Church, State, Vellum, and Stone is a collection of articles in honor of John W. Williams, with whom American research and study of medieval art in Spain has been associated for many decades. Celebrated especially for five volumes on the manuscripts of Beatus of Liébana's commentary to the Apocalypse (The Illustrated Beatus, 5 vols., Harvey Miller Publ.: London 1994-2003), Williams' research has multiple layers and covers a wide range of artistic media and methodologies. The volume in his honor contains a full bibliography of his oeuvre. In the introduction the editors emphasize Williams' remarkable methodological diversity, his all-embracing approach, and his openness to methodological shifts. The articles they have collected beautifully reflect the methodological foci made familiar in Williams' writings. For those who admire Williams this book is a remarkable tribute; for those who wish to get acquainted with the medieval art of Spain, it offers a multifaceted picture of up-to-date research in the field. Not only do the articles reflect current interests in medieval Iberian art and architecture, but they also contain an admirable apparatus of references guiding the reader to research less known in the English speaking world, especially studies done in Spain. This makes the book an important tool to guide any student towards this rich field of scholarship.
The volume is divided into three parts that sketch Williams' diverse interests. The first part Church and State discusses various aspects of the early medieval church in Iberia. Some of these papers refer to an archeological context, most of them, however, are historical studies. Achim Arbeiter addresses the question of multiple eucharistic altars in Iberian churches of the early medieval period and whether they go back to the early Christian period. Evidence from the recently discovered church of Santa Maria de Mijangos (Burgos) indicates that in the fifth century three eucharistic altars were already in use there. These findings are placed in the context of other early structures for which the possibility of multiple altars is debated. James D'Emilio revisits documents related to the legend of the early medieval bishop Odoario of Lugo, dismissed by many historians as forgeries. D'Emilio carefully re-reads the material and instead of questioning its historical truth he studies it from the point of view of medieval reconstructions of the past. Focusing on lists of churches and other ecclesiastical properties, he elucidates new aspects of the Odoario story in the context of the neo-Gothic movement of the tenth century and the organization of the diocese of Lugo, in particular, and Galicia in general. Three historical papers conclude this first part. Bernard Reilly discusses French cultural influence in Leon-Castile c. 1100 and addresses the question to what degree King Alfonso VI's son-in-law, Count Raimundo of Burgundy should be credited for this influence, an issue with clear implications for art historical study. Focusing on documents that provide information about the people of influence in Raimundo's entourage--almost all of them of Iberian origin--Reilly concludes that the count's personal imprint on the absorption of French cultural elements must have been limited. Rather, French influence was part of the cultural transformation Leon-Castile underwent during the reign of Alfonso, the presence of Raimundo in his kingdom being a part of it. Simon Barton's contribution discusses the career of one of the key political figures of the last phase of the Christian reconquest, Álvar Pérez de Castro. The critical reappraisal of his military career and his relationship to King Fernando III offers, as the editors note in their introduction, a welcome background to an important chapter in the history of medieval art in Spain, and one of great interest to Williams. However, the study does not refer to any artistic activity, nor does it discuss art in any way. Kenneth Baxter Wolf sketches the story of S. Isidro of Madrid and his cult, and elucidates the background to this narrative, which led to Isidro's canonization in the sixteenth century.
The second part of the collection Vellum, mirrors another of Williams' research interests, the one that he is probably best known for--illuminated manuscripts. At the outset Peter Klein addresses the main subject of Williams' scholarship--the surviving illuminated manuscripts of Beatus of Liébana's commentary to the Apocalypse, and specifically the question whether there is any connection between the flowering of the Beatus tradition in the tenth century and acute eschatological expectations and millenarist fears. Following an in-depth methodology of text-image relationship, together with a comparative iconographic approach that underscores the changes the tradition underwent from the earliest copies to those of the tenth century, Klein elucidates the nature of the revisions of the tenth-century edition. Ann Boylan discusses the corpus of manuscripts associated with the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos. Her point of departure is the Silos Beatus, the only manuscript that can be attributed with certainty by colophon to the Silos scriptorium. Then she works through another group of manuscripts from the Silos corpus, in which the hand of the Beatus artist can be traced. As all these manuscripts belong to the Roman rite, adopted in Léon-Castile in 1080, she proposes a terminus post quem for the establishment of the scriptorium. From here she goes on to the question if the monks of Santo Domingo resisted the introduction of the Roman rite, as did apparently those of San Millán de la Cogolla. Arguing against the conclusions in earlier scholarship, she makes a convincing claim that the monastery of Santo Domingo not only embraced the Roman rite sympathetically, but also that its introduction initiated the establishment of the Silos scriptorium after 1080. The same Silos Beatus is the subject of the following contribution by Ángela