The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh's The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice does not belong to a single literary genre. On the one hand, it is the biography of a thirteenthcentury Armenian manuscript, a project that dictates the chronological organization of content, the informal tone of chapter openings, and the loose relationship between text and image. On the other hand, it is a history of the Armenian people who moved in and out of this thirteenth-century Armenian manuscript's orbit, a project that dictates themes and subjects and necessitates a scholarly apparatus. The manuscript in question is Toros Roslin's Zeytun Gospels, a gospel book that was divided during the desperate days of the Armenian Genocide in the early twentieth century, the "mother" manuscript ultimately making its way to the Matenadaran (MS 10450, Yerevan, Armenia) and eight canon table pages (or four bifolia) making theirs to the J. Paul Getty Museum (MS 59, Los Angeles, California, United States). These canon tables are the title's missing pages. A lawsuit brought by the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America against the Getty Museum for restitution, plus damages, opens the book; the settlement of the lawsuit, wherein the Armenian Apostolic Church is acknowledged to be the owner of these pages, closes it.

I imagine Watenpaugh would say that a main accomplishment of The Missing Pages is its ability to make the dislocation, violence, separation, and loss suffered by Armenians under Ottoman rule manifest. Indeed, there is something about the portability and vulnerability of this gospel book that allows it to make such peculiarly human miseries palpable, a connection heightened perhaps by the flesh of its pages and certainly by the communal feeling it provoked. As an art historian of the medieval Levant writing a review for Manuscript Studies, however, I will underline different accomplishments altogether.

Since the progress of The Missing Pages depends on the life of the Zeytun Gospels, it does not have an argument. As a result, it is difficult to give a sense for the whole in tidy chapter summaries that together accomplish some set of interpretive goals. There are, however, valuable discussions within chapters that make real contributions to larger art historical efforts.

Thanks to a detailed colophon, we know Toros Roslin copied and illuminated the Zeytun Gospels in medieval Cilicia's Hromkla in 1256 for the Catholicos Constantine. This date makes the Zeytun Gospels the earliest extant manuscript signed by Roslin and, even more important, the earliest extant example of Roslin's inspired hand, which borrowed strategically om Byzantine, Islamic, and Frankish ("Crusader") artistic traditions to create dramatic and poignant biblical scenes that are without parallel. Thanks to Watenpaugh, we know not only where, when, and for whom the Zeytun Gospels were made, we know also where the Gospels went, when they went there, how they were used, and what agendas they served. This information, culled and woven together om memoirs, testimonials, travel accounts, photographs, and additional colophons within the manuscript itself, makes the life of the Zeytun Gospels better understood than perhaps any other medieval manuscript.

This, then, is a major art historical contribution of Watenpaugh's The Missing Pages. In addition to providing information related to often-elusive aspects of manuscripts such as use, function, audience, reception, handling, storage, and movement, Watenpaugh's account of the Zeytun Gospels is also part of a larger conversation on what Arjun Appadurai has called the social life of things, which emphasizes the constantly changing circumstances and meanings of "things" over the interpretations of historians that imply these are static. The chapters, in fact, are named after places where the manuscript has resided. Accordingly, we read about the birth of a sacred manuscript in "Hromkla" and its relocation to "Zeytun," where it is rebound and used as a treasured and powerful liturgical object. We read about the sacred manuscript becoming a valued cultural object when it flees as a rare survivor to "Marash," where the canon tables and the mother manuscript part ways—one section conveyed to "New York" and the other to "Aleppo," where they independently become objects of study. Finally, we read about the sacred manuscript as it makes its way to collections in "Yerevan" and "Los Angeles," where it is set before the eyes of ever larger and more diverse audiences. This is a simplification, but it gives some idea of the fullness of the Zeytun Gospels' "social life" as revealed in The Missing Pages.

Wrapped up in the social life of the Zeytun Gospels are art historical issues of looting and collecting, of course. The first chapter, "Survivor Objects: Artifacts of Genocide," is the only one of eight that is not named after a place. Instead of narrating a moment in the life of the Zeytun Gospels, it lays out the special status of objects like the Zeytun Gospels within Armenian history given the larger losses and destruction that were part and parcel of the Armenian Genocide and, moreover, given Turkey's ongoing policy of denial with regard to those losses and that destruction. Watenpaugh's discussion of the role of objects in survivor stories includes the sale of the Zeytun Gospels' canon tables and, eventually, their museum display. For those works that were never made for such display, this changes their reception utterly. This is especially apparent in the case of the Zeytun Gospels, which is represented by four discrete sheets of parchment, a means of display possible because these pages entered the museum collection detached om the book they once introduced. To help us appreciate what we miss when we see these pages in this way, Watenpaugh describes manuscript production with a special emphasis on those practices designed to communicate value and reverence. We thus understand the loss of original context and effect—the tables no longer clari the relationship between the gospel books that follow, and individual tables no longer stand beside their partner in color, form, and decoration. Watenpaugh is not the first to demonstrate disparity between a work's original significance and its museum significance. It is the case, however, that Watenpaugh makes this disparity especially vivid. Today's easy encounter with the Zeytun Gospel pages gives little indication that they were once part of a manuscript understood to be "the Breath of God," seen on special occasions alone and usually om afar.

Watenpaugh's The Missing Pages also makes contributions to manuscript studies. The second chapter, "Hromkla: The God- Protected Castle of Priests and Artists," for example, places the Zeytun Gospels within Armenian religious history, with the result that we appreciate a manuscript's unique capacity to record sacred sound, on the one hand, and to make manifest the relationship between Armenian script and an autocephalic identity, on the other. Indeed, the Armenian language is so important to its culture that early translators of the bible were canonized. The third chapter, "Zeytun: The Lost World of Ottoman Armenians," shows the extradevotional role manuscripts played during times of trial, a role appreciated all the more given an understanding of the object as uniquely Armenian and especially powerful. The sixth chapter, "New York: The Zeytun Gospels Enters Art History," traces the reunion of the canon tables with their gospel books that is only possible because of careful looking and codicology. And we comprehend the significance of this reunion, abstract as it is (the tables remain, after all, in Los Angeles and the gospel books in Yerevan), because of the particular ways in which it has come to embody a culture, a culture's relationship with the divine, and a culture's loss.

As stated at the outset, Watenpaugh's The Missing Pages does not belong to a single literary genre. More important for this review, perhaps, is that it does not look like nor does it purport to be an academic study of its subject. Nevertheless, it takes up issues of both more recent and long-standing art historical concern and, insofar as it is a narrative that unfolds between legal charges and settlement, as a whole adds real substance and nuance to debates on provenance and repatriation.