Medieval Academy of America

Review: [untitled] Author(s): Jacques Guilmain Source: Speculum, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 271-273 Published by: Medieval Academy of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2864881 . Accessed: 25/10/2011 06:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Medieval Academy of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Speculum.

http://www.jstor.org

Reviews

271

administrative and scholarly vocabulary of the thirteenth-century university, rather than a collection of essays. As Weijers points out, her goal is to enlarge our knowledge of medieval lexicography and the formation of technical vocabularies in all fields of medieval intellectual endeavor, not to reprise earlier work in that field. This objective accounts for the coverage and emphasis in the volume under review, which is more generic than the earlier volumes in the same series. It focuses on such matters as dictionaries, glossaries, and other works in which medieval Latin authors defined the terms they used; the division of texts into distinctions, chapters, and other subdivisions; the ways medieval authors flagged citations to other authors; alphabetization as a principle of organization in medieval reference works; the techniques used in making concordances, collections of exempla, and other compilations; and the organization of bibliographies and library catalogues. Weijers draws on a broad array of sources to illustrate these developments, from sermons to chronicles to medical florilegia to works of spiritual counsel to statutes governing library collections and more. The one field to which she devotes the most extended substantive as well as generic attention is jurisprudential literature, both civil and canon. The usefulness of this book is enhanced by its excellent bibliography of secondary sources, as well as by its extremely valuable catalogue of over 120 medieval texts from the seventh through the fifteenth century pertinent to the book's themes. In each case, she dates the work, gives references to modern editions and/or manuscript sources, and indicates secondary literature when it exists. She includes as well an index of manuscripts cited and an index of the technical terms whose meanings her research aims at discovering and explaining. That aim is achieved, and splendidly. This book meets the highest standards of scholarship and is a welcome addition to the larger project in which Weijers and her associates are engaged. Thanks to it, we have a much clearer understanding of the conditions under which medieval thinkers labored and a much better sense of how they conceptualized and described their own intellectual activities. MARCIA COLISH, L. Oberlin College

and A The A. JOHNWILLIAMS BARBARA SHAILOR. SpanishApocalypse: MorganBeatusManuscript. New York: George Braziller, in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991. Pp. 239; 130 color plates. $175. Around 776 the monk Beatus of Liebana in northern Spain produced his Commentary on the Apocalypse. Beatus was motivated by more than a desire to write. He and his disciple Etherius, accused of being heretical agents of Antichrist by Elipandus, bishop of Toledo, responded by denouncing Elipandus himself as the author of the doctrine of Adoptionism, a position that reduced Christ the man to a secondary position relative to God the father. Beatus's stand was vindicated by Carolingian councils that declared Adoptionism a heresy, thus making him a torchbearer of orthodoxy in Spain. The Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, the final biblical chapter, tells of the powerfully vivid mystical vision of St. John of things to come during the last days of earthly time. Then God's true believers will triumph once and for all over all false prophets and demonic usurpers. Thus Beatus's presentation was a double-barreled attack on the perceived enemies within the church as well as on Islam. Except for a single-page ninth-century fragment, the earliest extant copy of an illustrated version is the Pierpont Morgan Library's MS 644. The manuscript was commissioned by an Abbot Victor of the Leonese monastery of San Miguel de Escalada and executed by the monk Maius around the middle of the tenth century. It may have been an outside commission, for Maius's home would more logically have been the monastery

