Visual Translation: Illuminated Manuscripts and the First French Humanists by Anne D. Hedeman

Anne D. Hedeman's Visual Translation, adapted from a series of lectures at the University of Notre Dame in 2013, arises from her extensive research on early French humanism and its material reception through the study of humanist book production. In this very engaging and abundantly illustrated book, she, in part, draws and expands on previously published material, creating a cohesive, convincing study of lavishly illuminated manuscripts, that were produced for courtly audiences but were closely associated with two well-known figures of French humanism in the early fifteenth century, Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Lebègue.

Chapter 1 begins with a brief presentation on the Parisian humanist network of the early fifteenth century and the known involvement of Premierfait and Lebègue in book production. The chapter puts into perspective the role they played as voluntary intermediaries between, on the one hand, Latin classics (Cicero, Sallust, Statius, Terence) or Italian contemporary literature (Boccaccio) and, on the other hand, their contemporaneous princely audience. Hedeman argues that the two humanists became gradually aware of the way in which images and, more generally, the manuscripts' mise-en-page and mise-en-texte could be a crucial aid in understanding and interpreting their content (a process she calls, following Claire Richter Sherman, visual translation). This held true particularly for texts that were culturally and/or chronologically removed from the environment in which they were originally received.

Hedeman's study considers how Premierfait and Lebègue shaped access to these texts for a French audience that was used to lavishly illustrated books, and her early chapters focus on their links to manuscripts of Latin classics. Chapter 2 examines Premierfait's involvement in the production, between 1405 and 1407, of two luxurious manuscripts copied by the same scribe, who also worked for him. The first—London, British Library, Burney MS. 257—contains 129 illuminations illustrating Statius's Thebaid and Achilleid. The second—a copy of Terence's Comedies decorated with 142 illuminations (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 7907A)—was a New Year's gift from Martin Gouge to John of Berry in 1408. Although these manuscripts contain well-known Latin texts (school classics that were also favorites in humanist circles), they were, at this time, notably absent from aristocratic libraries. Courtly audiences were familiar with the stories of Thebes and Troy but primarily through French adaptations, such as the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César and the Romans d'antiquité. As Hedeman points out, the two manuscripts studied here had both to invent entirely new visual cycles. Earlier copies of Statius were mostly devoid of illustrations; the works of Terence, in contrast, had a rich iconographic tradition since the Carolingian period, mostly inspired, then, by copies made in late antiquity, but these images were not designed specifically for a courtly audience.

Hedeman studies these cycles in detail, always in close relation with the text they mediate. She shows how the pictures are an integral part of the critical apparatus that is intended to facilitate readers' access to the Latin text. The Statius volume, for example, contains no rubrics; but the illuminations, which open all but one chapter of the Achilleid and Thebaid, give readers a structure through which to apprehend the text, alongside the chapter summaries in Latin prose that close the volume. The images, in Terence's Comedies, are placed at the beginning of each scene and play on medieval costumes and contemporaneous artistic conventions to identify the characters' roles and social statuses. By visualizing the classical texts through a fifteenth-century frame of reference, the manuscripts work to make the past present and to facilitate readers' understanding.

Chapter 3 focuses on Lebègue's role in the development of a large visual cycle for Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline and Jugurthine War. (Other densely illustrated copies of Sallust did not exist at the beginning of the fifteenth century.) In addition to these manuscripts, Hedeman considers a unique set of French directions on how to illustrate Sallust: the Histoires sur les deux livres de Salluste, written by Lebègue in about 1417 and preserved in a single manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, D'Orville 141. The visual cycle thus described appears in a manuscript now in Geneva—Bibliothèque publique, lat. 54—which belonged to Lebègue. That manuscript includes sixty-six images, and its first thirty-one also appear in a previously lost manuscript, now in a private collection, to which Hedeman had access. Her comparative analysis of Lebègue's instructions and their corresponding pictures offers valuable information about how readers were meant to decode the illustrations in luxury books. New codicological data on the Geneva manuscript, combined with Anne van Buren's work on the Oxford manuscript, have also led Hedeman to new insights about how Lebègue worked with illuminators, probably through a libraire.

In chapter 4 Hedeman turns to the mise-en-page of three translations written by Premierfait in order to study "how visual translation work[s] in manuscripts that are themselves translations" (127). She analyzes a translation of Cicero's De Senectute, made in 1405 for Louis de Bourbon in a bilingual volume (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 7789); a translation of Boccaccio's De Casibus, copied in twin manuscripts executed for John of Berry and John the Fearless in about 1411 (Genève Bibliothèque Publique, Fr. 190 1/2 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal 5193); and a translation of Bocaccio's Decameron in a manuscript not linked with Premierfait but that mirrors the visual cycle he had imagined. The images in these manuscripts work in the same way that the translations themselves do: amplifying, historicizing, and moralizing the text, primarily by transposing scenes into fifteenth-century France. Hedeman also shows how images encourage nonlinear readings and may offer political commentary on contemporaneous events (and how they could—or perhaps should—be adapted to whom they were intended for). Finally, chapter 5 explores the later evolution of these new cycles and considers how artistic conventions mostly normalized the precise and detailed program imagined by Premierfait and Lebègue. This chapter is perhaps a little less compelling than the rest of the volume as its scope makes it necessary for Hedeman to gloss over a whole series of new manuscripts. Yet there is great strength in the book overall, which comes from the author's way of looking at manuscripts as a whole, apprehending text and pictures together and taking into account the place of each image on its page and within the sequence these images might form. The "elite illustrated subset of humanist manuscripts" (10) that she brilliantly presents to the reader thus reveals once again the dynamic interaction among their princely audiences, the various craftsmen who contributed to their execution, the two humanists who supervised their production, and the texts they transmit.