Welcome to this webinar, Meet the Manuscript's Hidden Treasures of Mediaeval Illumination.
Thank you very much for being here.
My name is Helen, I'm the Education Officer at the Bodleian Libraries. Just to let you know a few practical things before we start,
we are recording the event, but as this is a Zoom webinar, your video and audio are turned off and you won't appear in the video.
We will share a link to the film a week or so after the event.
Today's event features two of our wonderful Bodleian colleagues in conversation over some extraordinary manuscripts,
and we'd like you to join the discussion. So if you would like to ask a question,
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I will put your questions live to our experts after we've looked to each manuscript in turn.
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for the first time as part of the Polonsky Foundation digitisation project,
so you can take a look for yourselves. We have another exciting event on the 14th of June from the same project,
one of our Singing Together, Apart series, which this time will explore drama and Gregorian chants.
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So once again, welcome. The plan for today is to take a look at three manuscripts featuring great treasures of mediaeval painting.
Our speakers are Matthew Holford, the Tolkien curator of mediaeval manuscripts, and Martin Kauffmann, head of Early and Rare Collections.
Matthew and Martin are both in the Weston Library on Broad Street in Oxford, but in different rooms,
and they will be examining the manuscripts together to consider how they were produced,
the artistic style and meaning, and the significance of the images. As I said, we'll pause after each manuscript for questions,
so please do add these to the Q&A box throughout. If we don't have time to answer all your questions today,
we'll collate the most popular ones and do our best to answer them in our follow up email.
So I'll hand over now to Matthew and Martin. Thank you very much, Helen.
And, and welcome everybody to the Bodleian Library.
It's wonderful to have you all here and to share these manuscripts with.
And we're starting with an image that I hope encapsulates very nicely the idea of hidden treasure,
that we, we've organised the session around, wonderfully rich image,
sparkling with gold on a deep purple background, obviously a treasure,
but something whose meaning is, is perhaps not immediately obvious and a little bit elusive.
So we're just going to leave that on the screen for everyone to feast their eyes on,
while Martin says a few introductory words about how the session is going to work.
Thanks, Matthew. And hello, everyone. Yes, I think we're going to come back to this and look in a bit more detail at this, this page in a moment.
But just to say, as Helen mentioned,
we're going to look in a bit of detail at three manuscripts out of about 10000 manuscripts from mediaeval Europe in the Bodleian's collection.
We're just approaching the end of a digitisation project which is focussed on manuscripts, mediaeval manuscripts from Germany.
And so the manuscripts we're going to be showing are Latin manuscripts from, from Germany.
They're in wonderful condition. I'm looking at this one on the screen.
I'm not in the same room as, as, as Matthew. And I think the state of preservation of, of this manuscript is the first thing one notices.
This is a manuscript which dates from the early 11th century, from the 1010s or 1020s.
But it's the quality of its craftsmanship and the fact that it's been kept closed in a book has kept it in a miraculous state of preservation.
Matthew mentioned the word hidden, we don't try and hide these manuscripts, but to make them more widely available, we've been digitising.
But in this session, Matthew will be turning the pages of the real manuscript.
And I think that thrill of handling the actual manuscript is still very different from looking at still images on, on, on the screen.
So we're going to move away from this image briefly, aren't we, Martin, to look at perhaps a less exciting page,
but something that will tell us a bit more about when and where the manuscript was written and its later history.
You, you mentioned just now that the manuscript was from the early 11th century, a sort of quite imprecise dating.
And perhaps you'd like to say something about how we go about dating and localising these manuscripts and assessing where and when they were made.
Yes, because I think that's one of the key things to, to, to come to terms with is that these, these manuscripts on the whole,
don't say where they were made, when they were made, by whom they were made.
That's all, everything we know about them is really the result of sort of detective work on the manuscript.
We don't, for the most part, either have sort of external documents in the way that you might for a Renaissance painting,
have an artist's contract or something.
Everything we can get comes for the most part from the manuscript itself and trying to put together all the evidence,
not only of the contents, but of the style of script and, and the style of illumination.
And one of the, this is, this is a sacramentary, it's a book to be used by a priest in the, in the same celebration of the, of the mass.
And like many liturgical books, it begins with a calendar of saints and feasts, and their feast days.
And that's very, very useful in several ways.
Different saints were venerated in different, different places.
In this case, it also helps with the dating because we have Saint
Adalbert who only died in the year 997. So we know the book has to have been made after that year.
And we can also see sometimes additions, clearly in a different script.
And I can see on the, on the left hand, at the bottom of left hand page here,
one of those additions, the obit, the commemoration of the, of the death of a man called Sigehard,
who was patriarch of Aquileia in, in northern Italy.
So putting all the evidence together.
It was made in an abbey called Reichenau on Lake Constance, but that it was taken quite early in its life to Italy, to Aquileia. Sigehard,
we know when he died, he died in 1077. So the manuscript seems to have been moved quite early in its life.
And, of course, the things written in these, in these manuscripts is sort of in the margins or added to them, help us to trace their movements.
