Illuminating the Middle Ages: Tributes to Prof. John Lowden from His Students, Friends and Colleagues ed. by Laura Cleaver, Alixe Bovey and Lucy Donkin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Illuminating the Middle Ages: Tributes to Prof. John Lowden from His Students, Friends and Colleagues ed. by Laura Cleaver, Alixe Bovey and Lucy Donkin Joan A. Holladay Laura Cleaver, Alixe Bovey, and Lucy Donkin, eds. Illuminating the Middle Ages: Tributes to Prof. John Lowden from His Students, Friends and Colleagues. Library of the Written Word 79; The Manuscript World 12. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xxii, 481 pp., 138 ills. €198. ISBN: 978-90-04-42232-2. In the course of John Lowden’s distinguished career, he has concentrated on three separate areas of medieval art: manuscript illumination in both Byzantium and western Europe and ivory carving. In all three fields he has taken on big topics: the Octateuchs with their 550 scenes, the even more prolifically illustrated Bibles moralisées, and the thousands of preserved ivories now catalogued online in the Gothic ivories project that he directs at the Courtauld Institute. Close examination of the works and detailed study of context, in the sense of both the physical matrix and the social and political milieux that produced these works, have been the hallmarks of his scholarship. In the twenty-eight short articles in Illuminating the Middle Ages, specialists in the latter two of these three fields deploy these same approaches to pay tribute to their teacher and friend; Byzantine art has been omitted “to make it possible to lift the resulting book” (1). The articles, only some of which can be addressed here, examine works made between the tenth century and about 1500 with the greatest concentration on those from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries; they are ordered more or less chronologically. Manuscripts from Italy, Germany, France, and Spain are represented, although the largest number of studies are devoted to works of English provenance. Iconography and text-image [End Page 205] relationships are a concern throughout, as are context and audience; style and technique play lesser roles. Two essays devoted to ivories and one to mosaics seem a bit like outliers, although Sarah Guérin’s on ivory plaques assembled as booklets does indeed include two-dimensional painting on the leaves bound inside the carved covers of the same material. The only article that mentions the moralized Bibles to which Lowden devoted award-winning work is Mika Takiguchi’s on the mosaic scenes of Noah’s ark at Monreale Cathedral. A number of the essays are fairly straightforwardly iconographic. Maria Grasso identifies patristic sources for the portrayal in the Codex Aureus of Echternach of the souls of Lazarus and Dives as homunculi exiting from the dead men’s mouths; their green tint, she argues, is intended to connote a different state of being from living humans. Christian Heck, in a contribution on ants portrayed in a fifteenth-century Italian representation of the death of Saint Martin, finds in Pliny the knowledge that they were, apart from humans, the only animals to bury their dead. Author portraits of Terence and Aristotle, examined by Beatrice Radden Keefe and Hanna Wimmer, respectively, use similar devices to show these authors’ foreign origins; Wimmer subtly weaves into her discussion medieval ideas about authorship and the reception of the ancient philosopher’s work in Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century. A jointly authored essay by Patricia Stirnemann and Judith Kogel uses personal features in the Psalter of Blanche of Castile to associate the manuscript with the French queen more firmly than heretofore. The portrait of Abraham Ibn Ezra at the beginning of the book is one of these, commemorating the role of Blanche’s homeland in both new intellectual activity and translation from other languages, perhaps at the behest of Roger de Four-nival, the court scholar from Amiens, where the manuscript seems to have been illuminated. A similarly personalized book, with the text of Saint Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations, is T. A. Heslop’s subject. Admont 289 is, he argues, a “later derivative” (94) of a manuscript sent by the author himself to Matilda of Tuscany in 1104. Its significant deviations from another manuscript that also goes back to “an Anselmian original” (96) result from and refer to the [End Page 206] intertwined lives of the archbishop and the...