Manuscript 10 A 14 of the Huis van het boek (formerly the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum) of The Hague, is a sumptuously illustrated manuscript that is both conventional and extraordinary, even perplexing. Composed of 204 folios of 36 x 27 cm, it contains, in addition to a calendar for the full year, the temporale of the Roman missal for winter, the sanctorale, the ordinary for mass, and various masses. A single scribe wrote its text, while the hands of several artists can be recognized in the illuminations and penwork that decorate almost every page. That much is clear and largely uncontested. Problems arise when one digs a little deeper. There are two colophons: the first, dated 1366, names Laurence, a priest from Antwerp (in Brabant, central Low Countries) but working in Ghent (the largest city of Flanders, in the southwest of the Low Countries) as the illuminator, while the second, undated, identifies Arnold, lord of Rummen (in Loon, a small county in the southeast of the Low Countries) and Kwabeek (in Brabant), as the commissioner. The calendar does not suggest an obvious place of creation, though its base reflects practices in the diocese of Liège whereas several feast days are associated with Ghent. The manuscript as a whole bears multiple signs of changes in design and style as well as overpainting, which hint at a tortuous production process marked by discontinuities. Finally, if most of the imagery follows contemporary designs, here and there, for instance in a full-page Crucifixion, one detects a theologically more complex and original approach.
It took Carolyn Coker Joslin Watson several decades of study to resolve some, if not all of the puzzles. Following the lead of Lynda Dennison (in an article of 2002), Watson distinguishes a first campaign, of c. 1345-1355, in which the codex was written in Sint-Truiden, a small city south of Rummen, and one or more artists began its decoration, most probably in Ghent. A second campaign took place in 1366, again in Ghent, and was capped by the colophons; an “addendum” (revisions) followed closely after the second campaign. The shift of production from writing to decoration, and from Sint-Truiden to Ghent, as well as the hybrid nature of the calendar, can be explained by Arnold of Rummen’s marriage, in 1350, to Elisabeth of Lierde, a natural daughter of Louis, count of Nevers, the father of Count Louis I of Flanders (r. 1322-1346). Elisabeth’s home and social circle were located in Ghent, which offered greater access to high-quality craftsmen; the calendar’s “Ghent entries” would then reflect her interests. Watson further argues that the project must have been affected by turmoil in Flanders and Arnold’s own troubles in Loon. Elisabeth’s first husband, the fabulously wealthy financier Simon de Mirabello, was murdered in 1346 on behalf of Count Louis because of his involvement in Ghent’s revolt against Louis under the leadership of James of Artevelde, in 1339-1346. In 1349, Louis’s successor, Count Louis II of Flanders (r. 1346-1384), seized what was left of Simon’s estate; some of Elisabeth’s properties were taken as well, at least for a while, and when Arnold, her new husband, sided with the duke of Brabant during the Flemish-Brabantine wars of 1356-1357, Louis also had Arnold’s possessions confiscated. Arnold then engaged in fruitless struggles to claim lordship over Loon. Everything came to a head in 1366: Elisabeth died and Arnold’s castle of Rummen was burned down, putting an end to his claims to Loon; in the last months of the year, he also lost the missal to his old nemesis, Count Louis II, who had all references to Arnold removed or painted over in an “addendum” to the second production campaign. In the course of those hasty, last-minute revisions, the artists stopped short of deleting the memory of Louis’s natural aunt, Elisabeth, who is still represented as a kneeling figure on fol. 106, where in the space before her nothing but the shoes of her erased second husband can be perceived.
In all of this, one’s thoughts inevitably go out to the artisans, who must have wondered more than once if, when, and how they would get paid. But Watson keeps her eye on the real goals of her study: the identification of the various hands in the decoration; the analysis of their cooperation and their relationship to artwork in Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Bibliothèque royale (KBR), Ms. 9217 (the “summer missal”) and 9427 (a psalter), also commissioned by Arnold, with which the winter missal shares certain traits but which also diverge stylistically, and two antiphonals, KBR, Ms. 6426 and Bruges, Openbare Bibliotheek, Ms. SVC 10a/b (the “Loppem-Bruges” antiphonal); the more sophisticated rendering of volume and space in the second campaign; the penwork flourishing, which is often overlooked, according to Watson; and lastly, the iconography. Here, Watson invokes the concept ofeucharisma (eucharistic life) to demonstrate how the theology of the eucharist, central to mass, permeates the missal’s decoration, from the complex penwork to the illuminations, particularly the Crucifixion-Te igitur images on fol. 143v-144r, which in their complexity may betray the artist’s advanced training in theology. The fact that one of the colophons explicitly identifies the (main) artist as a priest confirms that. Watson concludes that eucharisma drove all major decisions of design and production of the manuscript. That is consistent, she believes, with the growing popularity of the feast of Corpus Christi, originating in the diocese of Liège in the mid-thirteenth century and widely celebrated from the middle decades of the fourteenth century onwards.