And it's from Italy that the Bodleian acquired it in the collection of the great Venetian collector, collector in the 18th,
the second half of the 18th century called Matteo Luigi Canonici.
Now, as I, as I page back towards the picture that we started at.
It's perhaps worth emphasising, isn't it, that of the 10000 manuscripts you mentioned,
really quite a small number of them have, have the luxurious decoration that we're going to see today.
And as you can see, as I page through, even, even this manuscript is by no means decorated all the way through.
So decoration is something that particular books tend to have and they tend to often have at particular places as well.
It's not evenly spread throughout the book. And perhaps that will, that will help us to understand something about what we're looking at on this page,
Martin? Yes, indeed, the majority, but not all of the books containing illumination from the Middle Ages are religious in, in, in, in content.
This is, this is a book for use in Christian ritual,
in the most important, the, the celebration of the mass, the most important ritual of the Christian church.
And the illumination is concentrated on the most important parts of the book.
And we'll, we'll see in a little while that there is a sort of hierarchy of illumination,
but they are very conscious of the matching that the, the, the, the biggest illumination to the most important moments in the, in the text.
But it's only really, we have to understand these as part of an art of the book.
And I think sometimes when one sees individual pictures or, you know a Christmas card or something, and, and just an image on its own,
one, one isn't really pushing the, this art in context.
And what we have here on the left, at the beginning of the preface to the canon of the mass,
the fixed portion of the text of the mass is in fact not, not a picture as such, but a monogram made out of two letters.
Standing for Vere Dignum, VD.
It is truly right and just, our duty and celebration always and everywhere to give you thanks.
So the, the, the, the words have been, have been decorated, knitted together into a wonderful,
almost mystical sign with a cross very prominently where they, where they join.
And we'll look at forms of decoration more closely in a little while.
But here we can see that there's a great amount of gold being used.
We can see that there are sort of very stylised but still recognisably sort of organic forms.
And I can see a sort of dragon's head or something biting the end of that sort of tendril.
So there's, we'll, we'll come back and talk about the meaning of decoration in a moment.
But this is very much an art that linked together image and text, pictures and words.
We tend to think that scribes and artists may be different people.
But in saying that, we have to realise how closely knitted together those forms were.
We can see that very nicely, again, can't we, if we turn over the page and look at, look at the following miniature, which introduces the canon of the mass.
Yes, yes, isn't that wonderful?
Here we have the, the crucified Christ, which is obviously appropriate for the commemoration and re-enactment of, of, of his sacrifice in the Eucharist.
But here again, here again, it's a, it's an image of the crucifixion, but it's also knitted together with the words because the text begins,
Te igitur clementissime Pater, You therefore most merciful Father.
So the, the cross is, in fact, also doubling up as the, as the T here.
So, so, again, there's this knitting together of the two.
Just, just we, also to notice there are so many crucifixions in mediaeval art, and yet they are all different.
And even at this period, there is a variety, some showing a very human Christ sort of suffering and dying on the cross.
But here we have a rather majestic, very living, eyes open Christ on the cross.
So there are very different forms that that central image can take.
We've got one more image to look at from this manuscript, and as I page through to it, we can,
we can again emphasise the point that the decoration is coming at particular places in the book to mark particularly important feasts.
So the next, opening of
decoration that we'll see, it's marking one of the most important feast of the year, which is Christmas, and we can see,
we can see the nativity, here,
but it seems like rather a strange arrangement in some ways for the nativity, Martin,
and this image is a little bit difficult to understand perhaps what's going on here.
Yes, I think, I think it's good
to try to understand how artists were working, so we've got the Nativity and the, the Angels announcing the good news to the shepherds
underneath, and then the, the opening of the mass for Christmas Day opposite.
We've, we've already said when we were looking at the calendar that these manuscripts don't say where and when they were made or
by whom these artists are, and scribes are anonymous, and there are different ways of trying to understand how they, how they worked.
One way is where we get the chance to try and see what's underneath a composition.
And there are some unfinished manuscripts which reveal the existence sometimes
of, of sketches of the composition underneath the, underneath the miniature.
But the other way that we can tell how they worked is by comparing the, the images to those in other manuscripts,
because I think it's very, very important to understand that the artist who did this didn't just, wasn't just told,
well, do, you know, do a nativity or combine it with the Annunciation to the shepherds in any way you can, you can imagine, and sort of make it up.
They were, they were in a context where this scene was, was being shown in other comparable books in, in a similar style.
And so I think Helen, Helen sent in the, in the introduction to this session, a link to another manuscript which, which we've chosen,
which is today in, in the Bavarian State Library in Munich and has the similar composition.
It's, it's, again, a book from the early 11th century, and it has the two scenes put on different, different sides of the opening.
And if one looks at that, one can compare it in style,
but also in composition and see that our artist has taken elements of that composition and put them together in a different way.
And so this is an art of strong traditions in which small divergences from the tradition are worth studying.
And it also challenges us to think how that happened.
There aren't as many model books or pattern books from this period as we, we'd like to see.
