shape, and color in different miniatures in the manuscript. Broderick rejects Mellinkoff’s earlier assessment that the artists of the Hexateuch depicted Moses’s horns attached to a helmet in order to emphasize him as war leader. Some of those horns, at least, seem to be emanating from Moses’s head, and the colorless “caps” that appear in some miniatures may simply have been segments of hair that were left uncolored. (Additionally, Broderick quashes the suggestion that horned helmets were a particularly northern European phenomenon.)

Having established the need for a new understanding of the way Moses’s horns were depicted, in Chapter 4 Broderick interrogates the different meanings attributed to horns in the ancient and Late Antique Mediterranean. He begins by considering why Jerome translated Exodus 34:29 to say that Moses’s face was horned...