The Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England, by Jessica Berenbeim

Abstract

A little like a chirograph, the historiographical consideration of the artistic and material aspects of documents is often separated from their diplomatic and administrative evaluation. Like a chirograph, re-joining both halves increases the understanding of either aspect, and of the whole. Jessica Berenbeim’s elegant and richly illustrated study of the art in, and of, various different document types does just this, raising wide and interesting questions for both art historians and historians of diplomatic and administration. She makes three arguments which also provide her wider themes: first, documents are part of the history of art and so its prism contributes to diplomatics; second, visual representations of documents tell us about their reception and use; and third, documents provide models for representation more generally, and understanding this opens new perspectives onto medieval art history as a discipline. After a wide-ranging introduction, these arguments are explored in detail across three principal documents and objects from late medieval England: the c.1400 Sherborne Missal for the Benedictine abbey there; two Evesham Abbey seals, one from c.1245 x 1274 and the other in use from 1433; and a 1393 inspeximus of Richard II’s for Croyland Abbey. Some detailed arguments can be summarised thus. The Sherborne Missal may be seen as including an ‘embedded cartulary’ since the missal incorporates in its border illustrations images of scrolls and sealed charters which summarise the essence of Sherborne’s charters and history in this liturgical context. These are positioned in the prefaces and canons, frequently consulted and liturgically strategic points. Berenbeim suggests a very attractive fit between the physical–theological transformation effected liturgically here during the Mass and the physical–ecclesiastical–legal transformation effected by the charters in their pendent depictions. Discussing the Evesham seals, in a similar way Berenbeim shows how they join heaven and earth in their complex iconography. Here the obverse combines both swineherd Eof’s vision of the Virgin which ends with Bishop Ecgwine’s founding the abbey there, as well as the ‘oral’ Old English inscription explaining the foundation’s naming after Eof. The reverse represents Ecgwine offering the church to the Virgin, plus the grant of lands by kings Æthelred, Cenred and Offa, manifest in a written, Latin charter which spells out their granting of royal liberty to the abbey. The effect of the seal is to validate all of Evesham’s group acta with a compressed narrative in seal form which legitimises all such action by invoking the divine, royal and ecclesiastical warrant of its history. Indeed, Berenbeim suggests we think of the seal itself as a ‘second narrative charter’. The 1393 Croyland inspeximus which she examines last effects a similar act of compression, though not perhaps so elaborate as the two earlier cases. Here the focus is on the historiated initial ‘R’ of Richard II himself inspecting and confirming the Abbey’s earlier charter. The R contains King Æthelbald, St Guthlac and Richard as the operative trinity collapsing Croyland’s past and present founders to grant/reassert (in the charter they hold) Croyland’s charters ‘of’ 716 and 948 (‘of’ because they probably both date from the twelfth century). Here Berenbeim is interested in the interaction of old and new. The 1393 inspeximus slavishly reproduces the archaic subscription marks in its earlier medieval ‘originals’. This fetish for the ‘retro’, though, she sees in tension with the über-modern Ricardian great seal which actually warranted the Abbey’s claims. It is as if one was listening to music digitally in an MP3 player designed to look like a Walkman. The pretence signals some insecurity of identity or some obfuscation about what, technically, is actually going on.