So it's not always possible to say whether artists are looking at actual other manuscripts
or whether they do have model books with compositions that they're working, working from.
And they, as I say they, they're, they're looking at the compositions, but also stylistically.
So, again, this is, this is not so much as an individual style, perhaps as a, as a style of a particular place and time.
Having said which, styles constantly change. And it's that balance between, between strong traditions and constant movements
that is one of the fascinations of these books. I think it's time for us to take our first set of questions now.
Thank you very much. I think we've all been struck by the colours and the materials that are used in these manuscripts.
I wonder if you could say a little bit about that, particularly if particular colours have significance or not.
For example, there's a lot of purple in some of the images you've shown us.
Thank you. Yes. Shall I have a go? I mean, the first thing to say is that we haven't done, we haven't done colour analysis of these manuscripts.
There is some very interesting work going on with manuscripts these days.
In the, in the past, if you wanted to test the composition of the colour, you had to scrape a bit off,
and curators didn't much want that.
So, but now there's, there are new techniques of imaging which can, can do that work without damaging the, the pigments.
I think there are, and so we are learning more about which pigments were used, where, and when.
I think there are two, two ways, I suppose, to approach this, one is to understand actually what the, what the chemical composition is.
And I think there that you need to be, you need to be careful if you're doing it with the naked eye.
This goes for the blues, say, people often look at some wonderful sort of deep blues and say ah lapis lazuli,
which is a famous colour which was only available in Afghanistan.
And there's a wonderful,
wonderful image of, of the trade routes involved in getting lapis from, from Afghanistan long before Marco Polo to, to Europe.
But actually with the naked eye, it's often very difficult to tell whether what you're looking at in a blue is
lapis or is azurite, a much more common mineral which was available in Europe.
So I think one has to be aware that there were different sources of very similar colours.
I think the other way to look at it, which, which is in the spirit of the question, is also the significance of colours.
And that's absolutely right, that the purples here, purple is a colour which in the classical in Roman times had imperial associations.
And although we're in, we're in the Christian Middle Ages, those associations go back to classical times, are still very strong.
And, thank you. We've had a question about why the text is bound. And I wonder, and also the vellum being so light.
And I wonder if the two were connected because it's a bound manuscript and has been preserved,
that might explain why the vellum is a lighter colour. Matthew, are you,
Yes, I'm not quite sure that I've understood the question. And so firstly, why is the text bound?
Was, there was a question whether the books came along later, whether it was common for this and also about the vellum.
And I wondered if there was any connection with the way it's been bound and the colours of the vellum.
I suppose it's, it's probably important to say that when it was painted and written, it wouldn't have been bound.
So binding was the last stage in the production of a book.
Now, we'll, we're actually going to talk about the binding as part of our next manuscript.
So I want to sort of push off that question about what, what the book would have
looked like in the Middle Ages as something we'll consider with the next item.
OK, and we've also actually had a question. I'll just, I'll just pop in as well,
just to say that one thing that we, we need to bear in mind is that the fact that the
manuscript is, is written and illuminated before it's bound, it's, it's most likely
in sections or gatherings, means that you can have several scribes and several
artists working on the manuscript at the same time as a sort of coordinated team.
And so another thing that art historians try and do is work out,
it can be very, very difficult because they're trying to work in a unified style,
but how many people are actually involved in the production of an individual book?
So that question does raise very fundamental, very fundamental issues.
Thank you. I'm aware we've got lots to talk about, so we may move on, but we are, I think,
going to look on to figurative versus abstract designs, so that's also come up as a question.
So thank you. I think we'll go into the second manuscript. Brilliant.
Yes, so let me just close this manuscript up, and as I do that, you can see that it's binding is, is not mediaeval.
It's in an 18th century binding. And so, too, is the next manuscript we're going to look at.
So just excuse me while I adjust the visualiser, the next manuscript is slightly larger, so we need to move the visualiser up to get a full view of it.
So if you just take a quick look at the binding, I'm going to page through to the decoration,
but Martin's going to start by saying a bit about what we know about the original binding of the book, in contrast to the binding it has now.
Yes. Thank you, Matthew, because having said that, we don't usually know where and when things were made,
this manuscript is a bit of an exception because it has a note of, of, of miraculous usefulness at the end, telling us about its binding.
Actually, as Matthew leafs through, I'm just going to also just say that what he's opening here is a gospel book.
And the, what what he's leafing through are the, the canon tables,
which link the, the episodes of the Gospels between the different gospel accounts in these, in these tables.
But just going back to the, back to the binding, so the note at the, at the very end tells us that the manuscript was bound in the year 1178.
So we're now in the 12th century, and it tells us where it was bound, which was at a place called Ranshofen in Upper Austria.
And it tells us that the original binding was consisted of gold and silver and precious stones.
It was what we would call a treasure binding. And so that's been lost from this manuscript.
And as Matthew said, this, this manuscript, again, has a later binding, an 18th century binding.
It comes from the same collection, that of Canonici, as the previous manuscript,
but it did originally have a treasure binding, which would be appropriate for a gospel book being carried in procession.
