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Medieval Academy of America

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Jacques GuilmainSource: Speculum, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 271-273Published by: Medieval Academy of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2864881 .

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administrative and scholarly vocabulary of the thirteenth-century university, rather thana collection of essays. As Weijers points out, her goal is to enlarge our knowledge ofmedieval lexicography and the formation of technical vocabularies in all fields of medievalintellectual endeavor, not to reprise earlier work in that field. This objective accountsfor the coverage and emphasis in the volume under review, which is more generic thanthe earlier volumes in the same series. It focuses on such matters as dictionaries, glos-saries, and other works in which medieval Latin authors defined the terms they used;the division of texts into distinctions, chapters, and other subdivisions; the ways medievalauthors flagged citations to other authors; alphabetization as a principle of organizationin medieval reference works; the techniques used in making concordances, collectionsof exempla, and other compilations; and the organization of bibliographies and librarycatalogues. Weijers draws on a broad array of sources to illustrate these developments,from sermons to chronicles to medical florilegia to works of spiritual counsel to statutesgoverning library collections and more. The one field to which she devotes the mostextended substantive as well as generic attention is jurisprudential literature, both civiland canon. The usefulness of this book is enhanced by its excellent bibliography ofsecondary sources, as well as by its extremely valuable catalogue of over 120 medievaltexts from the seventh through the fifteenth century pertinent to the book's themes. Ineach case, she dates the work, gives references to modern editions and/or manuscriptsources, and indicates secondary literature when it exists. She includes as well an indexof manuscripts cited and an index of the technical terms whose meanings her researchaims at discovering and explaining.That aim is achieved, and splendidly. This book meets the highest standards of schol-arship and is a welcome addition to the larger project in which Weijers and her associatesare engaged. Thanks to it, we have a much clearer understanding of the conditions underwhich medieval thinkers labored and a much better sense of how they conceptualizedand described their own intellectual activities.

MARCIA . COLISH,Oberlin College

JOHNWILLIAMSnd BARBARA. SHAILOR. SpanishApocalypse:TheMorganBeatusManu-script. New York: George Braziller, in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library,1991. Pp. 239; 130 color plates. $175.Around 776 the monk Beatus of Liebana in northern Spain produced his Commentaryon theApocalypse.Beatus was motivated by more than a desire to write. He and his discipleEtherius, accused of being heretical agents of Antichrist by Elipandus, bishop of Toledo,responded by denouncing Elipandus himself as the author of the doctrine of Adoption-ism, a position that reduced Christ the man to a secondary position relative to God thefather. Beatus's stand was vindicated by Carolingian councils that declared Adoptionisma heresy, thus making him a torchbearer of orthodoxy in Spain. The Book of Revelation,or Apocalypse, the final biblical chapter, tells of the powerfully vivid mystical vision ofSt. John of things to come during the last days of earthly time. Then God's true believerswill triumph once and for all over all false prophets and demonic usurpers. Thus Beatus'spresentation was a double-barreled attack on the perceived enemies within the churchas well as on Islam.Except for a single-page ninth-century fragment, the earliest extant copy of an illus-trated version is the Pierpont Morgan Library's MS 644. The manuscript was commis-sioned by an Abbot Victor of the Leonese monastery of San Miguel de Escalada andexecuted by the monk Maius around the middle of the tenth century. It may have beenan outside commission, for Maius's home would more logically have been the monastery

administrative and scholarly vocabulary of the thirteenth-century university, rather thana collection of essays. As Weijers points out, her goal is to enlarge our knowledge ofmedieval lexicography and the formation of technical vocabularies in all fields of medievalintellectual endeavor, not to reprise earlier work in that field. This objective accountsfor the coverage and emphasis in the volume under review, which is more generic thanthe earlier volumes in the same series. It focuses on such matters as dictionaries, glos-saries, and other works in which medieval Latin authors defined the terms they used;the division of texts into distinctions, chapters, and other subdivisions; the ways medievalauthors flagged citations to other authors; alphabetization as a principle of organizationin medieval reference works; the techniques used in making concordances, collectionsof exempla, and other compilations; and the organization of bibliographies and librarycatalogues. Weijers draws on a broad array of sources to illustrate these developments,from sermons to chronicles to medical florilegia to works of spiritual counsel to statutesgoverning library collections and more. The one field to which she devotes the mostextended substantive as well as generic attention is jurisprudential literature, both civiland canon. The usefulness of this book is enhanced by its excellent bibliography ofsecondary sources, as well as by its extremely valuable catalogue of over 120 medievaltexts from the seventh through the fifteenth century pertinent to the book's themes. Ineach case, she dates the work, gives references to modern editions and/or manuscriptsources, and indicates secondary literature when it exists. She includes as well an indexof manuscripts cited and an index of the technical terms whose meanings her researchaims at discovering and explaining.That aim is achieved, and splendidly. This book meets the highest standards of schol-arship and is a welcome addition to the larger project in which Weijers and her associatesare engaged. Thanks to it, we have a much clearer understanding of the conditions underwhich medieval thinkers labored and a much better sense of how they conceptualizedand described their own intellectual activities.

