The subject of the book is the relationship between pictures and poems in a great illuminated Bible, and especially the political and cultural context in which both were produced. The manuscript is Paris BN cod. lat. 1, most commonly referred to as the Vivian Bible, but here more appropriately termed the First Bible of Charles the Bald (distinguishing it from at least two others made for him, BN lat. 2, and Rome, S. Paolo fuori le mura). It is the grandest surviving production from Tours, the most productive of Carolingian writing centers. Although many aspects of the book are treated, the greatest attention is paid to one miniature, very likely the most commonly reproduced work of Carolingian pictorial art, purporting to depict the presentation of the book to the king, Charles the Bald. As the authors rightly say, there is no other work comparable to what they have produced, a study of the eleven poems and eight miniatures of the book, taken together, and including photographs of all the miniatures and of the complete (and richly decorated) pages with the long poems that begin and end the manuscript. Two of the poem-pages are reproduced in full color, for the first time, insofar as I know, and a lengthy appendix includes a new edition of the poems, with English translation on facing pages.
As Michael Camille argued in "Word, Text, Image and the early Church Fathers in the Egino Codex," in Testo e Immagine nell' Alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio 41 (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 65-92, even the difficulty of securing photographs showing miniatures and facing texts as full openings is an index of the scholarly segregation of the media in a manner wholly un-medieval. This book is a salutary contribution toward redressing the balance. Scholars in the field will welcome the authors' remarkably seamless and stimulating collaboration. The book is well written, and appropriately concise, given its deliberately narrow focus. In providing a thick description of a single important work, it is a good example of recent scholarship in this area, and its analysis of the poems, presentation miniature and the apocalypse miniature make fascinating reading, and offers grist for many other scholarly mills.
The book expands upon the respective authors' earlier studies, especially Kessler's Illustrated Bibles from Tours (Princeton, 1977), and his two recent papers from the Spoleto conference, "A Lay Abbot as Patron: Count Vivian and the First Bible of Charles the Bald" (38 [1991]), and "'Facies bibliothecae revelata': Carolingian Art as Spiritual Seeing" (41 [1994]), and Dutton's The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln, and London, 1994). It is impossible to do full justice to their intricate and generally persuasive argument in a brief summary, but these are some major points. They believe that the manuscript was begun, in the scriptorium of Saint-Martin at Tours in early or mid-845, as something like the slightly earlier Moutier-Grandval Bible (London, BL Add. 10546), with a program of four large miniatures and accompanying tituli. Subsequently when the young King Charles decided to appoint the layman Vivian, the local count, as abbot, and also announced his decision to visit Tours late in 845, the canons of Saint-Martin decided to "adapt" the already-in-production manuscript by including four additional miniatures and some elaborate verses, with a view to presenting it to Charles in person. In the view of Dutton and Kessler, the community expected or at least hoped for, a specific quid pro quo from the king, namely confirmation of the privilege of independent abbatial elections which he himself had just egregiously violated. One of the leading canons was charged with the task of planning the revised and improved volume, composing extensive new verses for it, and working with a painter of Tours on the development of the miniatures to be added.
On stylistic and historical grounds, Dutton and Kessler propose that the poet and designer, the impresario as it were, was Audradus "Modicus," best known for his poetic Liber revelationum presented to Pope Leo IV in 849, but apparently also involved in the production of a lectionary manuscript formerly in Chartres (destroyed in World War II). They propose that he is shown not once but twice in the Presentation miniature, which they describe as "an imaginary snapshot composed of real people such as Vivian, the named canons, and himself . . . and of the idealized ceremony of the presentation itself" (p. 93), which lay, of course, in the future when the miniature was planned and executed. The poetry in particular, but also the images, comprised a "somewhat unstable amalgam of admonition and panegyric" (p. 40) that contained not only "flattery and extravagant praise" but "imperative admonition [that] overrides the praise" (p. 43). Representing the canons of Tours, Audradus' gloriously contrived present to the young king was designed to function as an example of the important contemporary class of Furstenspiegel, showing Charles how to rule well and ultimately achieve salvation. As so often with flattery, it was not altogether successful, or not for long. Charles did not respond as the canons of Tours may have wished, and although Audradus himself shortly thereafter won a promotion to be suffragan bishop of Sens, he was shortly thereafter removed by a council, probably masterminded by Hincmar of Reims (for which story see at great length Dutton's Politics of Dreaming, pp. 128-156). It is an interesting index of the dramatic changes in art historical scholarship during the last two decades to compare this rich discussion of the specific individual contemporary makers and audience for the miniatures of the First Bible of Charles the Bald, with Kessler's own fine but very different discussion of the possible earlier pictorial sources of the miniatures in his 1977 book, which scarcely mentioned the contemporary context.
