This handsomely illustrated book is attractive for its many images (112 figures plus a frontispiece), and useful for its cross-referencing tools and detailed appendices. Kathleen L. Scott will be familiar to many; in 1968, her article "A Mid-Fifteenth-Century English Illuminating Shop and Its Customers" demonstrated how we can reconstruct the relationships of scribes, limners, and other artisans who worked together to produce manuscripts. Her 1996 survey of illuminated manuscripts, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390-1490, is a meticulous and engrossing discussion of 140 illuminated books that opens many questions about their production and tradition. This survey demonstrated the artistic and intellectual diversity in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century book culture. In the current book, Scott returns to this issue with a specific purpose: to demonstrate that fifteenth-century manuscript illustration represents a variety of technical skill and innovation, and that the manuscripts should not be relegated to a secondary position below the "exuberant book art of the fourteenth century and the appealing humanism of the sixteenth" (ix). She is undoubtedly successful in this task.
The book is divided into six chapters: five devoted to an individual manuscript and a short conclusion. The chapters are short, and since the book has so many large illustrations, there is very little text. If not reading this book to review it, one could easily get through it in an afternoon.
The first chapter is a study of Oxford Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 156, a modelbook for Nicholas of Lyra's Postilla litteralis super totam Bibliam. Scott introduces this book as "among the most interesting" fifteenth-century English manuscripts she has seen in forty years of study (1), and systematically addresses its methods of production, its probable origins (a well-endowed religious house), its use (as a circulating exemplar and book for study), and its audience (men of religious orders). Scott's argument that this manuscript illustrates concepts through images for readers as a didactic tool is convincing, and her suggestion that the medieval author "might overly depend on illustrations for an understanding of his text" (32) is undoubtedly true, in light of Lyra's repeated requests that the reader imagine and envision those things that cannot be expressed in words. Scott makes clear that the illustrations in the Laud manuscript attempt to guide the reader's imagination by supplementing Lyra's words. More interestingly, the Laud artist used his own imagination in his work; instead of depending on exemplars and stock imagery, he is shown to have adapted various iconographic techniques and traditions.
The second chapter is on the "enigma" of Oxford All Souls MS 10, a copy of the late fourteenth-century French translation of the New Testament that was itself a combination of two earlier French translations. This book shows the influence that French manuscript illustration had on its English artist. This artist's innovation, according to Scott, is not only his imaginative adaptation and invention of illustrations but also his cosmopolitan perspective, since the artist uses and adapts French and English images for different contexts and purposes. Most interesting is the enigma of its patron. The artist of this book had worked on another manuscript for Charles d'Orléans while he was in England, and Scott suggests that Charles may have commissioned the All Souls manuscript as well. Alternatively, it may have been a gift to Charles from Sir John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, who was responsible for maintaining Charles during his English imprisonment. Another suspect is Margaret, Duchess of Clarence, a usual patron of the English book market in the early fifteenth century. She may have had use for a vernacular Bible but wanted to avoid the Wycliffite Bible, so had requested a French translation. The fact that the patronage of this book cannot be resolved between a French prince living in England, his English acquaintance, and a famous English book patron suggests that the French of England and the cultural connections between England and France in the fifteenth century demand closer inspection. Scott has difficulties accounting for the All Souls manuscript, partly because the "decline in the use of French and of the production of English books in French over the first half of the fifteenth century adds to the mystery of the All Souls manuscript?" (57).
Next Scott turns to British Library, Stowe MS 39, a manuscript of 31 medieval folios (ff. 3-33) from the second quarter of the fifteenth century. This book begins with the Abbey of the Holy Ghost (ff. 4-8), a treatise for secular piety in Middle English prose written for a secular audience who want to but cannot pursue a religious vocation. On ff.8v-9r, we find two full-page miniatures that Scott calls an "afterpiece," since they immediately follow the text. The artist's innovations in these are impressive, and I was left feeling that its artist is the most innovative of those discussed in this book. Scott notes that the book's depiction of nuns as allegorical figures is unusual, as is its miniatures of women performing physical labour. Needless to say, these images are not common to the Abbey textual tradition, whether alongside the English text or its French counterpart. Scott reads the afterpiece as an aid in meditating or reflecting on the Abbey, and suggests that readers may have been expected to read the image as an "impetus for thought on the different qualities that contribute to a clean conscience" in a non-linear reading (85). I understand this to mean that the afterpiece is a reference--a pictorial index, as it were. Unlike Scott, I fail to see the innovativeness of placing this after the text, since, as she notes, a "few other English manuscripts have miniatures at the end of a text, all much smaller scenes that were, as a rule, not planned for that position" (64). Since f. 3 is a blank (although ruled) medieval page, it is possible that the original intention was to place this "afterpiece" on f. 3 and f. 2b*, a likely scenario since we are dealing with a booklet of 31 folios. Also, since f. 9v is blank and f. 10 contains another miniature of a patron-nun kneeling before Mary and child and an unidentified coat of arms, I believe there could be many possible reasons why the miniatures on ff. 8v-9 are where they are. I have difficulties with Scott's suggestion that the "position of the pictorial opening at the end of the text also contributed to the designer's purpose of emphasizing certain selected themes" and that the miniatures are a "summary reading" for the illiterate or as a supplement for those who read the text (86). I do agree that the miniatures had these function--but so would they if they were put before the text. Thus it is no surprise that Scott sees "this supplementary 'summarizing' function also present in frontispieces with multiple compartments, as well as in sequential series of frontispieces" (86). In any case, this is a small disagreement, and Scott's more important argument--that the artist creates an unusual and original image to inspire meditation on the text--is illuminating and fascinating.