272

Reviews

of Tabara, southwest of Escalada. The reconstruction of the history of earlier illuminated Beatus manuscripts is complex and conjectural. The Morgan Beatus belongs to a family of such books that was evidently reworked in the tenth century, at which time were added on Evangelist portraits, genealogical tables, and St. Jerome's Commentary theBookof Daniel. John Williams in his excellent, readable introduction, "The History of the Morgan Beatus Manuscript," argues for a central role for Maius in this enterprise and establishes connections between him and another prominent Spanish scribe, Florentius of Valeranica, as well as with the Carolingian center at Tours. Williams quite rightly does not attempt to discuss at length the place of the Morgan Beatus within the tradition of illuminated Apocalypses as a whole, which would surely have been an unmanageable task in the context of this publication. One will have to wait for his forthcoming corpus of the illustrated Beatus manuscripts to delve into that problem. Barbara Shailor's "Codicology of the Morgan Beatus Manuscript" is a welcome addition to her previous publications on Spanish early-medieval manuscripts but will be of interest primarily to the specialist. Williams's commentaries and quotations from the Apocalypse that accompany the plates make the perusal of the illustrations pure pleasure. Mindful that not all readers will be medievalists, the authors have included an excellent glossary of technical and ecclesiastical terms. There is also a complete bibliography. Surely no better choice could have been made to introduce the reader to the Morgan Beatus than Williams and Shailor. But in the end this is primarily a facsimile edition, reproducing the 131 pages in the manuscript that bear illustrations, initials, or other decoration. The star of the performance remains Maius, who clearly thought of himself primarily as a painter, although it is likely that he also did the writing. He belongs to that tradition of medieval Spanish art which has usually been called Mozarabic, although that label should strictly speaking apply only to those art works made in the southern areas of Spain under Moorish domination. Maius's paintings, like others in that tradition, may appear at first as provincial, exotic, and naive. Art historical research on early-medieval manuscript illumination tends to be dominated by the search for residual or reemerging "classical" elements, demonstrating at least their survival and at best their triumph against the forces of the East and barbarism, leading to Romanesque and ultimately, be it haltingly, via Gothic to the Renaissance. Any symptom of idealization, illusionism, plasticity, or depth is carefully added to the database of this grand recit. Within this scenario "Mozarabic" art can only be a side show; it is not even mentioned in the introductory art history textbooks. But Maius's style is almost joyously anticlassical. His little puppets with huge eyes, sometimes strung together like paper dolls, play out their grand prophetic story on colorful miniature flat stages. There are some Islamic and Carolingian elements involved, but they are not the foundation of this style, which is fundamentally the expression, carried to its logical conclusion, of certain late-antique formal trends. The result is rather startlingly "modern." Art historians and critics have always been sensitive to this. In his preface Charles E. Pierce, Jr., tells how Meyer Schapiro instructed the visiting artist Fernand Leger: "If you have time to see only one work of art in all of New York City, it should be the tenth-century Apocalypse at the Morgan Library"; and Andre Grabar once wrote a paper comparing the paintings of Mozarabic illuminators and those of Pablo Picasso. Maius's art is the product of a mystical vision of the universe and has, of course, nothing to do with modern aesthetic theories. Nevertheless those who love the moderns will find in Maius a kindred spirit. The locusts of Apocalypse 9.7-12 meander in a reversed S path through four colored bands, upwards towards the angel of the abyss, their scorpion tails striking their helpless victims, their fierce snarling heads in combined full-face/ profile view seemingly an early version of the horse's head in Picasso's Guernica. The Ark of Noah (a prefiguration of the Church) is a compartmentalized doll's house, decorated with little hearts, inhabited by a delightful menagerie of yellow, blue, orange, and

Reviews

273

purple creatures. There are some wonderful double-page spreads, such as the surrealistic "Woman Clothed with the Sun" (Apoc. 12.1-18). As Williams observes, it is conceived on the grand scale of mural painting. In a setting of six colored bands, the evil giant seven-headed dragon battles the forces of goodness in the form of Michael and his angels above, as one of its heads spews out a dark river below. The woman (an allegorical figure of the Church), with child, fused with the glowing sun, floats above the moon at the upper left; in the lower right the dragon, transformed into a black devil, is cast down into the Inferno with his own wicked angels. Maius was clearly proud of his work. His name appears in two places in the manuscript, and the unusually long colophon gives much information about the commissioning of the book. He was a well-known and influential illustrator. The monk Emeterius tells us how Maius passed away on 30 October 968 in the Monastery of San Salvador de Tavara, having left unfinished another illustrated Beatus that Emeterius himself was called upon to complete. Maius had been the teacher and mentor, and Emeterius the pupil refers to him admiringly as a worthy master painter (archipictor). At a time when facsimile editions have tended to become both exquisitely refined and exorbitantly priced, it is refreshing to find a high-quality facsimile edition of a major manuscript that even an average college library can purchase.
JACQUESGUILMAIN,State University of New York, Stony Brook

Chaucerand His FrenchContemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth I. JAMES WIMSATr, Century.Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Pp. xv, 378; 21 blackand-white illustrations. $60. is James I. Wimsatt's Chaucerand His French Contemporaries a major work of contextualization whose aim is similar to that of Charles Muscatine's magisterial Chaucerand the French Traditionof 1957-to demonstrate Chaucer's close affinity with literary things French. In the intervening years since Muscatine's book, the center of gravity of Chaucer's context has oscillated, it seems, between Italy and England. Piero Boitani, David Wallace, and others have emphasized Chaucer's affinities with Dante and Boccaccio, while Paul Strohm and others have demonstrated the centrality of English politics and society to an understanding of Chaucer and his oeuvre. Others have sought their Chaucers in directions more theoretical than geographical, with major works by Ferster, Leicester, and Kendrick using newer critical modes to explicate his works; particularly over the past three or four years, several important books have approached him from a variety of feminist perspectives (Mann, Dinshaw, Martin, Hansen). None of these approaches or contextualizations, of course, precludes all others, for the past twenty years has certainly taught us that the besetting sin of literary criticism has been the inclination to totalize, that is, to inscribe one's own intentions onto those of past authors, passing off one's interpretation as objectively "true," exclusive of others. It is, though, with some sense of coming home that I read Wimsatt's book, for to me Chaucer seems overwhelmingly French. Chaucerand His French Contemporaries not, however, merely a reharvesting of a field is so thoroughly worked by Muscatine thirty-seven years ago. Where Muscatine centers The Romanceof the Rose and devotes the last third of his book to The Canterbury Tales,Wimsatt largely avoids both, except in passing. His interest is mostly in the lyrical as opposed to the narrative; and, as his title affirms, the French poets he treats are less the giants of the previous century, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and more the ones whose lives overlapped and probably intersected with Chaucer's-Jean de la Mote, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Oton de Granson, and Eustache Deschamps. Muscatine, of