MARCIA . COLISH,Oberlin College

JOHNWILLIAMSnd BARBARA. SHAILOR. SpanishApocalypse:TheMorganBeatusManu-script. New York: George Braziller, in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library,1991. Pp. 239; 130 color plates. $175.Around 776 the monk Beatus of Liebana in northern Spain produced his Commentaryon theApocalypse.Beatus was motivated by more than a desire to write. He and his discipleEtherius, accused of being heretical agents of Antichrist by Elipandus, bishop of Toledo,responded by denouncing Elipandus himself as the author of the doctrine of Adoption-ism, a position that reduced Christ the man to a secondary position relative to God thefather. Beatus's stand was vindicated by Carolingian councils that declared Adoptionisma heresy, thus making him a torchbearer of orthodoxy in Spain. The Book of Revelation,or Apocalypse, the final biblical chapter, tells of the powerfully vivid mystical vision ofSt. John of things to come during the last days of earthly time. Then God's true believerswill triumph once and for all over all false prophets and demonic usurpers. Thus Beatus'spresentation was a double-barreled attack on the perceived enemies within the churchas well as on Islam.Except for a single-page ninth-century fragment, the earliest extant copy of an illus-trated version is the Pierpont Morgan Library's MS 644. The manuscript was commis-sioned by an Abbot Victor of the Leonese monastery of San Miguel de Escalada andexecuted by the monk Maius around the middle of the tenth century. It may have beenan outside commission, for Maius's home would more logically have been the monastery

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of Tabara, southwest of Escalada. The reconstruction of the history of earlier illuminatedBeatus manuscripts is complex and conjectural. The Morgan Beatus belongs to a familyof such books that was evidently reworked in the tenth century, at which time were addedEvangelist portraits, genealogical tables, and St.Jerome's Commentaryn theBookofDaniel.John Williams in his excellent, readable introduction, "The History of the Morgan BeatusManuscript," argues for a central role for Maius in this enterprise and establishes con-nections between him and another prominent Spanish scribe, Florentius of Valeranica,as well as with the Carolingian center at Tours. Williams quite rightly does not attemptto discuss at length the place of the Morgan Beatus within the tradition of illuminatedApocalypses as a whole, which would surely have been an unmanageable task in thecontext of this publication. One will have to wait for his forthcoming corpus of theillustrated Beatus manuscripts to delve into that problem. Barbara Shailor's "Codicologyof the Morgan Beatus Manuscript" is a welcome addition to her previous publicationson Spanish early-medieval manuscripts but will be of interest primarily to the specialist.Williams's commentaries and quotations from the Apocalypse that accompany the platesmake the perusal of the illustrations pure pleasure. Mindful that not all readers will bemedievalists, the authors have included an excellent glossaryof technical and ecclesiasticalterms. There is also a complete bibliography. Surely no better choice could have beenmade to introduce the reader to the Morgan Beatus than Williams and Shailor.But in the end this is primarily a facsimile edition, reproducing the 131 pages in themanuscript that bear illustrations, initials, or other decoration. The star of the perfor-mance remains Maius, who clearly thought of himself primarily as a painter, although itis likely that he also did the writing. He belongs to that tradition of medieval Spanishart which has usually been called Mozarabic, although that label should strictly speakingapply only to those art works made in the southern areas of Spain under Moorish dom-ination. Maius's paintings, like others in that tradition, may appear at first as provincial,exotic, and naive. Art historical research on early-medieval manuscript illumination tendsto be dominated by the search for residual or reemerging "classical" elements, dem-onstrating at least their survival and at best their triumph against the forces of the Eastand barbarism, leading to Romanesque and ultimately, be it haltingly, via Gothic to theRenaissance. Any symptom of idealization, illusionism, plasticity, or depth is carefullyadded to the database of this grand recit. Within this scenario "Mozarabic" art can onlybe a side show; it is not even mentioned in the introductory art history textbooks. ButMaius's style is almost joyously anticlassical. His little puppets with huge eyes, sometimesstrung together like paper dolls, play out their grand prophetic story on colorful mini-ature flat stages. There are some Islamic and Carolingian elements involved, but theyare not the foundation of this style, which is fundamentally the expression, carried toits logical conclusion, of certain late-antique formal trends. The result is rather startlingly"modern." Art historians and critics have always been sensitive to this. In his prefaceCharles E. Pierce, Jr., tells how Meyer Schapiro instructed the visiting artist FernandLeger: "If you have time to see only one work of art in all of New York City, it shouldbe the tenth-century Apocalypse at the Morgan Library";and Andre Grabaronce wrotea paper comparing the paintings of Mozarabic illuminators and those of Pablo Picasso.Maius's art is the product of a mystical vision of the universe and has, of course, nothingto do with modern aesthetic theories. Nevertheless those who love the moderns will findin Maius a kindred spirit. The locusts of Apocalypse 9.7-12 meander in a reversed Spath through four colored bands, upwards towards the angel of the abyss, their scorpiontails striking their helpless victims, their fierce snarling heads in combined full-face/profile view seemingly an early version of the horse's head in Picasso's Guernica. TheArk of Noah (a prefiguration of the Church) is a compartmentalized doll's house, dec-orated with little hearts, inhabited by a delightful menagerie of yellow, blue, orange, and

