This book offers a contextual history of a fourteenth-century amulet and a detailed analysis of its textual and visual content. The contribution of the study, however, goes far beyond that. It explores the cultural meaning of roll-format not simply as an information storage, but as lieu of interaction between the object and its cultural context, between changing conventions ("etiquettes") of using, reading and engaging with a written text or, as Glenn Peers puts it, the "special relationship" of the roll with its users.
At the centre of this meticulous study is a rare and precious object--a fourteenth-century amulet roll, 5.11 m long and less than 10cm wide. Divided into two parts at some point prior to the beginning of the twentieth century, it is kept at present in two locations--namely, in Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago as Codex 125, and in Pierpont Morgan Library in New York as M499. The scroll contains passages from the four Gospels; Nicene Creed; Psalms 48, 35, 91; Epistle of Abgar legend; and short invocations to eleven saints at the obverse side, all in Greek. The reverse side contains prayers, supplications and spells in Arabic placed after an initial cross. The part in Arabic was written in 1383 for Sulayman ibn Sarah, a Christian, and one of the copyists, the monk priest al-Bashūni, left his name in the concluding colophon. Glenn Peers points out that (unlike the side with the text in Arabic) the part in Greek was produced by only one scribe, and the images are consistent in their layout and form. The work contains twenty-eight illustrations in total. The parts reached the two libraries through different routes at the beginning of the twentieth century, and were exhibited together in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557) in Metropolitan Museum in 2004. It is thus a great service to scholarship to have this roll, once split, brought back together in this book through the insightful discussion, translations of the texts and the colour reproductions.
Glenn Peers points out that it is one of the most interesting specimens of this kind as it has not only the "longest cycle of the Abgar legend extant in East Christian art" (26), but retains texts in two different languages. The length of the roll is impressive, but not unusual--a number of amulet-scrolls of later date, containing large number of magic seals and written in English and Latin, kept today in the Bodleian Library, are of similar or more substantial length. Peers reminds us that often the amulet scrolls were measured to fit the body height of the patron (11)--but this is not a rule, and numerous examples from Armenia to the Balkans and Western Europe could evidence that. The reasons could be practical (especially in the cases when the roll is used to bind or cover certain parts of the body), or content related. The fact that the fourteenth-century roll has changed hands over the centuries is not surprising either: while amulets in general (be they rolls, books, pieces of paper, parchment, fabric, lead, stone etc), are objects of intimate, personal use, they at the same time often tell the story of continuous exploitation for centuries, and changed ownership. The use of more than one language or more than one graphic system in a medieval protective scroll could often be detected too, but this particular example crosses not only linguistic barriers, but--as the study convincingly suggests--it evidences an usage in two quite different environments: in a powerful Greek aristocratic politicized devotional context, and in more common, but personalized, Arabic-speaking Christian milieu. It is, however, quite remarkable that the two most popular apocryphal texts used for supernatural protection, the legend of King Abgar and St Cyprian's prayer, found their way onto the surface of this roll.
The book eloquently starts with a reminder of the manuscript of an American classic, On the Road, byJ. Kerouac, produced in a roll format. This sets the stage for constructing and re-imagining the cultural significance of roll usage, "viewing and storing" which Glenn Peers provocatively and fittingly calls "highly idiosyncratic" (7). The second chapter explores the historical (and political) context in which the Greek part of the amulet was produced. The author convincingly dispels previous attempts to associate the production place of the amulet with Constantinople based only on the ground of its high-quality illustrations and carefully executed text. Instead, he identifies the fourteenth-century Empire of Trebizond, which existed from the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the crusaders in 1204 to 1461 when the city was taken by the Ottomans, as the most likely provenance of the manuscript. He offers a number of "contextual clues" discussing the preservations of artistic conventions, the use of compositional devices characteristic of Byzantine visual culture, and the trend of filtering "Byzantine tradition" for specific cultural and ideological purposes. The author remarks that a codex from the Hellenic Institute in Venice containing The Romance of Alexander the Great stylistically "best approximates the characteristics of Chicago-New York roll" (16), and suggests a common workshop for both manuscripts (21). However, the main reason for associating the roll with Trebizond is the mentioning of the patron saint of city, St Eugenios and his three companions Valerianos, Kanidios and Akylas in the Greek part of the amulet. As the cult of St Eugenios was not particularly popular outside the Empire of Trebizond, this specific selection of martyr saints indicates a deliberate, local selection. Peers states: "The Chicago-New York roll was likely a product of an imperial court, and it was intended at an essential level as an expression and determinant of pro-Trebizond ideology" (17). This association and the stylistic closeness between the Venice Romance of Alexander and the roll allow the author to narrow the timeframe of the production of the roll to the reign of Alexios III, and in particular the decades 1350-1380. Peers reads the cultural importance of the linkage between patrons and their heavenly protectors as a defining cultural element and brings to discussion an ample number of visual texts to evidence that. Further, the second chapter offers a detailed analysis of the Abgar cycle of the amulet. The legend of King Abgar is indeed a key textual and visual source for amulets in Eastern Christianity. I should add here that beyond the medieval period it became more and more mass produced (as numerous Orthodox Slavic instances from late Ottoman period suggest). Glenn Peers discusses the execution of this cycle in the amulet roll with admirable expertise and erudition bringing into comparison various relevant materials. He reconstructs the meaning of the amulet through the presence of specific saints/protectors, and ultimately through the presence of Christ in Abgar legend and its visualization on the roll. Indeed, medieval amulets were not produced for any public display, and Peers is right to suggest that it operated through a small group--but "a group of one or several," "invested in the belief of Christ as a protector of the city" (28). He craftily underlines the dynamic between public and personal imbedded in this object.
