Brigitte Buettner gives the final word of her monograph, The Mineral and the Visual,to the great vocabularist and cataloguer of the thirteenth century, Alexander Neckham. Neckham wrote, “gems are commended by the wonderous power of their virtue, their sparkling light, and the elegance of their beauty. I call them miracles of nature, grateful gifts, a delight, a study, and a treasure” (204, translation from Lightbone 1992). This lovely piece of text encapsulates Buettner’s approach, weaving together jewel-encrusted objects and fantastic texts to examine the intertwining meanings of—as said in the title—the mineral and the visual.
Buettner’s theoretical grounding, outlined in the introductory chapter, takes a firm stance rooted in the material turn. The author uses a line from Lynn Thorndike as a starting point: “medieval men represented animals in art because they were fond of animals, not because they were fond of allegories” (10, from Thorndike 1923, 58). While startlingly empirical for the twenty-first century, Buettner seeks to return some literalism to the approach to medieval gems but wants to do so “without forgoing meaning” (9). To a great degree, the book is successful in this approach. Buettner finds the middle ground between “rubies mean blood” and “rubies mean rubies.” Stones are analysed as stones, but also as objects with agency, which imbue and create meaning.
Buettner’s longue durée approach, from late antiquity to late gothic, is undertaken not to “exemplify specific historical circumstances [but to examine them] for their creative amalgamation of the mineral and the visual” (18). That said, her approach is roughly chronological in order to trace the continuations or disruptions of knowledge and the intersections of place across nearly eight centuries. The first section, “Jewelled Crowns, Mineralized Kingship,” carries the longest stretch from the fourth through to the fifteenth century. Here, the quest to find the entanglement between object, agents, and meaning is particularly successful. Buettner’s analysis springs from the ever-classic jewelled diadem of Constantine and its symbolic impacts on the creation of jewelled regalia in the High Middle Ages. Because of the material and symbolic makeup of these crowns, Buettner points out that the royal or imperial practice of contemplating these objects, often with companions, not only marked moments of material competition but created meaningful opportunities to ponder their meanings: metaphysical, spiritual, royal, imperial.
Buettner’s examination of Charles IV of Bohemia’s collections is an excellent example of the nuanced and thoughtful analysis found throughout the monograph. Charles IV was, as Buettner agues, “one of the great gemmophile rulers of the period...[and] turned...to precious materiality as a medium to relay ideas about sacral kingship and insist on a regal concept of divinity” (56). At Prague Cathedral he created a special chapel for the crown of Bohemia. The crown had embedded within it a thorn from the crown of thorns and parts of a girdle repurposed from Blanche of Valois, Charles’s first wife. Both objects were associated with Paris, where he had been raised. The crown was stored on a golden bust reliquary holding St. Wenceslas’s skullcap. St Wenceslas was also a distant ancestor of Charles, and he tried to create a state cult in Bohemia centred on Wenceslas. Tying together the personal, ancestral, political, and spiritual, the crown and its setting created a site of intersecting meanings. The placement of the crown in this chapel, as well as further regalia at Charles’s private chapel at Karlštejn Castle, further allowed the gems to replenish their “divine virtus” so that the jewels could carry on their sacred duty in “protecting the royal majestas and participate in legitimizing displays” (61). These gems are not passive, but active objects; their wells run dry and need to be filled to carry on with their sacred and royal duties. Charles’s gemmophilia and its manifestations are put to excellent use in Buettner’s nuanced analysis.
The second section, “Lapidary Knowledge in Word and Image,” takes its focus from lapidaries, medieval manuscripts that describe and expound on the physical and metaphysical meanings and compositions of gemstones and minerals. Buettner leads from Marbode of Rennes’s early twelfth century Liber lapidum as one of the most influential medieval lapidaries, which was itself influenced by Qustā ibn Lūqā’s tenth-century writing. As Buettner shows, Marbode’s work was copied or adapted in various guises across later medieval Europe. These lapidaries, Buettner maintains, were primarily a royal concern, linking back to her examination of the physical objects and their meanings in the first section. The stones’ numerous metaphysical meanings are the focus here, though. Buettner meticulously examines the “lithic magic” of the stones, particularly their uses in sympathetic magic and cures (noting, as Marbode did, that since God endowed these stones with these sympathies and resonances, it was perfectly acceptable to use them as such). Suspensions, for example—the practice of suspending a mineral or gem hung from the neck to have continuous physical contact—are discussed as demonstrative of the importance of the human touch interacting with the mineral or gem for the most impactful effects. Coral, Buettner notes, was one of the few minerals with enough demand to be exported out of Europe for its own metaphysical properties, in a foreshadowing of the section to come. The interaction between the human and the mineral, with the agency of the minerality forefront, becomes the focus here.