The codicological discussion, critical to the notion of a sudden change in plan, is sometimes difficult to follow. Provision of a quire diagram of the entire manuscript, or at least of the several quires most important for the argument, notably the last one, would have been most helpful. The argument that because the "added" miniatures were all on inserted single leaves, they "could easily have been inserted into a manuscript already under production" (p. 51) is sensible, but the implication that they were so inserted as part of a revised plan simply does not follow. Unfortunately the reader is not told anything about the codicological situation of the other "standard" miniatures, or the practice in other Bibles and other manuscripts produced at Tours, or indeed in other Carolingian scriptoria. Here the narrowness of the authors' focus ill-serves the authors' argument. Insertion on single leaves of major miniatures, and of dedicatory material, had been commonplace from at least the middoe of the eighth century (Vatican cod. Reg. lat. 316), and was commonplace in the manuscripts associated with the court of Charles's predecessor, namesake and in many senses "model," Charlemagne (e.g. Vienna, cod. 1861). The character of the Paris lat. 1 Bible should not be assessed in total isolation. The fact that dedication verses are codicologically discrete does not mean ipso facto that they were later additions. The whole tradition of early medieval books favors separating units of text codicologically. See Patrick McGurk's Latin Gospel Books from A.D. 400 to A.D. 800 (Brussels, 1961) in general, and for the Carolingian luxury tradition see James Harmon's Codicology of the Court School of Charlemagne (Frankfurt/Bern/New York/Nancy, 1984), neither of which are cited by Dutton and Kessler, a surprising omission given the importance of codicology here. Dutton and Kessler make a convincing case for a change in plan during the course of production, but many other examples of such changes in other Carolingian manusripts can be cited, changes which do not require a particular "crisis." Given that making any illuminated Bible was a rare event at Tours, the book must have been intended for some important recipient, and Charles himself is a likely candidate. The change in plan might then have taken place after Charles' visit rather than before, and one would not need to imagine the very rushed pace of production envisaged by Dutton and Kessler.Yet the discussion hangs without a context, there being no mention of the circumstances, to say nothing of the codicological make-up, of other manuscripts presented to Carolingian kings, a class small enough (and interesting enough!) to have been taken into consideration.
This book is a valuable contribution to scholarship, but it is unfortunate that Dutton and Kessler did not take the opportunity to situate their case study within some broader picture of Carolingian art, considering other works of art that might either support or contradict their interesting hypothesis. Similarly, they do not situate their work in the context of the abundant current scholarship treating the possible political significance and interpretation of Carolingian art. The authors, especially in their introduction, talk about their project as an attempt to go beyond the "divided enterprises of modern scholarship" (p.2), tracing a way that they hope other medievalists will follow (p. viii). The implication is that this work is methodologically path-breaking, and that is simply not the case. At least in my view the "divided enterprise" idea unfairly characterizes the great scholar upon whom Dutton and Kessler most depend, Wilhelm Koehler, who blazed new ground in integrating different disciplines. Few scholars would accept that such "divided enterprise" is a fair characterization of scholarship of the last two decades related to Carolingian culture. In fact, to say that this book is part of a broad trend is in no way to belittle it, indeed simply makes it evident that the authors' reading and procedure is neither idiosyncratic nor deviant.