Franco, containing some observations on its illustration program. Without the thorough methodological articulation of most of the contributions, this discussion is of a more general nature. It considers text-image relationships, especially with regard to the largely neglected marginal illustrations, unfinished paintings, formal links to the Visigothic tradition and more, concluding by highlighting the unique nature and "aesthetic sense" of the Silos Beatus. David Raizman leads us to the later editions of Beatus' commentary, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on the Morgan M. 429 Beatus, produced in 1220 in Toledo. Through a careful reading of the detailed colophon Raizman argues convincingly that the book was a gift of Queen Berenguela (1180-1246) to the convent of Las Huelgas--a royal foundation of the Cistercian order. Linking the design of Morgan M. 429 to Cistercian pietistic practices of lectio divina, contemplative reading, meditation, and prayer, he shows that the illuminations may have functioned as a sort of visual commentary. Julie Harris, one of the editors of the volume, addresses fourteenth-century Haggadah illustration focusing on the image of the Wicked Son based on Ex. 13:18: "and thou shalt tell thy son." Harris offers a subtle interpretation of the Wicked Son in the Sephardic Rylands Haggadah, generally understood by scholars--as all other images of the Wicked Son--as a personification of gentile oppression. Observing that the Rylands image shows specifically a Muslim (Berber) warrior, Harris suggests that this should be understood against the background of the phenomena of Jewish mercenaries in medieval Iberia and assimilated courtiers in the Crown of Aragon. The biblical Queen Esther as a model of medieval Christian queens and noblewomen is the subject of the last study in the manuscripts section, offered by Diane Reilly. The earliest pictorial treatments of the Esther story appear in the eleventh-century Catalan Ripoll and Roda Bibles. Whereas the version of the earlier Ripoll Bible focuses on Ahasuerus' authority, in the later Roda Bible an iconographic development can be observed and Esther appears "in the center of court power politics." Through a careful analysis of the history of Ermessenda of Carcassonne, Countess of Barcelona, the Catalan marriage conflict, and Church mediated divorce, Reilly demonstrates how each of the two cycles is embedded in its immediate political circumstances.
The last of the three sections of the book, Stone, leads into the fields of archeology, architecture, and sculpture. The section is opened by José Luis Senra who revisits the dating of the medieval church of Santo Domingo de Silos, consecrated in 1088 and replaced by a modern structure in the eighteenth century. Senra focuses on the question whether the construction consecrated in 1088 was the lower or upper church. Discussing a wide range of evidence he argues in favor of the lower church, and draws up a hypothetical groundplan. Therese Martin considers the Royal Collegiate Basilica of San Isidoro in León and the question of the masons' marks she identified there. The purpose of these marks was to calculate the portions of labor to be paid for, and they were supposed to be hidden by plaster, murals or tapestries. Identifying the marks enables her to find a link between the stonecutters of San Isidoro and those of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, a link that can be confirmed by analogies in the sculptural works of both churches. Through a systematic study of the marks she is able to offer a major contribution to the chronology of the building and its historical context. Pamela Patton's point of departure is an image in the Sarajevo Haggadah showing Cain killing Abel--following a midrashic description of the fratricide in terms of (ritual) slaughter--with a blade instead of the tools familiar from other examples of Christian art. Patton observes that the blade appears also in architectural sculpture in northern Iberia and southern France during the twelfth century, posing an interesting question of possible cultural interaction and revisiting the issue of Jewish roots of Christian Old-Testament iconography. Careful analysis shows that the Christian examples do not necessarily hark back to a hypothetical Jewish prototype, but, rather, stem from a Christian line of exegesis rooted in Byzantium. She concludes by suggesting that the designer of the Sarajevo Haggadah may well have been aware of this Christian motif and adopted it in accordance with his own Jewish interpretation based on the Midrash. Eileen P. McKiernan Gonzalez observes the persistence of Romanesque architecture in the Crown of Aragon and southern France in the late twelfth century at a time when elsewhere in Iberia and other countries Gothic cathedrals were already being built. She links this phenomenon--referred to in earlier scholarship as the "stepchild of both Romanesque and Gothic architecture"--to the patronage and deliberate choice of Alfonso II of Aragon and Sancha, and to conservative trends that held steady for anther five decades or so. Another case of the deliberate use of a stylistic mode is described by Rocio Sanchez Ameijeiras. And, again, this was a choice made by the patrons, not by artists. The paper discusses the royal tombs of San Isidoro in Leon, another stepchild of art history. The earlier tombs were established during the twelfth century, and a reform of the cemetery took place towards the middle of the thirteenth after a gap of about thirty-five years.
The editors are to be congratulated on a beautiful tribute to an outstanding historian of medieval art. They were able to put together a wide-ranging collection of thoroughly researched studies in a field that has often been lamented as underrepresented. The resulting book is obligatory for specialists of the culture, history and art of medieval Spain, and is also one that anybody interested in medieval art will appreciate and wish to acquire.