The final section, “Geographies of Mineral Marvels, Economies of Mineral Assets,” focuses on “gems as a transnational currency” (154). As Buettner firmly situates her theoretical stance within global histories to understand the contacts and transmissions of not just materials but knowledge (18), this section brings a welcome view of these connections throughout Europe, North and East Africa, and Asia. Buettner examines well-known texts such as those of Prester John and Marco Polo, particularly Jean de Berry’s illuminated fifteenth-century version of Livre des Merveilles, alongside the Book of John Mandeville, Odoric of Pordenone’s Itinerarium, and others. In the chronological reach of these texts, Buettner notes a tension between some earlier texts’ geographic description of travel itineraries, and “fresh, fact-based geographic information” (176) emerging in the West in the fourteenth century but notes the continuing appearance of particular precious objects. One, a ruby coveted by Kublai Khan, can be traced through Byzantine, Arabic, Persian, and Indian sources, as well as both Odoric and Mandeville, whether real or not. Its importance is in its meaning, read consistently through these texts, rather than the existence of any actual ruby “as long as the palm of a hand and as thick as an arm” (176). Distance, combined with difficulty of acquisition, mapped on to each other to create heightened desire around the gems and minerals which travelled distances, primarily from east to west (with the noted exception of coral, as highlighted above.) This combination of distance and difficulty of acquisition, Buettner argues, helped position these stones from the east as objects worthy of desire and possession.
From here, Buettner sets perhaps the most ambitious argument to the book: that the desire, possession, and display of these precious materials, generated from lapidaries, manuscript illuminations depicting precious stones and mining scenes, and imperial regalia and crowns and other precious objects, created an intellectual foregrounding in Europe to see the world as “a repository of natural rarities” (200). These ideas, Buettner maintains, reached further audiences with Renaissance print culture which then manufactured “full-blown gem envy, eventually unleashing the somber forces of extractive colonialism” (200). The book’s topic and global scale means that the shadow of human exploitation exists on so many of the pages, from the Western medieval sources and their monstrous othering, to the trade routes and ships that not only carried minerals but also enslaved people, to the exploitation of mine workers extracting the valuable resource. Indeed, Buettner points out repeatedly that the illuminations depicting mining masks showcase what must have been a painful, if not brutal, job possibly carried out by the enslaved in some locations. As a part of a final chapter examining the networks of the gem trade, it is a sobering and almost startling conclusion, coming as the very last paragraph and sentence of the chapter. It is an avenue worth much further exploration in the future.
The book is wonderfully illustrated, often with manuscript images that are from texts lesser-known or harder to access. However, a map or two would not have gone awry here, especially in a monograph that is tracing the global medieval network of industry and trade of these precious materials. The book also seems to be occasionally un-material, even for a study that focuses primarily on manuscript studies. To some degree this is understandable; Buettner is specifically using text and image, as she points out, to build the majority of the study. The danger of this is that the book may not land in the hands of materialists or archaeologists, but appeal more to those in manuscript studies. These audiences can and should comingle whenever possible through studies like this. Those objects which are gorgeously illustrated allow the reader to visualise these them in use and in motion with their “augmented radiance” (21-22), such as the crown of Bohemia discussed above.
The Mineral and the Visual’s three sections are just as strong, or perhaps stronger, apart than they are together. Without a stronger throughline maintained in the book, the three can seem disparate enough as to almost be separate topics even with their related theoretical approaches. For some readers, this may mean that the individual sections may be more useful than the whole book, and indeed, read separately, these are excellent studies on their own terms. But for others, the whole will give wide new knowledge on approaching mineral and precious objects in the Middle Ages, and some of the questions raised here will no doubt need further mining (pun entirely intended). For example, Buettner twice nods towards gendered interpretations. One of the crowns of Castile, “antiquity-infused and legitimacy-laden” in its gems and cameos, was bequeathed from Peter the Cruel (d. 1369) to his daughter Constanza, a claimant to the disputed throne. This, Buettner notes, indicates the “relatively gender-fluid nature of medieval crowns” (52). In another section, Buettner recalls the shock of fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta’s description of jewels being displayed in the hands of enslaved boys in the mineral markets of Tabriz. Buettner briefly wonders whether Ibn Battuta was shocked by this “nontraditional mode of display or because female shoppers did the looking” (195). Such notes, passing though they are, tell us there is much still to examine with gender and the mineral.
Overall, The Mineral and the Visual is a thought-provoking and occasionally exceptionally dazzling read. The breadth of knowledge needed to assemble a topic spanning centuries, and the detailed textual work, is impressive. Academic readers will find much here to ponder and take forward into their own research. It is an impressive read, and highly recommended.