And so its outside would be visible to the, to the faithful.
But that, that is lost. And we have to wait until we're inside the book for its, for its artistic wonders.
So I paged through as, as you would have seen to the, the first major piece of decoration,
one of the major highlights of the book and perhaps, perhaps Martin you could tell us what we're looking at here.
Yes, so this is, I mean, as, as with the other, as with the last book, the most important illumination comes at certain key moments in the book.
And so in this in a gospel book, very typically at the opening of each gospel, is this, this kind of presentation.
And we'll speak in a moment about the beginning of the text on the right.
But just looking first of all, at the left, what we've got is the author of the, of the Gospel.
This is, this is Saint Matthew. And so each time we've got an evangelist portrait, we call it a portrait.
We don't know what Saint Matthew looked like, but here he is as a mediaeval scribe.
I suppose you would say, he's sitting at a desk, he's holding open a book.
I don't think I can see any, any writing on it yet.
He's got an ink well, sort of slotted into the frame of his desk and in his right hand,
he's sort of holding something which I think is more likely to be a pen knife than a pen.
So it looks as though he's, well, he's sort of deep in thought and he's not actually writing.
And the pen knife is a crucial piece of equipment because it was a, a scribe would, would, would sharpen the pen with, what they would hold
the, the quite springy parchment, sort of level, and also scrape out any mistakes that they immediately noticed from the surface of the parchment.
So here one is starting to try to use this as a realistic depiction of a mediaeval scribe.
They're, of course, great limits to the realism here. So one has to judge.
But, but it is quite precious information for us trying to understand mediaeval
scribes and each of the, we're not going to have time to look at each one,
but each of the evangelists in this manuscript is portrayed in a very different pose.
But meanwhile, of course, he inhabits a realm, a golden background,
a sort of heavenly realm, in a sort of fantasy ecclesiastical architecture above him.
So there are, there are, yes,
this isn't a realistic depiction. The style is
very Byzantine, actually, and is part of the whole story of the influence of Byzantine illumination on the illumination in Europe,
which was very, very strong in the 12th, in the 12th century.
So, yes, but that's probably something we don't have time to go into a great deal of detail about, about now.
One of the real sort of treats of being here and paging through the book, as well as the very important point you made,
Martin, about putting the images in their context in the book as a whole,
is that you can really appreciate these, the sort of magnificent two page, two page spreads and openings in a way that can
be very hard to do again with isolated images or scrolling through images online.
And just as in the, in the previous manuscript, we've got here,
a magnificent combination of the figurative art portrait on one side and then the sort of abstract, decorated letter on the other side.
Which seems to be sort of equally prominent and given, given equal care and attention, um, can you, can you say something about that?
Yes, I think that's really crucial, what you just said, that it, that, that it is, it's just as prominent.
And I think, I mean, what we're looking at here, this wonderful form is all a large letter L beginning the word liber, book,
the, the, the opening of Matthew's Gospel, looking at it's sort of wrapped,
wrapped around the frame as if, if it weren't sort of tethered to the frame, it would sort of fly, fly off the, the page.
And I think, I think it's so important to realise that the, it's the, the, the decoration and especially in this form of initial letters,
which gets just as much care and, and, and artistic excellence as, as the pictorial art.
But I think it's much harder for the, for modern, modern art historians to know quite how to speak about it or to understand its meaning.
We can try and describe it, although that's not easy.
But again, I think it's even clearer here than it was in our first manuscript, that we have organic forms.
We've got sort of leaf forms and enormous sort of flowers.
And some writers talk about this in terms of, of, of the theology of God's creation, for instance.
Others look at particular, particular plant forms, particularly, especially the acanthus leaf,
and realise that that has, again, classical echoes, just like the purple.
There's an artistic vocabulary which does go back to, to classical times.
But again, this is an art that doesn't really tell us, you know, there isn't a crib telling us how to interpret it.
That's, it's for us to, to enjoy it, but also to try to, to, to, to understand it.
But certainly, decoration is absolutely as prominent in these manuscript, manuscripts as illustration.
This is a nice example, isn't it,
because it pushes the sort of very edges of legibility and turns a letter L into something, something quite extraordinary.
But if we, if we turn over the pages, there are other ways, aren't there, in which the, the perhaps less spectacular
letters are helping to, to increase the legibility of the manuscript.
Yes, and this has, I mean, by contrast, I suppose you might say, there's a wonderful plainness here,
although it's still very, very grand and with, with the wide margins of, of blank parchment.
But also we see, we see other smaller initials still using gold.
These are, these are lesser not in their materials, but in their place, in the hierarchy.
And I think understanding the art of the initial as part of the way of structuring the text is also really,
really important, that you'd never have a larger initial at a, at a minor section of the text and a smaller initial at the opening of the gospel,
or something, the size of the initials is very carefully controlled to structure the text, so that you might have larger initials
for, for sort of chapters, smaller initials for sort of verses.
This is an age before page numbering on the whole.
And so the initials are also helping you to find your way around the text, also to memorise the text.
And presumably we mentioned before that this, the manuscript is being made in sections.
