Artistic images, as Michael Camille reminds us, are not mirrors of 'real life'. The order of things in the Middle Ages was profoundly analogical: a set of interlocking correspondences, repetitions, and symbolisms, often simultaneously sacred, social and political, in which nothing ever stood wholly for itself. There are few better guides to the symbolic meanings of medieval visual culture than Camille. This rich and erudite book considers the illuminations of a single manuscript: the magnificent early thirteenth-century Luttrell Psalter, produced for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (d. 1345), in Irnham, south Lincolnshire. In some ways Camille's study works like hypertext: click on an image, and Camille provides exhaustive commentary. But the hypertext analogy does not do justice to Camille's insistence that we treat the manuscript as an ideological continuum, and that we refuse the piecemeal plundering of its images which has so often characterised its use in both popular and academic histories. Nor does that analogy do justice to the range and depth of Camille's imaginative recreation of the social, domestic, spiritual, gestural, and local world that produced the Psalter. That world includes Lord Luttrell's involvement in the Scottish border wars, the "intersection of politics and personal memory" (p. 79), heraldry, archery, sheep diseases, costume, the composition of pigments, puns and rebuses: a hinterland of history that extends beyond and behind the page, shaping the images that we see in the Psalter. Camille's approach is Machereyan: "It is in the fissures or cracks between visual and verbal discourse, the 'breaks' of ideology, that we begin to see history opening up before us" (p. 45). So this is not history in terms of the event, of 'what happened': rather, Camille demonstrates how the Psalter bears witness to a web of signifying systems where reality and fantasy collide in what he calls 'the imaginary'.
The book is structured thematically, with individual chapters on the representation of knighthood and war; feasting and fashion; spirituality and religion; life on the estate; masks and monsters; Saracens, Scotsmen, and women. The opening chapter traces the history and ownership of the manuscript and the closing chapter deals with the illuminators. This structure is deliberate: Camille wants the reader to engage first of all with the political and social aspects of the illuminations and only afterwards with issues of artistic autonomy. The thematic structure makes the book handy to use for those with specialist interests in, for example, the medieval English household, drama and courtly entertainment, or the boundaries between humans and animals. As the subtitle suggests, one important strand of Camille's argument concerns the Psalter's place within English vernacular culture as well as its embodiment of particular myths of Englishness for its later owners. This book therefore takes its place alongside a growing body of work on nationalism and vernacularity in later medieval England.
This is also a polemical book. Camille makes the point that most medievalists, especially historians, ignore or misrepresent visual evidence. He goes a long way towards teaching those of us who are not art historians how to read this evidence. But he also goes further. Comparing the Psalter with a farmer's almanac, now in the Bodleian, he argues that a 'work of art' like the Psalter can offer "a denser historical sense of things" than a "functioning tool or document" (p. 225), and that this is true for all the areas of social history that he claims the book participates in. For example, it can reveal "undisclosed, and even imaginary, areas of chivalric self-consciousness" (p. 81). You could see the whole of this book -- and indeed the whole of Camille's work to date -- as an argument that images are crucial in informing our notions of the past, that representation is never straightforward, and that the art object is never simply a reflection of its patron's ideals and aspirations. For example, the Luttrell Psalter embodies the economy in which it was produced: money earnt in the lord's estates helped pay for the scribes to copy it, and the sheep depicted in its pages also provided the vellum for the book. Camille offers many suggestive local arguments and insights: for example, that the Psalter was a tool of learning to read Latin (p. 162); that Geoffrey's spiritual commitments were "complex and sometimes contradictory" (p. 123); that medieval notions of community be seen not as oppression but as the people regulating themselves(pp. 199-20); and that the representation of machines (ploughshares, windmills, watermills, spinning wheels, a knife-grinder's wheel) differs in its literalism from that of other representations.