British Library Royal MS 1.B.x (Part I) is Scott's next concern. This manuscript consists of two parts; the first begins with a fifteenth-century addition (ff. 1-43), which is followed by a thirteenth-century Bible (ff. 44-291). Part II of the manuscript, which Scott does not discuss, is a continuation of the Bible (Part II, ff. 292-560). The fifteenth-century folios contain an incomplete copy of the Compendium historie in genealogia Christi (ff. 8-33v), a summary of Biblical history by Peter of Poiters, a late twelfth-century chancellor of the University of Paris. The Compendium survives in many fifteenth-century English rolls and a few codices. Folios 1-33 form a booklet of four quires (1^7, 2^8, 3^8, and 4^10), and ff. 34-43 are another addition from the fifteenth century, although both gatherings have been together since the fifteenth century. As in the Stowe, All Souls, and Laud manuscripts, the artist creates unusual and sometimes unique pictures. These are almost always unknown to manuscripts of the Compendium or to any other fifteenth-century English manuscript (such innovative pictures are listed and marked with an asterisk in Appendix E). These images and the genealogies and tables of the first booklet were clearly added as supplemental references for the Bible that follows, and the artist's various appropriations of images and imaginative productions prove Scott's main argument. Particularly interesting for book history is the audience of the book; the additions seem to have been commissioned by Dygon, a known scribe who also produced annotations and tables for other books and who was the rector or vicar of various parish churches from 1433-1435, when he became a recluse in Sheen Priory, Surrey, and who lived at least until 1449. Dygon's notes appear throughout the two fifteenth-century booklets and in the Bible (e.g., on f. 45). Scott is amazed that such a book was produced for a mere scribe: "It verges almost on the unbelievable to find a book that was commissioned by a scribe (if not the only hat he wore), and of such quality" (f. 116). The discovery of such a book, alongside the work of other scribes from the century (particularly Thomas Hoccleve and Adam Pinkhurst), suggests that we should reconsider the status of the scribe in fifteenth-century England. The closer we look, the more absurd scholarly prejudice against these toiling copyists seems.
A third British Library manuscript, Additional 21974, is the final subject of Scott's study. This codex, compiled for John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln from 1521-1547, is an accomplished combination of fifteenth and sixteenth-century illumination and illustration styles and, as Scott observes, it is as indicative of its owner's intellectual interests as it is a representation of the transition from medieval to early modern manuscript illumination. As a coda to the discussions before it, this chapter demonstrates how fifteenth and sixteenth-century manuscript art are best seen as eras of developments and innovations that flow into one another, and not as periods separated by intellectual and aesthetic differences. This leads Scott to conclude that illuminations are included in manuscripts because they can teach, they can represent the author or presumed author of the text, and because patrons were willing to pay for them. Such general motivations defy generalisations and result in diverse and innovative manuscript decoration.
The book's general presentation is solid. Misprints are rare and often limited to a missing word (e.g. p. 30, p. 83, and p. 116) or a wrong number ('Folios 4-9' for 'Folios 4-8' on p. 61). Scott's misremembering of Stephen Jay Gould's last name ('Goulding') on page 141 is perhaps the most eye-catching error. All figures are, as far as I can tell, correctly labeled, and the book's Notes and Index of Manuscripts are extensive. The lack of a Subject or Name Index is unfortunate, and a separate Bibliography would have been helpful. Only the pedant would care about such minor blights without appreciating the impressive and detailed scholarship that this book offers, and the important implications it has for our understanding of how and why books were made and illustrated in fifteenth-century England.