And so there is whether your, you know a team of, of, of religious in an abbey or a team of professional artists,
you've got perhaps the more junior members of the workshop doing these smaller initials while
the, the, the, the masters are doing the the kind of illumination we saw at the opening of the gospel.
Should we take some questions now Helen, about this manuscript? Yes, certainly. So
we've seen a lot of very beautiful golds in both the manuscript so far.
Firstly, practical question, what kind of fixative was used to fix the gold to the page?
Absolutely. Thank you for that question,
because I, I ought to have said that. It's important to realise that there are several different ways in which the gold might be put on.
Essentially, one is, one is gold leaf, and the other is sort of the gold ground up into a sort of gold ink or paint,
you, you would call it. They would be done at different stages.
The gold leaf, you need to, it is, is crinkly when you put it on and so needs to be
burnished with a tool and that burnishing might damage other surrounding colours.
And so rather contrary to our expectation, and we know this again from the, some
unfinished manuscripts which I mentioned are so useful to understand technique.
The gold is the first of the colours to be applied, not the, as you might rather think, the sort of crowning glory and the last.
And so you do sometimes see a page unfinished, just with drawing, and just with gold and no other colors.
Just coming back specifically to the question, you've got to have something that you're if you're using leaf, that your your gold is going to stick to.
And that might be some kind of, any kind of sort of glue.
But, but can sometimes be a sort of gesso, and sometimes the gesso will be white,
but sometimes it might have a little, a reddish tint, which will also help the gold to, to, to, to glow.
And, and if you've got gesso underneath,
then you're also going to get the kind of slightly three dimensional effect that you sometimes, you sometimes see in these manuscripts. Thank you. And the gold,
and to have so much gold sort of seems to suggest a considerable investment in terms of materials.
Do we know anything about, if there are patrons behind the production of this manuscript and the previous one.
Yes, I mean, that's, thank you, the, the note in this manuscript about the treasure binding actually gives the credit to
the provost of Ranshofen and the treasurer of the religious house, sort of financially.
So the treasurer was presumably, you know, allocating the funds, which isn't to say that the whole manuscript was necessarily made at Ranshofen.
We know the binding was, but we know even at this, at this sort of date that there were professional artists.
So this, for instance, might have been commissioned from a professional workshop in, in Saltzberg,
which would have been the nearest major centre of illumination.
Or sometimes we know that professional artists came and stayed for a while in a religious house.
But, yes, these are very considerable investments in, in the, you know,
the, the most important books for the religious house and objects of great pride, but also of, of great expense.
And just thinking about the colours, again, the white colour was that lead white,
and if so, why didn't it oxidise and turn black, how did the colours stay so fresh?
I'm just carrying on with these until Matthew corrects me.
But yes, I mean, again, we haven't, we haven't, you know, done analysis of this, but white lead, could be, but it's the same,
and so oxidisation is a, is a danger.
It's not a, gold doesn't tarnish but silver does, and white led can. In many ways we talked about hidden treasures at the beginning.
But what has protected this so wonderfully is the fact that it's been kept closed in a book.
And if you, if you compare it to the kind of state that 12th century painting on the wall of a church survives in, you can see the difference.
It's the, it's the quality of the materials, but also the protection that the codex gives, gives it.
So there is, yes, these are things we want to show to the world, they're great works of art.
But we're also trying to preserve them in this wonderful, this wonderful freshness. And thinking about the artists who created these beautiful images.
How long would it have taken for an artist to be able to work at this level of skills, do you think.
Yeah, that's really hard and the same question goes, I think, for writing the text,
people want to know how long it took to write out the Gospels or whatever.
There are a few clues in mediaeval accounts, but some of the, some of our understanding of this goes to modern practitioners.
I don't know whether we have any in our audience, but modern calligraphers, illuminators.
I think sometimes that we imagine, oh it would have taken a lifetime to produce one book because it's so beautifully done and so precious.
But I think, of course, they didn't have a lifetime to spare.
They wanted a gospel book to use at Ranshofen.
And so I think the answer is often slightly faster than we imagine, that the scribe
might be doing several pages in a, in a day depending on the grade of script.
And of course, we also mentioned the fact that you might have several artists working at once, and that also speeds up the process.
But I think in many cases we might be looking at things produced in weeks and months rather than years and years and years,
although there are some famous examples of manuscripts which just got stuck.
They were very magnificent and they just took too long and ran out of steam.
So it, it's a very hard question to answer. Thank you.
And lastly, for this section, you mentioned the Byzantine influence, do you have any references that help, that can explore this further,
that our attendees could look at, particularly the influence on 12th century German miniatures.
Yes, well, I realise in, in, in recommending a book that that can be hard for people to get their hands on.
But, one of the sort of great points
at the beginning of that study was a book called Byzantine, Byzantine Art of the West by a great,
a great art historian, no longer alive, called Otto Demus, D-e-m-u-s.
And we can put the details of that in a, in a, in a message.
So it's, it's, it's very interesting thinking of people in Europe looking into
Byzantium as in many ways a rich culture artistically and trying to imitate it.
