Most books that take as their cover image the famous relief of Arch of Titus in Rome focus on the portion of the relief representing the large Temple menorah carried by Jewish captives in procession. Such is, for example, the cover to K. Stebnicka, Identity of the Diaspora: Jews in Asia Minor in the Imperial Period (2016), or that to Steven Fine,The Menorah (2016). By contrast, Oftestad's cover centers on the elided portion of the otherwise remarkably well preserved relief, presumably representing the object that is the focus of this book, namely, the Ark of the Covenant. Oftestad's medieval source, the Descriptio Lateranensis Ecclesiae, claims that the Ark was brought to Rome at the time of the conquest of Palestine by Vespasian and his son Titus in AD 70 and has since safely resided under the main altar of the Constantinian building known as the Lateran basilica or Church of St Saviour. Unlike the frieze on the Arch of Titus, the presence at one time of the Ark of the Covenant under the Lateran basilica's main altar is not widely known.
The topic certainly deserved this monograph to lift it out of oblivion. Oftestad shows commitment to her subject. She is determined to find an innovative angle on the text and grapples with a wide range of historical and documentary sources in order to provide a context in which to understand the Descriptio's extraordinary claim. Nevertheless, she is conscious of walking a tightrope between sharing the skepticism that prevailed when, in 1745, Pope Benedict XIV removed the ancient relics on display in the Lateran and consigned them to oblivion, and acknowledging the strength of a tradition that is clearly documented for more than six hundred years before that. Her assessment is cautious and balanced, as is fitting for a scholarly work. Yet the central issue of this discourse, namely, the relation between Christianity's self-perception and its Jewish heritage, presented in starkly concrete terms by objects of cultic reverence and patterns of ecclesial structure and liturgy, remains somewhat opaque. Her argument wavers between the same unease that motivated the eighteenth-century removals (as when referring to "the supposed temple objects," at p. 145), and the specter of accusations of antisemitism that are connected, in the late eleventh century, precisely to the beginning of the crusades that she sees as instigating the propaganda about the Lateran's ark.
The Descriptio Lateranensis Ecclesiae belongs together with other similar Descriptionesof Roman churches that performed the double function of local guidebooks and distant advertisements for pilgrims in the Middle Ages. This fairly short text (here printed at pp. 217-224) survives in a number of twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts in a variety of recensions. Oftestad begins from Cyrille Vogel's 1956 article to distinguish families among these recensions. However, she considers Vogel's Lachmannian Urtext principal method as inadequate for the purposes of approaching an unstable medieval textual tradition. Following current Norwegian trends in New Philology, Oftestad takes issue with Vogel's insufficient consideration of the manuscript witnesses and sets out to redress this neglect by structuring her study around the provenance of manuscripts. The chapter titles therefore reflect this geography, starting at Rome itself, then examining manuscripts from Northern France and Belgium, locations in turn pointing to Jerusalem through the association of crusading Chronicles found copied together with the Descriptio. Oftestad considers the manuscript context as providing essential clues for dating the origins and understanding the development of the Descriptio.
Departing from this approach as a material philologist, Oftestad's main conclusion about the text refines Vogel's dating. Vogel had suggested that it was written between 1074 and 1118, with a preference for the earlier dating. Oftestad claims instead that the earliest stratum of the text should be dated soon after the Latin reconquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and that its ideology reflects the immediate aftermath of that crusading effort.
However sympathetic one might be to material philology for its valuable contribution to textual criticism, one cannot refrain from thinking that the book's thesis might have gained in depth through a more charitable approach to previous scholarship. After all, Vogel's dating hypothesis is not radically altered. Moreover, we are told that Vogel had announced a study of the manuscripts that death prevented him from completing. In any case, Vogel's preliminary analysis of a very complex manuscript tradition remains the basis for the classification that Oftestad merely fine-tunes by distinguishing a Belgian sub-group to the Northern French witnesses. A more serious criticism is that this book is not clearly focused on the manuscripts either, but rather dwells on the historical context and draws literary parallels to fill in the picture. We do not learn very much about these codices in terms of paleography or codicology, nor can we form an opinion of them or become familiar with what they look like in the absence of any images. A summary description of their contents is confined to the appendix. Thus, despite its claims and formal structure, the book does not take shape as the result of manuscript-led research.