Naturally some questions or uncertainties remain. When, during the “addendum” to the second campaign, shields and helmets originally depicted were painted over, obviously because of a change of ownership, they were not replaced by new heraldic identifiers (except for lions on fol. 7v). Was that simply due to haste, and if so, why was it not remedied in a later stage? Watson portrays “Artist 2” (whom she identifies as Laurence, the priest from Antwerp) as the grand designer of the iconography, a master of the “metanarrative...simultaneously maintaining a strong structural framework, manifested in part through symmetry and nested pairs” (38), but she nevertheless claims that “irregularity can be predicated not only of his style but also of his work habits” (37). One can question her dating of the first campaign: her suggestion, c. 1345-1355, is based on style and clothing (29-30) but is partly at odds with her contextual analysis. If the manuscript was commissioned by Arnold and Elisabeth, with the latter serving “as more than an adjunct to her husband in the project” (2), work can hardly have started before their marriage, which took place in 1350, and certainly not before the murder of Elisabeth’s first husband in 1346, unless the new couple were guilty of perfidious plotting that has escaped notice by all historians of Flemish politics in this period. Watson may also not have been aware of the fact that Elisabeth left Ghent in 1347 and may not have returned until 1357 (see Paul Rogghé, “Simon de Mirabello in Vlaanderen,” Appeltjes van het Meetjesland, 9 [1958]: 1-52, at 21-22, especially note 102). I do not understand her initial doubt (ultimately overcome) that the text was written at Sint-Truiden rather than Liège. The “liégeois” feast days in the calendar do not necessarily place the scribal activity in the city of Liège, since Sint-Truiden was of course located in the diocese of Liège and shared with the latter city numerous regional saints (in a strange lapsus, Watson places “Liège in the diocese of Cologne,” [68]; meant is the church province or archdiocese of Cologne). The presence of St Trudo in the calendar is a clear pointer to Sint-Truiden and perfectly normal in a manuscript for a lord of Rummen, just north of the city. Such Brabantine saints in the calendar as St Gertrude (72) were commonly venerated in this border area—she was (and still is) the parish saint of nearby Landen. It is true that the scriptorium of the abbey of Sint-Truiden went into decline in the thirteenth century, but in addition to the abbey, the town had a collegiate church with a school and a large clerical population. Several manuscripts in the abbey library from the mid-fourteenth century, some of them modestly illustrated, have been attributed convincingly to local professional scribes (see Maurits Smeyers, “De verluchting in handschriften uit de abdij van Sint-Truiden,” in Handschriften uit de abdij van Sint-Truiden [Leuven: Peeters, 1986], 48-71 at 58-67). Watson excludes the possibility of any work being done in Brussels because “manuscripts known to have been made in Brussels in the 1340s and 1350s...seem to be virtually nonexistent” (85), which may be correct for the category of lavishly illustrated items in Latin, but there is no doubt that books were being written and illustrated in mid-fourteenth century Brussels (see for instance Erik Kwakkel, Die dietsche boeke die ons toebehoeren: de kartuizers van Herne en de productie van Middelnederlandse handschriften in de regio Brussel (1350-1400) [Leuven: Peeters, 2002], 162-175). Still, Sint-Truiden remains the most likely site for the production of the text, and Watson is surely also right that flourishing and illumination (for both campaigns) probably took place in Ghent, because “it offered possibilities of patronage and access to a rich range of superior artistic resources [and] specific features of style and iconography connect [the missal] with products of earlier illumination in Ghent” (87). Perhaps 1350/1357-c.1360 and 1366 are the best approximate dates for the two campaigns?
Sadly, Carolyn Coker Joslin Watson died shortly before her book was published. While illness may have prevented her from overseeing the last stages of its production, the end result is a magnificent work, richly documented and illustrated. The text of 195 pages is accompanied by 218 pages of figures, all in full color. Scholars will find much to learn from her methodological observations and analysis of technical matters; since the evidence reveals highly mobile artists of the Low Countries at the confluence of international trends, her book will be of interest to all historians of manuscript illumination in late medieval northern Europe.