And that's a wonderfully interesting story in its own right. Thank you.
And I think we'll move on to our final manuscript. Thank you very much.
Our last manuscript, is, is something a little different, which is to say it's not a liturgical book,
so we've been looking at books that were used in the celebration of the divine office.
But the final manuscript is a book of the, well, not precisely a book of the Bible,
but a commentary on the book of the Bible, and perhaps Martin we might start by saying something about biblical illustration,
I mean, would we expect all books of the Bible to be llustrated or was it concentrated on certain parts of the book?
Yes, because one might expect, yes, every bit of the Bible to get illustrated.
Many Bibles at this state, we're actually still in the 12th century in this manuscript.
Many Bibles were not single volumes. They were, you've got your Bible in several volumes, and some books of the Bible were produced a sort of
individual stand alone Bibles and got more, tended to get more illustrations than others.
And this is an apocalypse. What we might know is the Book of Revelation, the last book,
of the New Testament and the, The Apocalypse attracted illustration more intensively than some other books of the Bible.
This is actually the text of this manuscript is a commentary on the, on the apocalypse, the, the events of the end of, the end of time,
and that's perhaps not surprising either because the apocalypse, a series of visions, is very, very difficult to understand.
It was difficult for people in the Middle Ages to understand.
And so they they wrote commentaries and, to try and help them to understand what was, what was going on.
And so there is, again, a whole tradition of apocalypse illustration, and we don't have enough time now.
But we could look at these pictures in this book in relation to earlier manuscripts of apocalypse illustration and again,
see a sort of strong tradition, but then a sort of adaptation of that tradition.
So what we're looking at here, is, is a judgement scene on the left,
particularly the, we've got the, the, the lamb at the centre of the heavenly Jerusalem on the right and a judgement scene on the left.
And so the, in the sort of lower left are the blessed and alas,
on the, the, the lower right are the dammed being dragged down to, dragged down to hell.
One of the things that I think is so interesting about this image is the figure of the devil in the, in the bottom corner,
which I'm just going to hold my finger above and perhaps I'll zoom in on slightly because,
what I think might become a bit clearer is that the image has been rubbed and deliberately damaged,
it seems, almost as if the sort of early readers of the manuscript were expressing their hostility to the devil.
Is that, is that something that we see in other manuscripts as well? I mean, that's interesting.
And I, I'm just looking at it on the, on the screen now, and
yes, because, I mean, sometimes you see damage to a miniature throughout the miniature.
But as far as I can see, the damage here is very concentrated.
You've zoomed in and it does look as though it's concentrated on the, on, on the devil.
And so this seems to be a kind of attack on the villain of the piece, which is a really interesting bit of, sort of reader interaction,
I suppose you would, you would say. One does see this,
but actually one also sees sometimes damage done to some of the holy figures depicted.
And I think there that might be the opposite kind of interaction, a kind of devotional touching,
even perhaps kissing of a figure which is has, paradoxically, has damaged it.
And I think, well, even today, if you go into an Orthodox church and you have icons,
you may see, you may see worshippers sort of greeting an icon by, by, by touching it or kissing it.
And so that, so, so I think what one can see, yes,
both a sort of hostile interaction and the veneration of these images,
which I suppose reminds us that although we're looking at them in a way as great artistic productions,
they are, you know, they bear this meaning, and their, their their original readers and users were, were interacting with them in a variety of ways.
Yes, sometimes I think that talking about them as art is, is a little bit unhelpful, isn't it,
because it imposes our sort of modern relationship back onto what was something quite different sometimes.
So going back to the, the apocalypse is a text for illustration, it must have caused particular challenges for artists,
not only in terms of the, the subject matter and turning that into a narrative,
but also in sort of in trying to express that it's a series of visions being, being seen by John.
How did artists deal with those problems? Yes, because,
well, here is Saint John, yes, on the left, there, it is,
what we're looking at is supposed to be a series of visions seen by John.
And so I suppose that's a challenge to the artist, you know how to do that.
And this, this manuscript is actually quite innovative in, in bringing John into the picture in earlier apocalypses
you often just get the visions without John and you're just sort of seeing through his eyes.
But here he is, Haloed, you know, a large figure looking at the enthroned, the enthroned Lord with the, the elders around him.
There's a sort of open door with that sort of curving metalwork
sort of next to him. He's hearing a voice which commands him,
Come up here. That's written in the, in the sort of flying scroll above his head.
But it's really interesting because he's, he's sort of pointing, I think,
not just at his face, but at his eyes to sort of emphasise that he's having the vision.
And in fact, in the Middle Ages, there was, there was a very, going right back to St. Augustine,
one of the great fathers of the church, a very sophisticated sort of theology of different kinds of seeing.
You've got sort of corporeal vision, you know, with your, with your senses.
Looking at the world around us. You've got what they would have referred to as spiritual vision, which is the stuff of visions, of dreams.
