The aim of this book as stated in the Preface is to provide a history of medieval Britain using the “biographies of twelve outstanding illuminated manuscripts from about 700 to 1550” (5). Each of the twelve chapters concentrates on the making and use of a particular illuminated manuscript that has been both produced and used in Britain. The earliest candidate is the manuscript of the eighth-century Lindisfarne Gospels; the last is the Psalter of King Henry VIII. Most centuries are represented by a single illuminated manuscript. The exceptions are the twelfth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which are dealt with in two chapters each, bringing the total to twelve chapters dealing with twelve illuminated manuscripts. When information is available about other manuscripts which is useful to understand the “biographies” of the twelve manuscripts chosen, this is skillfully woven into the text.
The photographs provided are of excellent quality. 103 out of 107 are in color, and although the size of the pages of the book is relatively small (23.2 × 15.5 cm), it is possible to read the text present on most illustrations, even that of the interlinear glosses. Clearly, the attention of the reader is focused on the illuminations rather than on the texts, but the author and her publisher must be congratulated on the quality of both.
How many readers will take the trouble, however, to pay sufficient attention to the illustrations remains to be seen. Research by museums on the amount of time spent by visitors on the individual works on display leads them to suggest spending at least one minute on each exhibited masterpiece, which suggests that many visitors do not manage even that. This is also the case when manuscripts are on display, whether illuminated or not, as one can easily observe at the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibition, in London, where the Lindisfarne Gospels are on permanent display.
The aim of the author has been to present readers who are not specialists in all or any of the “subjects and methodologies of history, art history, book history, and...archaeology” to pass through “the portals of the painted pages of the key manuscripts and their relatives, to meet those who commissioned, made and used them and to venture out into the world they inhabited” (9). She has spent most of her career as Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, and has written monographs on the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Cerne, The Holkham Bible, the Luttrell Psalter, and the Sherborne Missal, all of which are the subjects of “biographies” in this book, and all of which (except for the Book of Cerne) can be found in the British Library. The readers are in good hands.
Michelle Brown has also taught many students and has given many lectures and talks to interested laymen. This book is meant for non-specialists, and therefore there are no footnotes, there is only a very short bibliography, and the index (312-320) is far from complete. She knows how to keep the attention of non-specialists by making comparisons, for instance: the Lindisfarne Gospels’ eclectic range of styles and motives “is like reading a menu in the latest Anglo-Italian-Franco-Irish/Scots-North African-Middle Eastern fusion restaurant” (32); a “mannered phase of Byzantine art” shows figures “looking as if they have just stepped out of the shower, with a ‘wet T-shirt’ look, revealing their stylized, elongated anatomy” (127). She muses on the Holkham Bible’s artist: “[w]hat might he visualize now? Might he be a prominent film director?” (197). There are also references to “Boney M in their hit song ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’” as an “alternative treatment of the biblical episode” in Psalm 136/137 in the Saint Albans Psalter (130), and to the hairdo of Princess Leia “in the original Star Wars film” (221). That is fine as far as it goes, of course. But sometimes, I fear, the readers’ attention will become unduly focused on these attempts at keeping their thoughts from wandering.
The subtitle promises to give, through the biographies of twelve illuminated manuscripts, “a history of medieval Britain.” As the chosen manuscripts were indeed very precious and came often into the hands of members of the secular and ecclesiastical elites, an attempt has been made to include a potted history of the kings and queens of England, from the Anglo-Saxons to the Tudors, in the individual chapters. Much of the history of medieval Britain is presented to the public in monographs which take their titles from the monarchs and their families. But usually, such history covers much more than the bare facts of royal aspirations, successes and failures.
Rather than concentrating on political history and histoire événementielle, it might have been possible to give more attention to the general history of the book in Britain (which is now more or less reduced to the urban book trade as it developed in Paris and London (122, 176, 179-180) and the production of illuminated books and the royal collection of books under Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VIII (268-269, 271-272, 283)). Much has been published on book production and book culture in Britain in general (see the bibliography at 292), and it would be possible to expand the comparisons of developments in Britain with those on the Continent beyond occasional observations on Paris and the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages. “Why,” as Helmut Gneuss once observed, “do we have about 7000 extant books written (or added to) on the Continent in the ninth century, as against less than two dozen produced in England?” [1] This would mean that the Book of Cerne alone forms at least 4.16% of the still extant manuscripts made in England made in the ninth century. By the thirteenth century, the numbers must have gone up dramatically. “London had 499 stationers recorded for the period 1300-1499,” engaged among other things in book production (183).