272 Reviews

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purple creatures. There are some wonderful double-page spreads, such as the surrealistic"Woman Clothed with the Sun" (Apoc. 12.1-18). As Williams observes, it is conceivedon the grand scale of mural painting. In a setting of six colored bands, the evil giantseven-headed dragon battles the forces of goodness in the form of Michael and his angelsabove, as one of its heads spews out a dark river below. The woman (an allegorical figureof the Church), with child, fused with the glowing sun, floats above the moon at theupper left; in the lower right the dragon, transformed into a black devil, is cast downinto the Inferno with his own wicked angels. Maius was clearly proud of his work. Hisname appears in two places in the manuscript, and the unusually long colophon givesmuch information about the commissioning of the book. He was a well-known andinfluential illustrator. The monk Emeterius tells us how Maius passed awayon 30 October968 in the Monasteryof San Salvadorde Tavara,having left unfinished another illustratedBeatusthat Emeterius himself was called upon to complete. Maius had been the teacherand mentor, and Emeterius the pupil refers to him admiringly as a worthy master painter(archipictor).At a time when facsimile editions have tended to become both exquisitely refined andexorbitantly priced, it is refreshing to find a high-quality facsimile edition of a majormanuscript that even an average college library can purchase.

JACQUESGUILMAIN,State University of New York, Stony Brook

JAMES. WIMSATr, haucerand His FrenchContemporaries:atural Music in the FourteenthCentury.Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Pp. xv, 378; 21 black-and-white illustrations. $60.James I. Wimsatt's Chaucer and His French Contemporariess a major work of contex-tualization whose aim is similar to that of Charles Muscatine's magisterial ChaucerandtheFrenchTraditionof 1957-to demonstrate Chaucer's close affinity with literary thingsFrench. In the intervening years since Muscatine's book, the center of gravityof Chaucer'scontext has oscillated, it seems, between Italy and England. Piero Boitani, David Wallace,and others have emphasized Chaucer's affinities with Dante and Boccaccio, while PaulStrohm and others have demonstrated the centrality of English politics and society toan understanding of Chaucer and his oeuvre. Others have sought their Chaucers indirections more theoretical than geographical, with major works by Ferster, Leicester,and Kendrick using newer critical modes to explicate his works; particularly over thepast three or four years, several important books have approached him from a varietyof feminist perspectives (Mann, Dinshaw, Martin, Hansen). None of these approachesor contextualizations, of course, precludes all others, for the past twenty years has cer-tainly taught us that the besetting sin of literary criticism has been the inclination tototalize, that is, to inscribe one's own intentions onto those of past authors, passing offone's interpretation as objectively "true," exclusive of others. It is, though, with somesense of coming home that I read Wimsatt's book, for to me Chaucer seems overwhelm-ingly French.Chaucerand His FrenchContemporariess not, however, merely a reharvesting of a fieldso thoroughly worked by Muscatine thirty-seven years ago. Where Muscatine centers TheRomanceof the Rose and devotes the last third of his book to TheCanterburyTales,Wimsattlargely avoids both, except in passing. His interest is mostly in the lyrical as opposed tothe narrative; and, as his title affirms, the French poets he treats are less the giants ofthe previous century, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and more the ones whoselives overlapped and probably intersected with Chaucer's-Jean de la Mote, Guillaumede Machaut, Jean Froissart, Oton de Granson, and Eustache Deschamps. Muscatine, of