And you've got the highest form of vision, which they might have referred to as sort of intellectual vision,
a sort of non, non seeing vision, as sort of you're apprehending something by reason and you're
you're, you're, you're coming into union with the divinity and writers about the apocalypse,
one of the things that they wondered about was which kind of vision are Saint John's visions.
So I think that's really interesting here, an attempt. It's sort of difficult for the artist,
but it's an attempt here, perhaps to convey some of the importance of the whole business of seeing in the context of the apocalypse.
One of the things that's so striking about this manuscript, in contrast to the other two we've looked at,
is that we have this great massive illustration at the beginning of the manuscript.
It's not, it's not spaced out as it was in the other manuscripts, taking its meaning from, from where it occurs and the text it's, it's adjacent to.
But we have, we have it all as a sort of whole cycle, a narrative cycle at the beginning of the manuscript,
which I suppose implies a slightly different relationship perhaps between the pictures and the text.
Yes, yes, absolutely, because actually, the, once you've got past sort of 12 leaves of, of, of, of pictures,
you're into the text, which is not illustrated. Someone's just put in the, in the chat,
it's like a graphic novel. And absolutely it is, isn't it? And in sort of registers here.
I mean, what we're looking at, we haven't, haven't time enough to you know,
we could enjoy the detail of this endlessly, but we've got the horsemen of the apocalypse on the left here.
And you've got death on a pale horse in the middle there.
But yes, where to put the pictures in a book was a, was a big issue.
And, and we've been, we looked first, I suppose, at liturgical books where there is this great integration of text and image and, and, and we examined that.
But this is another way in which you might get pictures in a book right at the beginning.
And it's not only in Apocalypses. You sometimes get that in the Book of Psalms,
the Psalter with a whole cycle of pictures at the beginning of the book, but it didn't stay necessarily set.
So this is, this is a 12th century apocalypse. But in the 13th century, there's a whole group of apocalypses produced in England.
And again,
I think we've put a, a link to one, a Bodleian example in the message that Helen sent out, where the texts and the pictures go sort of hand in hand.
Each page has a picture of the top half and the text, a chunk of text below.
So they're, they're constantly experimenting with how to combine words and pictures and looking here,
I think I can see that the, some of the text of the apocalypse is actually written into the frame.
And so in order to give some kind of, of, of textual context, it's, it's been been squeezed in like that.
So I think, I think that is really interesting.
And it is, there's no set relationship. It is like so many of these books, very strong in tradition and yet constantly experimental.
That's fantastic. Thank you. And I think we have, we're ready to take questions now, Helen.
Great. Thank you. We've got a few questions, not many, so we may go over by a few minutes.
But to start off with, does this apocalypse relate somehow to Spanish Beatus manuscripts.
Yes, thank you. I mean,
we mentioned this is a commentary, the text of this is actually a commentary, and
there's a commentary on, on the Apocalypse by a man called Beatus in Spain,
which, again, there's a whole tradition, a wonderful traditional of illustrated what are called Beatus manuscripts illustrated with Apocalypses,
with the commentary of this man Beatus. In fact, interestingly, that is a rather separate tradition.
So although I said, yes, there's a strong tradition, there's more than one tradition, if you like.
There are, there are traditions.
And that that wonderful series of Spanish manuscripts, Beatus manuscripts going back to the, the 8th century and onward, and onwards are in fact,
in terms of their compositions and presentation, rather distinct.
But the study of apocalypse illustration is wonderfully rich and wonderfully complex and
art historians sort of start drawing family trees of which manuscripts relate to which others.
But the Beatus manuscripts are wonderful, but, but in some ways different from the compositions here.
Thank you. And just thinking about the style of this manuscript and the others we've seen, and we've had a question
about whether you think William Blake might be referring to mediaeval manuscripts in his art.
That's really interesting. I don't know the answer, but there's another whole you know, another day, you know,
the, the, the sort of afterlife of these manuscripts and the influence they've had on later
artists and trying to track down exactly who saw what and what influence it had on them.
And I can't quite answer about Blake, although I absolutely see why that question has been asked.
But for instance, William Morris rather, rather later, very, very interested in mediaeval manuscripts.
And he was an Oxford student and our predecessors in the library kept careful records of who had seen which manuscripts.
And so we know when William Morris came into the Bodleian library,
into the reading room, and which manuscripts he ordered on which days and can therefore, you know, give us
some really strong evidence of what influence those manuscripts might have, might have had on him.
So absolutely, I think the, the revival,
especially perhaps in the, from the late 18th century into the 19th century, of interest in these manuscripts and
very intense study of them, and and use of them by, by artists is a really interesting subject in its own right.
Absolutely. Yes. And in thinking about that, actually, and the fact that they have inspired other artists,
can you say a little bit about how the Bodleian acquired these three manuscripts and where they might have come from?
Yes, sorry, yeah, we should have. So
the collector, the Venetian collector called Canonici who owned the first two, the library
bought the greater part of the Canonici collection in 1817, its largest ever sort of purchase of mediaeval manuscripts.
And that's why actually we're, we're very rich also in Italian manuscripts, because he had a lot of them.
