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  • Introducing the Lambeth Bible: A Study of Texts and Imagery
  • Aden Kumler
Introducing the Lambeth Bible: A Study of Texts and Imagery. By Dorothy M. Shepard. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. viii + 320; 35 color plates, 89 black-and-white figures. EUR 105.

Introducing the Lambeth Bible is a meticulous two-part study of a monumental English illuminated Romanesque Bible. Its eponymous subject is today preserved in two volumes—Lambeth Palace, MS 3 and Maidstone Museum MS P.5—each of which has suffered losses. The monograph begins with a thorough codicological and paleographic examination of the manuscript, considering its visual affiliations and textual composition in detail. Having established the Bible's contents and structure, in the second part of her study Shepard undertakes a more traditional art historical consideration of its iconographic program and its relationship to its visual and textual sources.

In the course of her careful examination of the Lambeth Bible, Shepard revisits older arguments about the manuscript, nuancing and correcting their claims. Following C. R. Dodwell's lead, she argues forcefully for the attribution of the manuscript to St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury and describes its production as involving two campaigns of work, undertaken from ca. 1150–70. Readers seeking a thorough orientation to the manuscript's construction and contents, with frequent consideration of other Romanesque manuscript comparanda, will find this study indispensable. Those seeking a historicist contextualization of the manuscript, an exploration of how its visual forms are productive of visual meaning, or a functionalist account of the manuscript's value and utility in its original twelfth-century context, will leave this book with more questions than answers.

Shepard's first five chapters establish her credentials as a keen observer of the manuscript and its archaeology. The first part of her book is a detailed manuscript study articulated in dense descriptions of the book's paleography, codicology, and the specific affiliations of its component texts, particularly its prologues. This bibliographic work allows Shepard to substantiate her assertion, based largely on [End Page 121] a comparative examination of the specific prologues that preface many of the manuscript's Biblical books, that the manuscript's production at St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury made creative use of that community's rich collection of older illuminated codices and varied textual sources.

Shepard sees the manuscript as the product of collaboration between an "iconographer," a master of monastic theology and exegesis, who, she claims, was likely the manuscript's patron, and several "designers," identified as the Lambeth Master and the artists who completed the painting of the Bible's second volume. Repeatedly emphasizing the inventive agency of the Lambeth Master, his ability to appropriate and modify his visual models and to work in direct relation to the manuscript's texts, Shepard would seem to build the case for seeing the Lambeth Bible as a monument to artistic intelligence, an exemplar of learned illumination. In this light, her repeated invocations of an omniscient master "iconographer" seem to be more an inherited art historical reflex than an historically grounded inference from the manuscript's design and illumination.

A comparative consideration of an impressive corpus of illuminated Romanesque Bibles allows Shepard to situate the Lambeth Bible with greater precision in relation to its manuscript peers than have previous studies. She persuasively suggests that we should relate the Lambeth Bible to a roughly contemporary group of illuminated Bibles produced in both England and France (the Stephen Harding, Bury, Winchester, Lothian, and Capucins Bibles; also Amiens, Bibl. mun. MS 21 and Rouen, Bibl. mun. 16) (p. 223). Shepard is, nonetheless, interested in foregrounding the Lambeth Bible's "Englishness" (p. 232) and her analysis is at its most compelling when she works through the manuscript's visual and semantic relationships to other English sources. She argues persuasively for its selective redeployment of compositions and motifs from several manuscripts kept in Canterbury in the period, most notably the Ælfric Hexateuch and the Eadwine Psalter. She also finds visual connections with Continental exemplars, both the expected French candidates and two important Spanish codices, the Ripoll and Roda Bibles. In a prospective account of the Lambeth Bible's influence, Shepard further argues that the Bible served as a...

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