Dutton and Kessler cite a great many scholarly works, including many of recent date, in their extensive apparatus, but the list of recent authors whose works are never discussed and names never mentioned in the text (and so do not appear in the index), and whose studies are cited in the notes only on minor issues, ruther than in connection with their major arguments and contributions, is very long. Janet Nelson is the dean of modern scholars studying Charles the Bald, and author of a recent biography which discusses the context at issue here, but is little cited, only in reference to matters of chronology. Peter Godman's Poets and Emperors. Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987), is cited only for "background material" and because it repeats an erroneous reading by Ludwig Traube (pp. 2 and 3, notes 3 and 7 respectively). Nikolaus Staubach's major two-volume study Rex Christianus: Hofkultur and Herrshcaftspropaganda im Reich Karls des Kahlen (Cologne, 1990 and 1993) is cited in connection with the same borrowed erroneous reading, and not again that I found. Yet both works treat the same historical issue, and address much of the same literary, historical and artistic material considered by Dutton and Kessler. Michael Herren's new edition and important studies (see "The 'De imagine Tetrici' of Walahfrid Strabo: Edition and Translation," Journal of Medieval Latin 1 [1991], 118-139, and "Walahfrid Strabo's 'De Imagine Tetrici: An Interpretation," in Richard North and Tette Hofstra, ed., Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe, Germania Latina 1 [Groningen, 1992], pp. 25-41) are not cited at all, although the poem is one of the few other Carolingian poems directly related to a work of visual art, written only about one decade before the Paris Bible verses by probably the most highly regarded poet of the period, who happened also to have been Charles the Bald's tutor. It is hard to see how Herren's important work can have been deemed not relevant to Dutton and Kessler's project, especially as Herren argues for a sophisticated and critical reading of this poetic text bearing upon royal ideology. William Diebold's several important articles treating Charles' art are cited only is passing, their arguments not seriously engaged. Elizabeth Sears' major contribution to the interpretation of Carolingian royal portraiture ("Louis the Pious as Miles Christianus: The Dedicatory Image in Hrabanus Maurus's De laudibus sanctae crucis," in Peter Godman and Roger Collins, ed. Charlemagne's Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814-840) [Oxford, 1990], pp. 605-628), written against an earlier tradition of scholarship, and helping to lay the groundwork for the interpretation advanced by Dutton and Kessler, is noted only in connection with the appearance of the manus dei in a portrait of Charles' mother Judith. Christoph Eggenberger's Psalterium aureum Sancti Galli: Mittelalterliche Psalterillustrtion im Kloster St. Gallen (Sigmaringen, 1987) is cited twice, once concerning an ornamental detail, and once in reference to a possible lost model from Tours, but Eggenberger's strong argument that the St. Gall Psalter was designed for royal use, ond carried a distinctly monitory program, is ignored. Genevra Kornbluth's Engraved Gems of the Carolingian Empire (University Park, Pa. 1995) is not cited at all, although it contains an extended discussion about the controversy surrounding the proper interpretation of the other Carolingian artistic work most commonly discussed in a political context, the Susanna crystal of King Lothair, a near-contemporary work commonly regarded as the sort of admonition against royal misconduct proposed by Dutton and Kessler (an interpretation that Kornbluth opposes, specifically in connection with an article by Valerie Flint, also not cited by Kessler and Dutton). Important recent studies by Kathleen Corrigan and Leslie Brubaker arguing for a strongly political context for important contemporary Byzantine works of art are not mentioned at all, although the latter's studies of the Homilies of Gregory (Paris gr. 510) provides perhaps the most stimulating parallel to Dutton and Kessler's thesis of the ad hoc preparation of a uniquely luxurious illuminated manuscript for presentation to a ruler.
To be sure, scholars' styles differ, and many editors quail at extensive "reviews of literature." It is fine to concentrate on Audradus and the Paris Bible, but it is not fine to leave those figures and works hanging without an appropriately sketched context in Carolingian culture or in modern scholarship about that culture. Acknowledgement of others' work is not simply a gesture of politeness, but an important part of building an argument and serving readers who might wish to pursue the issue in greater depth and a wider context. Moreover, the lack of reference to other scholarship fails to recognize the complex debates concerning historical and interpretive issues that are by no means obvious, presenting their own view as if the only possible, obvious, interpretation. By ignoring relevant and sometimes differing arguments throughout their book, and citing them only in a misleading or trivial manner, Dutton and Kessler mask important debates, and weaken their own interesting proposals. For example, central to the thesis of Dutton and Kessler is a reading of poetry and art in a specific political context, a gift offered to Charles the Bald in hopes of some response. In the authors' view, poetry and images contain complex messages that not only praise the king but warn him against the dangers of pride. The humility of King David figures powerfully here as a presumed model for Charles the Bald. My recent book, A Tainted Mantle. Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court (Philadelphia, 1991) argues that poetry and works of art made for Charlemagne and for Charles the Bald present an analogous message, tracing the true path of David against the dangerous seduction offered by imitation of Roman Emperors. Taking a very different line but using much the same material, Nikolaus Staubach's Rex christianus emphasizes the panegyric aspect of court art and literature. Staubach and I have different emphases, and sometimes disagree sharply. Dutton and Kessler's argument seems to me much closer to my own approach, reference to which would support their conclusion. Perhaps they disagree, in which case readers would profit from having their analysis. Perhaps they agree with Staubach. The point is that there is a lively current debate in scholarship about the central issue raised by this book, and yet this book does not enter into that debate at all, or assist interested readers who might want to know more.