The Mirror of Salvation: Speculum Humanae Salvationis. An Edition of British Library Blockbook G. 11784 (review)

It is difficult to imagine the audience envisioned for this edition by its editor-translators. The editors say their purpose is to present the SpeculumHumanae Salvationis "in an immediately accessible and understandable form and to the widest possible present-day audience" (p. 6). Judging from their approach, they are resurrecting this late-medieval text for a modern, non-specialist reader. While the translation of the Speculum text that forms the core of the volume will be useful as a finding aid for English-speaking scholars working in the fields of medieval art history, history, theology and literature, the explanatory texts are simplistic and the apparatus is minimal.

The volume consists of a short introduction, a list of woodcut illustrations, reproductions of the woodcuts accompanied by an English translation of their Latin captions and texts, a modern commentary on the text titled "Interpreting the Blockbook," a cursory and somewhat dated bibliography, and an index. The editors provide no rationale as to why they chose the second Latin edition of the Speculum, dated by van Theinen and Goldfinch as c. 1474-75 (Incunabula Printed in the Low Countries, 1999, item 2007), for translation and reproduction. This Speculum edition is, in fact, very interesting as it combines xylographic printing (also known as prototypography) with moveable type, though readers are not told why this might be interesting. The first Latin edition, also printed in the Netherlands, and subsequent editions are not discussed.

In their brief discussion of xylographic reproduction (the terms 'xylography' and 'prototypography' are nowhere used), the editors say that the woodblocks were "moistened with dye" (p. vii), which is odd, as the usual substance for printing in this period is ink. Very little is said about the role of blockbooks in the early history of printing; there is no mention of A. H. Stevenson's important discovery about watermarks in blockbooks, for example; and there is no discussion at all of the role that typographical images like those found in the Speculum play in the margins of Books of Hours, the best-selling book of the later Middle Ages. In their introduction, the editors do say they hope their work will encourage readers to explore further the iconography in "Gothic" stained glass and sculpture, and in Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (p. 7), a general gesturing toward art history. Similar statements are made about the book's relevance to medieval history and theology.

The Speculum itself is described throughout as a book "for teaching the common folk" (pp. 5-6), though this notion has been mainly discounted by recent scholarship, which suggests that the book is rather more complex than first imagined. The discussion of typology, that is, reading Old Testament stories as prefiguring the New, the central organizing device of the Speculum, is also explained at the most basic level. One would think that with the Speculum text so immediately at hand, more might have been said about the complex interrelationships of its images and texts. The interpretation of specific texts in the "Interpretation and Commentary" is sometimes helpful (as in identifications of more obscure stories found in the Apocrypha and in Peter Comestor), but sometimes not. On the question, for example, of the female face of the serpent that tempts Eve there are any number of scholarly articles and at least one important monograph that immediately spring to mind, but the editors interpret this as reflecting Eve's "alter ego," then discuss the myth of Narcissus, which appears nowhere in the medieval text.

The Speculum itself, though, remains just as compelling as it was to readers of the fourteenth-century manuscripts and of later blockbooks and printed editions, and it is good to have this English prose translation to supplement the Middle English verse text edited by Avril Henry (The Mirour of Mans Saluacion...