The third chapter "Performing the Roll" is perhaps one of the most interesting from a methodological perspective. Peers makes valuable assertion that "the roll was a performative object" "through its objectness, and through its images and texts" (33) and explores the Abgar text intra- and extra-contextually by bringing into the discussion the image of the cross surrounded by sacred abbreviations. Peers discusses similar examples from seals, Georgian manuscripts and a schema from the monastic complex in Meteora, and points out that it could often be found in the decoration of the Orthodox Churches. (Here in brackets I should mention that in some late/post medieval Slavonic manuscript this particular image of the cross with letter abbreviations is accompanied by a prayer for protection to Holy Cross, and that the Byzantine poem on which the letter abbreviations are based exists also in medieval Slavonic rendition.) The roll is explored through a wide panorama of manuscripts, objects, images and anecdotes going back in centuries and cultures, in order to "profile" further its patron and to demonstrate that while the use of any kind of "amulet" may suggest a deviation from the Christian norms, this particular specimen was produced for "elite patron concerned with avoiding any taint of heterodoxy and, one might say, with strong assertion of perfect righteousness" (49). While the excerpts from Psalms and the New Testament on the roll could be seen as a further proof of that, the relation between the texts and images varies from highly symbolic, demonstrative (as the image of the evangelists Mark and Luke) to suggestive of liturgical associations. The author carefully tries to disentangle the question of the role this object performed within its cultural context and for its user(s).
The fifth chapter focuses on the amulet "diglossia" and explores its further uses in the Eastern Christian context. The verso side of the amulet suggests that at some point it reached a new owner, Sulayman, who felt the need to add further a protective content on the roll, and to personalized it, this time in Arabic. Peers suggests, correctly in my view, that this does not imply bilingualism, as it is difficult to judge how fluent was Sulayman in Greek, although he clearly understood the purpose of the object he now possessed. Searching for the location where this exchange might have happened, Peers points at communities such as Melkite in Cyprus, where both Greek and Arabic were in use, but does not rule out the possibility that the object changed hands in increasingly diverse Trebizond itself. The chapter examines closely the reverse side of the manuscript with its texts in Arabic, a blend of apotropaic invocations and scriptural quotes. Analysing the cross image on the verso side, the author admits that both Christians and Muslims used intricated patterning of knots for protection. Comparing the two sides of the roll, their content and execution, the author concludes that the Arabic texts "make clear the desire for results of piety, and not the selfless devotion one might possibly see in the obverse" (68). The concluding chapter brings furthero int the picture the cultural and devotional diversity of Trebizond and paints a colourful image of the place both provincial and imperial in its own ways.
The book is usefully furnished with two appendices one by Peers--containing a physical description of the roll, a description of the images on it and a translation of the accompanying texts--and the second by Barbara Roggema with an expert commentary on the part in Arabic and on the prayer of St Cyprian of Antioch, which she translated from Arabic into English. The book contains also a lengthy bibliography and good quality of reproductions of the roll and other relevant images.
To conclude this is an excellent study, both erudite and eloquent, balanced in its assertions and yet very rich in its interpretations, and for that both Peers and Roggema should be congratulated.