Picturing the Treasury: The Power of Objects and the Art of Memory in the Bernward Gospels

Abstract

The Gospel book known to German scholars as the precious Gospels of St. Bernward of Hildesheim was produced under the direction of the early eleventh-century bishop ofthat name, a patron perhaps better known for a pair of bronze doors that represent the most complex bronze casting project since Antiquity. Despite the manuscript's renown, many questions remain about the Bernward Gospels and the meaning of its miniatures both individually and as parts of a program. The dedicatory painting is the key to understanding the manuscript's pictures in that it anticipates, on the one hand, the bishop's liturgical commemoration and, on the other, the monks' intercessory prayers by engaging the praxis o/memoria, the multivalent medieval term for memory that refers equally to mnemotechnics and liturgical commemoration. The codex draws on the cognitive and ritual processes of both in order to decorate an object of particular symbolic power, the Gospels, venerated as the Word of God made flesh, namely, the Incarnate Christ. It does so most notably by translating a well-known medieval formula, the treasury list, into pictorial form and by emphasizing the symbolic power of its objects to make the saints present and accessible. The Gospel book's capacity to project the bishop's memory is predicated on that symbolic power.