This magnificent two-volume catalogue of illuminated manuscripts produced in early medieval France between the end of the Merovingian period and the crowning of Hugh Capet in 987 is a feast for the eyes and the mind. Curated with care and unparalleled expertise by Lawrence Nees, it offers comprehensive descriptions of the decorative features of 100 manuscripts. Taken together, these two volumes present a dazzling panorama of elite book production during the so-called “dark ages” of European history. Volume One: Text & Illustrations begins with a short introduction that lays out the parameters of the volume and the principles of inclusion for the manuscripts presented in the book. Nees has wisely avoided the terms “Merovingian” and “Carolingian” throughout the catalogue, opting instead for the generic term “Frankish,” which he uses to delineate a geographical area--those territories in northern Europe controlled at one time or another by the Frankish people--rather than as an ethnic marker. For this reason, manuscripts with origins in early medieval England, Lombard Italy, and Ottonian Germany have been excluded from the book, while those created in writing centers located well outside of the borders of modern France, such as Lorsch or St. Gallen, have been included.
More than 7500 manuscripts survive from the ninth century alone, many of which were decorated in one way or another, so the task of selecting the contents of the catalogue was formidable. There are many famous illuminated Bibles, Gospel books, and liturgical manuscripts described here, such as the Gellone Sacramentary (cat. no. 14), the Vivian Bible (cat. no. 53), and the Utrecht Psalter (cat. no. 57), but Nees has gone out of his way to take account of lesser-known illuminated manuscripts representing a variety of genres, including grammatical and legal compendia (cat. nos. 23 and 26), a Latin translation of homilies on the Gospel of Matthew attributed to John Chrysostom (cat. no. 27), collections of late antique Christian poetry (cat. nos. 43 and 87), Boethius’s De arithmetica (cat. no. 52), and a book of culinary recipes (cat. no. 54). The Leiden Aratus and the Vatican Terence are rare representatives of manuscripts devoted to works by pagan authors (cat. nos. 63-64). All but one of the manuscripts described in the catalogue was written on vellum, the sole outlier being a seventh-century copy of a selection of Augustine’s letters and sermons produced at Luxeuil written on papyrus leaves encased in a vellum bifolium (cat. no. 2). With one exception--the famous Plan of St. Gall (cat. no. 46)--all of them are codices.
Nees devotes several pages of his introduction to the “places of production” where these manuscripts were created (25-31). He eschews the notion of organized writing centers where sedentary monks produced manuscripts easily identified by uniform scripts and distinctive decorations, but he provides a useful overview of the primary “seats of writing” (sedes scribentium, a felicitous phrase borrowed from the Plan of St. Gall) in early medieval Europe. These include places and regions with demonstrable manuscript production at various points in this period, like the city of Tours, where the brethren of the abbey of St. Martin and Marmoutier produced luxury Bibles and Gospels at a breathless pace between the turn of the ninth century and the sack of the community in 853, and the diocese of Reims, where several centers of production yielded dozens of lavishly decorated manuscripts, some of them related directly to the patronage of Charles the Bald (r. 843-77), like the Hincmar Gospels (cat. no. 77). Needless to say, monastic institutions throughout the Frankish heartlands were also important centers of manuscript production throughout this period, beginning in the seventh and eighth centuries with Luxeuil, Corbie, and the nunnery of Chelles--the latter providing a rare example of female bookmaking and decoration at this time--and continuing in the ninth and tenth centuries with St. Gallen, Reichenau, Weissenburg, Lorsch, and Fulda. In contrast, Nees downplays the idea that there was an organized scriptorium at the time of Charlemagne that produced luxury manuscripts for the royal court.
After the introduction, Nees devotes the rest of Volume One: Text & Illustrations to the presentation of 341 high-quality reproductions of examples of illumination and other forms of decoration selected from the 100 manuscripts described in the catalogue (37-241). Many of these plates are full-page and most of them are in color. The effort to secure the licenses for so many reproductions of decorated manuscript pages from collections around the world must have been nothing less than Herculean. While these images are indisputably sumptuous and a joy to behold, they are primarily pendants to the catalogue descriptions contained in the second volume of Frankish Manuscripts, which unlock their meaning and significance in the context of each manuscript specifically and early medieval decorative traditions more generally. A rich bibliography and a list of significant exhibition catalogues concludes the first volume (242-88).
Volume Two: Catalogue comprises descriptions of the 100 manuscripts that Nees has curated for the book. He presents the manuscripts in roughly chronological order. Each entry follows the same template that provides the following information: the current location and shelf number of the manuscript; its measurements and number of folios; its date and location of production; brief descriptions of its binding, collation, and script; notes on text decoration, often keyed to the images reproduced in the first volume; the provenance of the manuscript; digital access to the manuscript (when available); and finally, a brief bibliography. Each entry also includes a discursive commentary, where Nees provides details about the transmission and reception of the manuscript, its singular contribution to the history of book decoration, and information about any historiographical debates surrounding it. These commentaries are admirably unfussy and accessible, even to non-specialists and students. Nees wears his vast learning lightly and often expresses an unbridled, contagious enthusiasm for these precious objects. For example, he begins his commentary about a late seventh-century copy of Gregory the Great’sHomilies on Ezekiel made at Luxeuil or Corbie (cat. no. 3) with the phrase: “What a wealth of ornamental design of the finest sort!” (19). He is often frank in his assessments, even when they are uncertain or negative, as is the case when he considers an enigmatic portrait miniature in a late eighth-century legal collection (cat. no. 22): “I wish that I could believe that the image is a self-portrait of the scribe, but having this as an independent image, frontal, strains credulity for the period” (85), or when he evaluates the “untutored style” of lawyer portraits in a contemporary collection of Germanic laws (cat. no. 26): “There is no denying that this painter was, to say the least, inexpert, and gives the impression that he had never drawn human figures before, which might well be the case” (95). Nees’s keen eye for color also yields insights, including the observation that the painter of a Carolingian Gospel manuscript (cat. no. 38) mixed gold and silver pigments to clothe his depiction of Jesus with “electrum,” a composite element interpreted by Gregory the Great as a symbol of the divine and human natures of Christ (133).
These two volumes are monuments of early medieval scholarship that every research library should strive to own. Nees has brought to bear his expertise in manuscript decoration, book history, paleography, codicology, and early medieval Christianity to create a visual resource that will guide and enlighten scholars and students for generations to come. Given the number of manuscripts included in the catalogue, there is no way that its analysis could be close to comprehensive. As Nees notes with respect to the Soisson Gospels (cat. no. 42), “[t]o describe the ornament would take nearly forever if one attempted to be exhaustive, as the range of patterns and the variations upon them is almost beyond description” (149). Nonetheless, this catalogue provides an important introduction to the study of illuminated manuscripts produced in the Frankish heartlands in the early Middle Ages that is sure to kindle scholarly interest in these decorated books and to inspire future inquiry into their creation, use, and preservation.