Beyond Words: New Research on Manuscripts in Boston Collections, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Lisa Fagin Davis, Anne-Marie Eze, Nancy Netzer, and William P. Stoneman. Text, Image, Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination, 8. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2021, 361 pp, 291 col. Ill.

Abstract

This study stems from an exhibition/ conference of the same name, “Beyond Words,” presented in Boston in 2006; however, it goes well beyond the bounds of a conventional exhibition catalog, which was produced at the time to accompany the objects on display. The volume produced here expands these initial parameters to consider additional questions about the manuscripts held in these Boston collections, notably Houghton Library at Harvard University, McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Boston. The book is divided into four major sections, devoted respectively to monastic manuscripts (3 essays), courtly culture and patronage (5 essays), princes, patricians, prelates and pontiffs (4 essays), and illuminating history (3 essays) with a coda on manuscripts in the modern era provided by the final essay. As the editors remark in their introduction, the emphasis is Christian and central European; this is due in part to the collection parameters themselves (the above institutions have no Ethiopian or Hebrew manuscripts, for example) and in part by limitations of time and focus (there are a number of Islamic manuscripts in the Boston collections which have not been included here but would be well worth exploring in a separate study of their own). The richness and depth of the sixteen essays here offer insights into many aspects of the late medieval world. The chapter by Patricia Stirnemann on Gilbert de la Porrée traces book collection of the works of a single, theologically problematic author, and offers a valuable case study on the transmission of writings by a scholar charged (though exonerated) with heresy. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak demonstrates how the charters of the abbey of Sawley preserved in the Houghton library allow us to consider the “medial role” of document writing, and how this practice assisted an English Cistercian monastery to shape its own representation with its neighbors by crafting records of land ownership disputes. Kathryn M. Rudy examines manuscript workshops among nuns in Delft in the fifteenth century, providing a vivid model of book production practices in these devotional contexts.