Generously acknowledging the work of previous scholars, notably Eric Millar, Lucy Sandler, Michael Michael, Lynda Denison and Janet Backhouse, Camille has nevertheless come to his own conclusions about how the Psalter was illuminated (the Latin text was the work of a single scribe, and is complete). He conjectures that the MS was produced in two different shops or centres -- that the work of illumination was started in one, then the entire project was taken over elsewhere and masterminded by the fourth hand, belonging to the "highly individualistic illuminator" (p. 232) whom Camille dubs the "Luttrell master." The project languished for ten years and was then finished by two other hands.
For Camille the Luttrell master's input is what makes the Psalter so astonishing. An artist with "genius and self-consciousness" (p. 333), his work is not found in any other English manuscripts of the period, though he may have worked in other media (stained glass, or masks and costumes for drama). Camille suggests that "in one hitherto unnoticed place" (fol. 177v) this illuminator reveals himself in a miniature self-portrait: untonsured, and therefore probably not a cleric, he nevertheless knew Latin well enough to create symbolic interplays between text and image. In the impressive final chapter Camille advances a powerful argument about the kinds of newness that the Luttrell master's illuminations bring into the world. These illuminations frequently feature naturalistic or contorted mouths which bear comparison with the work of Edward Munch or Francis Bacon: a "cry we hear with our eyes" (p. 344). Others are extraordinary babewyns, strangely-whorled and obsessively-patterned. Some are curiously bifurcated, suggesting Rorschach inkblots. Some incorporate aspects of folk-plays: hoods, animal disguises, hobby-horses. Many evade classification. They seem self-referential, drawing attention to themselves as artifice. For Camille, these are images in the process of becoming, not being. They push the limits of interpretation and disturb the very notion of art itself.
This is a compelling argument. But I was also compelled to challenge some of Camille's other readings, such as that of the wife with distaff beating her husband (fol. 60r). Certainly the image represents the threat of female "maistrye," but that knife sticking out of the husband's pocket is not simply the carnivalesque reversal that Camille claims: that it is "not a protective sign of male strength but embarrassingly exhibits the priapic lust that subjugates him to the female" (p. 301). Yet doesn't it also suggest one of the (suppressed) reasons why medieval male culture delighted in producing images of the unruly women: that they also arouse? Such a reading would give more weight to the ambiguity of the woman-on-top. I wonder too why Camille has opted for "Mirror" in the title, given that he is at pains to explain in what ways he resists seeing the Psalter as "a mirror of English medieval society" (p. 13)? More could have been made of the preposition "in," which carries the irony: the illuminations may give the illusion of reflection, but parchment is opaque. The subtitle, The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, unfortunately makes too large a claim, suggesting (in that second definite article) the pre-eminence -- and even singularity -- of this manuscript in the construction of early fourteenth-century Englishness. It is inconsistent to give some quotations from Chaucer in Middle English and some in modern translation. I assume that exigencies of space mean there is no Bibliography, which is a pity. I was amused by the typo "corncake" (p. 24) for "corncrake," but surprised to see "disinterested" for "uninterested" (p. 151). And the image of confession from both ends of the body (p. 144) may be better explained by the well-known pun on the text Cor meum eructavit (Psalm 44) -- and not just, as Camille argues, by that on the vulgar expression cornar al cul. One slight oddity is that Camille uses "textual" and "textuality" to refer, quite literally, the text: what is written, as opposed to what is illustrated.
It should be clear that the book does not pursue a single argument about the 'meaning' of the Psalter: inevitable, perhaps, in such a compendious and wide-ranging work of scholarship, and one more concerned with demonstrating the complexity of medieval representations. But I entirely agree with Camille's insistence that images do not mean just one thing but are sites of constant re-reading and renegotiation (p. 340): Sir Geoffrey Luttrell may well have regarded the ludic material as sinful and yet also desired to participate in 'popular culture'. Yet there is still considerable scope for the construction of audience responses, particularly for its later medieval female owners, Eleanor, countess of Arundel, and then her daughter, Joan de Bohun, countess of Hereford, but that is for another book. Many will feel awed by the standards Camille has set but will certainly be inspired to draw on the resources of this book to illuminate their own readings of medieval English cultural history.