FILLING THE BLANKS: A MIDDLE DUTCH DIONYSIUS QUOTATION AND THE ORIGINS OF THE "ROTHSCHILD CANTICLES"

Abstract

The Rothschild Canticles, MS 404 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, New Haven, which takes its name from an illustrious twentieth-century owner, is a collection of Latin prayers and prose texts dating from about 1300 and illuminated with a cycle of outstanding miniatures, which are almost without equal in the artwork of their period. They constitute a treasury of spectacular images inspired by the mystical theology of the thirteenth century, a perfect illustration of the medieval idea that text and image have equivalent didactic functions. It is not possible to determine exactly who the individuals were who made and commissioned this manuscript, but one must assume that they collaborated closely on the project. The manuscript itself yields very few concrete clues, so that progress can only be made by careful combination and deduction from evidence provided by its contents. Jeffrey Hamburger, whose monograph provides a detailed discussion of these issues, signals a discrepancy between the style of the illumination, which is unmistakably northern French or Flemish, and the literary and iconographical sources for the contents of the manuscript, which seem to have points in common with literature from the German language area. The third scribe, who transcribed excerpts from Bonaventura's Itinerarium on folios which had originally been left blank, is of particular importance to this discussion. He concluded his work with a few lines from the De theologia mystica of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite translated into a Germanic dialect, the only place in the manuscript where the vernacular is used. The dialect was identified as Ripuarian (the language spoken in the area around Cologne). Hamburger's solution to this problem is to assume that the individual who commissioned the manuscript must have come from Germany or the Rhineland. The question of the dialect of the Dionysius quotation in the Rothschild Canticles formed the starting point for this article. From a linguistic point of view there are various different factors that need to be brought into play, and the language certainly shows strong traces of interaction with Middle High German. It should not, however, be classified as Ripuarian, but rather as Middle Dutch. This conclusion opens up new possibilities to explain away the discrepancy between the Flemish style of the illuminations and the apparently German sources of the Rothschild Canticles. If the third scribe writes Dutch rather than a dialect of German, this makes an origin of the manuscript in the Low Countries all the more worthy of consideration. Further research into the Dionysius quotation has brought to light striking connections between Middle High German and Middle Dutch religious literature that have not previously been noted. On this basis I shall explore the supposed links between the Rothschild Canticles and the German tradition afresh, proceeding from the idea that already quite early on there were active interregional networks through which literary and iconographical motifs could spread. It is possible to show that the makers of the Rothschild Canticles were familiar with iconographic and literary traditions that were widespread throughout the greater part of western Europe and thus to account for the apparent discrepancies between the style of the illuminations and the literary and iconographical sources. The Rothschild Canticles Thanks to the excellent monograph by Hamburger, published in1990, the Rothschild Canticles is now readily accessible. In this work the iconographical programme, particularly of the first part of the Rothschild Canticles, is studied very thoroughly and in combination with the texts. The texts from the first part are edited in full and all the miniatures are reproduced in black and white; a few examples are also included in colour. Except where explicitly stated otherwise, the following characterization of the manuscript is based on Hamburger's study. …