This manuscript, although made in Germany, in keeping with our theme and we don't know exactly where, but from some of the annotations in the margins,
not on this page, but in the text, we can see that it seems to have come to England by the end of the Middle Ages.
There are some annotations which look as though they're 15th century, and the library acquired it,
we don't know exactly where from around 1603, which is very,
very early in the library's history because the Bodleian was, Thomas Bodley opened the doors of the library in 1602.
So, but to answer more generally, I think it's worth for, for the Bodleian's great collections,
many of our mediaeval manuscripts are from England and had been in monastic libraries in the
Middle Ages, and obviously were dispersed at the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.
And so the Bodleian founded, you know, some decades later, there were still very large numbers of mediaeval manuscripts to be, to be had.
So, yes, the, the provenance, as we would say, the travels of these manuscripts through time is another very, very interesting subject.
Yes. And it's one. Sorry. I was just going to say
it is fascinating to think about how far some of these manuscripts have travelled and what that can tell us about
their history and if, even in the Middle Ages, as Martin said this manuscript written in 12th century Germany,
but coming to England, we don't, we don't really know how in the 15th century, and then, then ended up in Oxford in the early 17th.
And it's wonderful that we're able to see them now as part of the Polonsky Foundation funded digitisation project,
so I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the digitisation process. Oh, yes.
And the project itself. Perhaps I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll let Matthew, Matthew's been very, very, yes, very intensely involved in this project.
I think that the best place to look for more information about that is the website for the project.
And perhaps Helen can share a link to that in the chat where we've got several blog posts that our
photographers have written about the actual process of photographing these for digitisation,
which is extremely sort of intricate and technical craft, so there's, there's a lot to learn about there.
I think the other, the other things, the other stages that are important to mention are the sort of selection process, so how we go about
choosing the manuscripts and deciding what's important and what, what sort of belongs in a project.
And then the assessment that we would do before photography to make sure they're
suitable for, for being photographed without possibly undergoing damage.
So the conservation assessment that we do together with our colleagues in conservation.
Lovely, thank you. And just to go back to some of the detail, because we weren't able to cover this earlier, just for the last moments,
firstly about the framing of the beautiful lettering that we saw in the first manuscript and also in the second.
Where does that kind of framing come from? Can you say anything about that?
And also whether it reflects anything of the education of the artist.
Yes, I mean, I suppose there are different ways to think that because the framing, I mean
there's a lot to be said about the shape of, of pictures and the shape of books themselves and the way in which,
I suppose framing, framing defines sometimes a pictorial sphere.
But there are lots of illuminated initials which aren't framed.
And so perhaps we shouldn't give the impression that everything's framed.
I think perhaps part of the question might be about about the decoration within the frame.
And again, there's a whole vocabulary there.
I, I think some of the things we saw, we, we haven't got time to go back.
But some of the things we saw were like sort of palmettes and again, might be seen as part of a sort of classical, artistic, decorative vocabulary.
And then, of course, I suppose once you've got framing, I mean, here, here very unusually framing is used to contain the text as well.
But once you've got framing,
artists can also play with sort of going beyond the frame, because the frame seems to contain a pictorial world that you're looking into.
But then, as it were, if you cross the frame, then you're coming out of that world.
And in a way, there's a hint of that. Just looking at this on the right hand side here at the top, you know,
but, but, the, the, the, the top of this angel is sort of emerging from beyond the frame.
So once you've got a frame, as with many later, you know, artists, you can then play with the frame.
So, yes, frames are themselves a wonderful subject.
And just to finish off with, thank you, are the public or the readers able to see these manuscripts in the Bodleian, at all.
Yes, we are not only open to, I suppose, the majority of our readers,
many of our readers are doing academic study, but our readership isn't limited to, to that.
And yes, indeed, we welcome, we welcome readers to the library.
And there's information about, about obtaining a reader's card, getting admitted to the library on our, on our Web pages.
And the, yes. The, the, the, the, the thrill of turning the pages of a mediaeval manuscript is, it's a great experience.
Having said that, there are some manuscripts which we deem, you know, very, very precious, very fragile,
and which we do limit access to, to try and find that balance between making them available and preserving them for the next many centuries.
And so, in a way, the digitisation of manuscripts, it's not a substitute for the real thing,
but it is a way also not only of spreading these images far and wide,
but also making them very immediately available to the vast majority of people who
aren't going to be able to come, and come into the library and sit in the reading room.
Excellent. Well, I think that's, that's a really good place to leave it,
to encourage people both to look online and if they can, get to Oxford to come and see the manuscripts for themselves.
So, thank you very much to everyone for joining us today.
It's been a real pleasure to be able to connect with friends of the Bodleian from all over the world.
I'm aware we've had people from America, from Argentina, all over the place today.
So thank you for your curiosity and enthusiasm.
Thank you very much to Matthew Holford and Martin Kauffmann for their knowledge and expertise and to our behind the scenes technical team,
Karen, Steph, and Rebecca. So do look out for an email with a link to the session recording, which we'll send out in a week or so.
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We hope to see you again soon. Have a good evening and thank you very much again.