A fundamental and underexploited connexion between this text and crusading ideology had been suggested by John Cowdrey. It is not so evident that the examination of the contents of the manuscripts was necessary to bring out this focus, though its pairing with a number of crusading chronicles does reinforce it. The question is, why, if the Crusaders realized only after the conquest in Jerusalem in 1099 that the Ark of the Covenant was preserved in the Dome of the Rock--which they understood as Solomon's Temple--, that appeared as the best moment to revive (or, according to Oftestad, invent) a rival tradition placing the Ark in the Lateran instead? How could these claims, at loggerheads with each other and soon after settled in favor of the Lateran, be used to serve and fuel the crusading cause? The author employs the concept of translatio templi to show that the Jewish objects enacted a transfer of power from Jerusalem to Rome and from synagogue to church. While this transfer, made visible by the relics, could bolster Rome's interests in regaining Jerusalem as its rightful possession, it could also be used in the opposite direction, to nullify the claims of earthly Jerusalem to represent the core of Christian concerns.
Another important source is the liturgical study by Sible de Blaauw (1990), repeatedly cited in the footnotes. De Blaauw highlights the Maundy Thursday ritual which the pontiff celebrated alone in his chapel over the Ark in imitation of the Jewish High Priest's exclusive functions within the holy of holies (Sancta sanctorum). The liturgical record points to a tantalizing continuity between eighth-century Roman liturgy and the claims of this text. While Oftestad acknowledges some of these earlier strata by pointing to sources such as Isidore of Seville (560-636) and Amalar of Metz (816/7), that describe church service according to the model of Levites and their service at the Jerusalem temple (p. 133), she still considers as an eleventh-century innovation the institution of regular canons at the Lateran synod of 1059--a remarkable factor for the setting of this narrative.
The genealogy of presence provided by the text itself is well articulated. Clearly the Ark was brought to Rome in AD 70, pace Josephus (and witness the Arch of Titus?), and the objection that it could not have been because it had been lost years before according to the Bible (in Babylonia in 587 BC) is answered through Ambrose's spiritual exegesis of Jeremiah's prophecy (in 2 Macc. 2:7; see p. 182): the Ark was found again in the Temple when the curtain split at the death of Jesus. With respect to this earlier, spiritualizing, tradition, Oftestad maintains that the medieval counterpart takes a more concrete approach: "the insistence on the physical presence of the Ark is strikingly different from the previous tradition. The reference to the Ark as a physical object is a new phenomenon when compared to earlier texts. This literalization can be explained as a response to the new interpretation of Jerusalem and especially of the newly established Templum Domini" (p. 109). Oftestad considers the spirit of Reform in the Roman church as germane with the intention of the Descriptio. She emphasizes the concern for purity [1] and the retrenchment of access to the holy for lay people, in favor of a clerically-led liturgy on the model of the Jewish priesthood, as being part of the structuring of the service around a restricted "Holy of holies" (pp. 138-139). She does not consider, however, the potential telescoping of significances from the Ark considered as a tabernacle of presence to the real presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist as the centre of the new ritual's high point. This omission follows in part from the absence of a discussion about what is more precisely intended by this "Ark of the Covenant," both in shape and in significance. The presence of other relics in the Lateran, such as that of Christ's prepuce and Christ's blood, is also mentioned but never fully discussed. On the other hand, the multiplication of evidence from the same objects, quite usual in the case of the bones of apostles, for example, could be considered as a parallel to the simultaneous find of the objects of Jewish cult in both Jerusalem and Rome.
In the course of the book, Oftestad examines many relevant texts, such as the Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and the writings of Bede, Peter Damian, Bruno of Segni and Bonizo of Sutri. She discusses at length the very engaging poem by Achard of Arrouaise on the Dome of the Rock or Templum Domini, Super templo Salomonis, consisting of 817 verses and written around 1112 when Achard was prior of that church (pp. 112-119). Oftestad considers its allegorization of the objects, while pointing to the persistent tradition of St James, the brother of the Lord, as "the first bishop of the temple" (p. 116). The intertwining of Jewish sacred history with the beginnings of Christianity around the temple cult at Jerusalem has therefore ramifications for the reconquering of the holy places as part of a Christian brief that was hardly separable from, and certainly was not depicted as antithetical to, Jewish faith and cult. Although Pamela Berger's 2012 book on the Dome of the Rock is cited in the bibliography, her argument that the building demonstrates a close allegiance between Jews and Muslims is not used. That Christians reclaimed allegiance with Jews during the crusading effort via the symbolism of the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant would be particularly significant in that light.