Incidentally, we read about texts other than books (illuminated or not): records, such as charters, occur in books (63, 78); already William the Conqueror could use England’s “advanced bureaucracy” (109); probate acts increased in numbers during the thirteenth century (184); and in late medieval London “[t]here are also records of book people’s wills, legal transactions, transfer of apprentices, standing surety for one another and so son” (189). This suggests that it would have been possible to say somewhat more on other forms of literacy than those that come to the fore in the making, keeping and using illuminated manuscripts as well. Pragmatic literacy comes to mind [2], with its uses of single-sheet documents, but also rolls and registers in book form (cf. 249). The observation that most people could not read (32), that the illiterate read in images (14, 130), and that images telling Bible stories were aimed primarily at the illiterate (191) are debatable. And indeed, the author rightly concedes that “[s]ome of the assumptions about medieval literacy are perhaps too stereotypical.” (191).
The suggestions made above amount to this reader’s regret that not much background is given to the place of illuminated manuscripts in the culture of the book in general, and, even more generally, in the various forms of literacy. But as far as the underlying idea of Illumino is concerned, it does what it sets out to do. There are of course some statements that may be considered questionable. I mention five of them. The “tiny words in Old English...added in the 950s by Aldred” surely do not amount to a translation (33). The “disastrous ‘children’s crusade’ in 1212 in which some 30,000 children from France and Germany...attempted unsuccessfully to reach the Holy Land” never took place (cf. 119): “children” is a mistranslation of pueri, here better rendered as “the powerless” [3]. “Local scores were...often settled [during the Crusades], including pogroms against the Jews in the Rhineland and France, which were opposed by the Church” (121; my italics). This was opposition by some bishops at best; not by “the” Church. And finally it is by no means certain that the “Ramsey Psalter hand” can be found on the Continent, where he “contributed to a copy of Cicero’s Areatea written by the scribes there” (111) [4].
In the previous paragraph I have given references to two of the five statements I labelled “questionable.” I cannot be certain that all readers of this review consulted the notes below. Those who did not will not have been disturbed much by the absence of references; those who did, might of course have liked more references. I doubt whether “the progress and enjoyment of the [intended] reader [would have been impeded] with hefty footnotes” (9). It is wrong to assume that this non-specialist reader would not have understood that for certain specialist readers footnotes might have helped, while the non-specialist reader would simply have skipped the notes [5].
Despite some quibbles, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to the general readers for which it was written ̵ and I am happy to share myself among them, as I am, like most of the readers of this review, no specialist in many of the matters touched upon either.
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Notes:
1. H. Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Tempe, Arizona, 2001: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241), 4. An estimated 80 manuscripts per year may have been produced in Britain in the ninth century. See E. Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden and Boston, 2011: Global Economic History Series 6), 329.
2. Michael Clanchy’s classic From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 occurs in the bibliography in its 2nd edn. The 3rd edn. (Chichester, 2013) is of interest as well, as is his Looking Back from the Invention of Printing: Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2018:Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 40), with 49 illustrations, in color. This second book devotes much attention, as the subtitle suggests, to the role of mothers in teaching reading, and gives illustrations of the remaining primers surviving from England (Figs. 12, 40-42).
3. Peter Raedts, “The Children's Crusade of 1213,” Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977), 279-323, although there are other interpretations as well.
4. This refers to MS London, BL, Harley 2506, which has been attributed to the scriptorium of Fleury by some (sometimes without giving arguments for their certainly), whereas others are equally certain that the manuscript was not written at Fleury. M. Mostert, The Library of Fleury: A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum, 1989: Medieval Studies and Sources 3), 107 was undecided. The jury is still out on this matter.
5. Christopher de Hamel, The Posthumous Papers of The Manuscripts Club (London, 2022), solved the problem by printing the footnotes and bibliography in a (very) small but still legible font, at 510-585.