The Book of Marvels: A Medieval Guide to the Globe is another superb publication from the J. Paul Getty Publications on the occasion of a spectacular exhibition recently on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and still on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York (through May 25, 2025). It is also another of the books co-written by the current or former staff of the J. Paul Getty Museum in collaboration with other scholars. Previous notable publications include Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250-1500, [1] Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, [2] and Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art. [3] In this latest exhibition catalogue that intends to change our understanding of how medieval Western Europe projected and created the shape of the world, Elizabeth Morrison (Senior Curator of Manuscripts, Getty) and Larissa Grollemond (Assistant Curator of Manuscripts, Getty) join forces with Joshua O’Driscoll (Associate Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Morgan) and Kelin Michael (Former Graduate Intern, Manuscripts, Getty). The pretext for both the exhibition and the catalogue are two fifteenth-century copies of The Book of Marvels, produced in Angers, in northwest France, around 1460-1465. They are respectively held at the Getty and the Morgan. While the Getty copy misses around half of its original text and illuminations, the Morgan copy is complete.
The volume is superbly produced with a full scholarly apparatus. The first half of the volume is taken up with four scholarly essays and an epilogue. The second half of the catalogue includes a description of the two manuscript copies, a list of locations, and plates from both copies with translations of passages referenced in the illuminations. The whole is complemented with a copious bibliography and an index. The comparative analysis, textual and visual, of the two copies that the plates provide, is one of the great benefits of this and similar Getty publications. It gives access to unedited manuscripts and opens a possibility of a welcome guided reading into, in this case, possibly treacherous territory of views and imaginations that fifteenth-century Western European Christian people held of the globe, its inhabitants, places, natural phenomena, and customs. As the authors explain in the introduction, some of those views could be troubling for modern viewers, even if they present difference as a thing at which to marvel. The authors do not hesitate to be explicit about the prejudice that a reader/viewer encounters, calling out Islamophobia and racism that pervade The Book of Marvels. They thus adopt a contemporary perspective on The Book of Marvels, showing how it reveals less about the world and more about the way in which “wealthy Christian Europeans” viewed and imagined it. At the same time, the authors provide context for a range of these views, on “peoples with physical differences, fabulous animals, valuable natural resources, violent encounters, religious practices, and visually distinct customs” (12), at the intersection of geography, ethnography, and the natural sciences. The essays in the volume pick up on this complexity of the European medieval mind whose propensity to catalogue difference in ways abhorrent to our age sometimes prevents us from seeing behind it. It is that medieval mind that O’Driscoll, and Morrison and Michael, endeavor to explore, and Grollemond brilliantly achieves in the final essay of the volume.
In his chapter on “Envisioning the Medieval World,” O’Driscoll demonstrates that marvels were a singularly medieval way of seeing the world, tracing it back to Pliny’s Natural History and comparing how medieval encyclopedias, maps, illuminations, and travel narratives (with the exception of Marco Polo, who combatted many of the misconceptions) continued to develop the basic structure of “‘generic’ human beings... and drastically different varieties of marvelous people” (16). Morrison and Michael open their co-authored chapter on “Wonder and Fear in The Book of Marvels” with a pointed question: “What is the difference between wonder and fear?” (37). If wonder is defined in the medieval period as a reaction to what exceeds knowledge and understanding, the unfamiliar may likewise produce fear: the experience of the unknown may lead to a conflation between the two. The two co-authors, however, do not delve deeper into whether “wealthy, white, able-bodied, heteronormative, European Christian men” (37) experienced fear in the face of the new and unfamiliar, but posit that wonders were a means to express everything they perceived as different from their own culture. In the chapter, they focus on “the dangers of women; divergences in behavior and customs, such as religious practices; and animals as signifiers of foreignness” (37). Marvels are the mechanism of othering that persists to present-day America, they observe. They explain that the practice of othering is not unique to one group of people, but in this case that group is a “white, Christian, medieval Europe” (53n28).
The concluding chapter, Larissa Grollemond’s essay on “Copying, Creation, and Collaboration in the Book of Marvels,” is a tour-de-force. Her study of the Marvels manuscripts, and in particular the Getty and the Morgan copies, imposes a wholesale reconsideration of our appreciation of medieval illuminators. Grollemond asserts, based on evidence, that “the Morgan and the Getty Marvels were produced quite closely together, perhaps even simultaneously, by different, but connected artists, or more probably, groups of artists” (67). This collaborative model obviates the idea of a workshop model, grounded in a hierarchy of assistants gathered around a more experienced, accomplished master. It also jettisons the idea of artistic style as a singular piece of evidence that favors positing a single artistic creator. Concretely, the artist known as “The Master of the Geneva Boccaccio” was more likely “a group or groups of illuminators working in collaboration” (67). To continue modern attachment to artistic genius prevents our understanding of social relations that structured the production of Marvels copies and the ways in which groups of artists, rather than a single illuminator, offered visual innovation in portrayals of foreignness to satisfy the demands of their wealthy clients. In other words, Grollemond implies, without needing to be explicit, that the representation of marvels as mechanisms of othering and creation of normativity of bodies and races in the European medieval world was the result of a collective endeavor, and not a singular--and, hence, presumably exceptional--expression of individuals.
The continuous preoccupation that the catalogue’s authors have with the relation of the medieval to the contemporary, and with the ways in which the medieval European worldviews determined the later organization of social and racial hierarchies across the globe, is reinforced with an incisive epilogue by anthropologist Noel B. Salazar, who draws a line from the medieval times to the caricatural reduction of “other” peoples to a single trait that is enhanced and reiterated in contemporary narratives. He offers a word of caution on the present-day global imaginaries fueled by contemporary mass media.
Indeed, confronted with the full visual display of medieval imagination in the illuminations reproduced from the Morgan and the Getty Marvels, we may be dazzled and terrified at the same time. We may marvel at the power of imagination from 500 years ago, but at the same time we should be alerted to the power of imagination and fiction that, despite our contemporary belief in science and equality, clearly continue to pervade our thinking. In this complicated landscape, the catalogue’s authors prove to be excellent guides for both the general public and scholarly readers.
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Notes:
1. Morrison, Elizabeth, and Anne D. Hedeman, eds. Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250-1500. With ElisabethAntoine. Los Angeles: TheJ. Paul Getty Museum, 2010.
2. Morrison, Elizabeth, and Larisa Grollemond, eds. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World. Los Angeles:The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019.
3. Collins, Kristen M., and Bryan C. Keene, eds. Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art.With an Introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2023.