The Elusive Quest for the 'Real Thing': The Chicago Lectionary Project Thirty Years on

Abstract

The methods developed by New Testament scholars at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, 40s and 50s to study the text of the Byzantine lectionary deserve to be examined critically by art historians, for they played a formative role in our own discipline. Kurt Weitzmann knew the Chicago Lectionary Project well, and its methods shaped fundamentally his own art historical approach to the illuminated Byzantine lectionaries. Bound to shared premises, his interpretation of the lectionary also shared many of the Chicago project's fatal shortcomings, above all a focus on hypothetical original sources rather than on the existing Byzantine books themselves, a narrow and biased selection of evidence, and an almost total neglect of the use and reception of the texts under examination. Abandoned by textual scholars, the Chicago project ground to an inconspicuous end in the 1960s; art historians, on the other hand, continue uncritically to lean on Weitzmann's methods and conclusions. This article reviews the history of the Chicago project. It then suggests ways by which art historians might follow the textual historians out of the dead ends of its methods, into a more fruitful exploration of the Byzantine lectionary and its sometimes ravishing illumination.