Two other sections of the Descriptio are worthy of attention. The first is that mentioning the Constitutum Constantini, where the famous Donation is interpreted as referring specifically to the Lateran in its (contested) transferral of secular power to the spiritual: "The Donation of Constantine thus established the Lateran palace and basilica...as the material expression of supreme priestly authority" (p. 54). This important focusing, based on the 2007 work by Johannes Fried, chimes in with the emphasis on the basilica as a place of law, borne out in its dedicatory inscription as well as in its function as the see of Church councils and synods. The legal function is clearly consonant with the Jewish tradition too. The second aspect is the mention of a "passio ymaginis Domini," whose Feast Oftestad describes as "a Latin counterpart to the Byzantine Feast of Orthodoxy" (p. 150). This Feast overlapped with that of the Dedication of the Lateran basilica and appears to have been gradually replaced by it. Yet, in the narrative of the image of Beirut, read for the Feast, a precise etiology for the Lateran is found, presented as parallel to that of a synagogue housing the image, which is rededicated as the Church of Our Savior, the same dedication of the Lateran basilica itself (p. 154). Thus not only the presence of the image, as recorded by the Descriptio, is relevant, but also its liturgical celebration, which included this (and other) texts springing from the time of the defense of images. [2] In this context, a sermon by the twelfth-century Hebraist scholar and Cistercian monk Nicolas Maniacutia is also analyzed. The Lateran appears to be contending with other Roman basilicas, including St Peter's and Santa Maria Maggiore, for status, importance, and perhaps also popularity among pilgrims to Rome.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, manuscripts from Northern Europe that include other crusading texts also point to Constantinople. They include a list of treasures (mainly relics) in the imperial chapel (p. 202). Taking this Oriental capital into the picture results in a triangulation of claims between Jerusalem, Rome, and Constantinople itself. Oftestad's book leaves this broader scene unexplored. Comparison with work on the objects of Jewish cult in Byzantium [3] may be a fruitful avenue to explore in future studies, shedding light on the dynamics of Christian controversy between East and West that played a fundamental role in the period in question.
Despite some problems in the book's structure, stemming from its status as a first-book-from-a-dissertation (we only discover at p. 150, n. 113, a reference to her 2010 Ph.D. thesis from the University of Oslo), Oftestad offers a broad discussion of the medieval context in which the story about the Ark in the Lateran developed and provides a number of very interesting leads for unpacking the range of issues that claim brings with it. But just quite how much the book cover's powerful (if erased) visual tribute on the Arch of Titus relates to that (for us) quaint medieval claim, that the Ark was kept (and had been kept all along) under the main altar of the Lateran basilica, is not definitively pinpointed. Oftestad's reluctance to engage the visual sources is frustrating. Besides the cover, the book has no illustrations or plans (for example, of the Lateran complex), stretching the readers' imagination to reconstruct the physical whereabouts necessary for understanding the narrative. Placing the text itself in the appendix, and printing the translation following rather than facing the Latin, are also inconveniences for the reader and result in the impression of an ultimately superficial engagement with the original from a philological point of view.
Some minor slips show occasional distraction, such as the same author being called Richard and Richardson (both at p. 88, n. 22), the title "Dedicatio basilica Salvatoris" for the correct basilicae at p. 150, and some spelling mistakes in Italian names and titles ("Zuchetti" for Zucchetti--one of the main early editors of the text--and "Santo Croce" rather than Santa Croce).
Still, the book is a valuable source of information for the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, a key moment for the European engagement in the long enterprise of crusading. It opens the discussion of several aspects of Christianity in the Middle Ages, particularly its relation to its Jewish heritage and its use not only of biblical sources, but also of biblical objects, for the construction and upholding of its peculiar identity.
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Notes
1. In this discussion, I miss a reference to Michael Frassetto (ed.), Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York, 1998).
2. See now Francesca Dell'Acqua, Iconophilia: Politics, Religion, Preaching, and the Use of Images in Rome, c. 680-880 (Birmingham, 2020).
3. The works by Elizabeth Revel-Neher in this field are seminal. They should be considered to reevaluate the statement at p. 99: "the idea of the holy objects circulated primarily within the Latin Church."