purple creatures. There are some wonderful double-page spreads, such as the surrealistic"Woman Clothed with the Sun" (Apoc. 12.1-18). As Williams observes, it is conceivedon the grand scale of mural painting. In a setting of six colored bands, the evil giantseven-headed dragon battles the forces of goodness in the form of Michael and his angelsabove, as one of its heads spews out a dark river below. The woman (an allegorical figureof the Church), with child, fused with the glowing sun, floats above the moon at theupper left; in the lower right the dragon, transformed into a black devil, is cast downinto the Inferno with his own wicked angels. Maius was clearly proud of his work. Hisname appears in two places in the manuscript, and the unusually long colophon givesmuch information about the commissioning of the book. He was a well-known andinfluential illustrator. The monk Emeterius tells us how Maius passed awayon 30 October968 in the Monasteryof San Salvadorde Tavara,having left unfinished another illustratedBeatusthat Emeterius himself was called upon to complete. Maius had been the teacherand mentor, and Emeterius the pupil refers to him admiringly as a worthy master painter(archipictor).At a time when facsimile editions have tended to become both exquisitely refined andexorbitantly priced, it is refreshing to find a high-quality facsimile edition of a majormanuscript that even an average college library can purchase.

JACQUESGUILMAIN,State University of New York, Stony Brook

JAMES. WIMSATr, haucerand His FrenchContemporaries:atural Music in the FourteenthCentury.Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Pp. xv, 378; 21 black-and-white illustrations. $60.James I. Wimsatt's Chaucer and His French Contemporariess a major work of contex-tualization whose aim is similar to that of Charles Muscatine's magisterial ChaucerandtheFrenchTraditionof 1957-to demonstrate Chaucer's close affinity with literary thingsFrench. In the intervening years since Muscatine's book, the center of gravityof Chaucer'scontext has oscillated, it seems, between Italy and England. Piero Boitani, David Wallace,and others have emphasized Chaucer's affinities with Dante and Boccaccio, while PaulStrohm and others have demonstrated the centrality of English politics and society toan understanding of Chaucer and his oeuvre. Others have sought their Chaucers indirections more theoretical than geographical, with major works by Ferster, Leicester,and Kendrick using newer critical modes to explicate his works; particularly over thepast three or four years, several important books have approached him from a varietyof feminist perspectives (Mann, Dinshaw, Martin, Hansen). None of these approachesor contextualizations, of course, precludes all others, for the past twenty years has cer-tainly taught us that the besetting sin of literary criticism has been the inclination tototalize, that is, to inscribe one's own intentions onto those of past authors, passing offone's interpretation as objectively "true," exclusive of others. It is, though, with somesense of coming home that I read Wimsatt's book, for to me Chaucer seems overwhelm-ingly French.Chaucerand His FrenchContemporariess not, however, merely a reharvesting of a fieldso thoroughly worked by Muscatine thirty-seven years ago. Where Muscatine centers TheRomanceof the Rose and devotes the last third of his book to TheCanterburyTales,Wimsattlargely avoids both, except in passing. His interest is mostly in the lyrical as opposed tothe narrative; and, as his title affirms, the French poets he treats are less the giants ofthe previous century, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and more the ones whoselives overlapped and probably intersected with Chaucer's-Jean de la Mote, Guillaumede Machaut, Jean Froissart, Oton de Granson, and Eustache Deschamps. Muscatine, of

Reviewseviews 27373