Download PDF | Elizabeth Moore Hunt - Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts, 1270-1310- (2006).

Download PDF | Elizabeth Moore Hunt - Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts, 1270-1310- (2006).

264 Pages 

Introduction 

Images painted in the margins of Gothic manuscripts are tiny. Some measure a few millimeters tall, while others measuring three centimeters wide are considered large. Surrounding the text, borders of gold, red, and blue baguettes serve as stages for these minute figures of knights, ladies, monks, angels, simians, animals, and hybrids. They dance, play, hunt, battle, and jest, performing a range of activities and interchangeable roles that distinguish each illuminated page from any other. 

Despite the diminutive presence of these images, when considered in the larger context of the manuscripts in which they appear, they offer insightful commentary about cultural values and the socio-political climate of medieval northern Europe. Marginal images abounded on the borders of manuscripts produced throughout Europe during the late thirteenth century. Art historians have tended to concentrate their studies on deluxe manuscripts produced in England and Paris.1 By emphasizing liturgical and devotional manuscripts, this research has vastly expanded the understanding of how marginal images interacted with the text, other images, and the audience. 

Marginal illumination, however, was not limited to sacred texts produced in England and Paris. Manuscripts produced in the counties of northern France and Flanders exhibit the widest range of marginal repertoires and book types such as romances, historical works, encyclopedia, and poetry.2 Building on extant studies of marginal illumination, this study explores how the practice of illuminating margins developed with respect to the production of both sacred and secular manuscripts. By examining both Latin and French texts, this study demonstrates the breadth of influence illuminators had on book production and reception in medieval western Europe. 

MANUSCRIPT PRODUCTION ON THE FLEMISHARTESIAN BORDER 

The broadest spectrum of book types embellished with marginal images occurred during the late thirteenth century in northern French and Flemish counties.3 Likely composed of lay, itinerant artisans, the groups of illuminators developed and shared repertoires of motifs that were applied to the margins of illustrated Latin and French texts. Among the workshops participating in this fashion, those in the centers of the dioceses of Thérouanne, Arras, and Tournai had important patrons in the courts of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault, among others, and in the abbeys of various monastic communities.4 

These marginal images, or marginalia, emerged over the course of the thirteenth century from the inhabited scrolls and zoo-anthropomorphic initials of decorated letters dividing the books of the Bible or the major Psalms. By the mid-thirteenth century, the figures merge with the vines and border stalks surrounding the text, morphing into foliage, dragons, and human bodies, while others begin to stand independently on the borders as groundlines.5 In his study of the marginal spaces of medieval art, Image on the Edge, Michael Camille notes that the Rutland Psalter, made in England, ca. 1260, can be counted among the earliest Gothic manuscripts fully decorated with marginalia, and that the newly available manuscripts of Aristotle’s Physics at the universities in Paris and Oxford were also among the earliest examples with marginal vignettes.6 Connected to Bruges in the diocese of Tournai and dating to ca. 1265–75, a Bible named for its scribe, Henricus, is addressed in chapter 2 to demonstrate how closely socalled profane motifs of nudes, birds, and jongleurs were tied to the decorated letters in the early stages of the Flemish-Artesian repertoire’s development (fig. 1). 

Devotional manuscripts produced by related artists in Thérouanne, called the Dampierre group, and customized for local patrons are examined in chapter 3 to demonstrate the expansion of the repertoire into numerous folios containing variations and combinations of marginal motifs throughout the initials, borders, line-fillers, and margins. Also in the mid-thirteenth century, new categories of manuscripts became subject to illustration, especially deluxe romances, histories, and encyclopedia, which are explored in chapters 4–6. Written in the vernacular, such books were increasingly favored by noble and clerical readers.7 Romances were on the whole not illuminated in England, and Parisian illuminators rarely incorporated marginalia into illustrated vernacular texts.8 Yet the artisans of the manuscript centers featured in this study applied marginal figures with abandon to new programs of illumination in both Latin and French texts on both large and small scales. While our knowledge of literacy and patronage for texts in this period is riddled with lacunae, the varied combinations of marginal images attest that each manuscript was a specialized product and should be considered on its own terms.9 The enhancement of these different types of commissions with a shared repertoire demonstrates the flexibility and adaptability of marginal figures toward generating meaning for readers in a variety of contexts. Although each manuscript product is certainly unique, illuminators typically followed models for compositions and for iconography.10 Like their counterparts in Liège, East Anglia, and Paris, illuminators in northern France and Flanders shared repertoires for accentuating the borders with figural elements. 

As Lilian Randall aptly demonstrated in her 1964 index for Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, not only do marginal figures tend to be repetitive, but also the types of images are hard to categorize as they are rarely developed from biblical sources and are usually described by manuscript catalogers as profane, droll, and grotesque.11 Given the sometimes rote non-sense of numerous marginal motifs in any given manuscript, I consider these illuminated borders in the terms of the “manuscript age of reproduction.”12 Through the repetition, transposition, and juxtaposition of recognizable motifs, the added contours, polychrome, and gilt required specialized attention for major turns in the pages, making all the subjects of each opening more pronounced. During a period in which new kinds of texts written in both Latin and French were becoming available to a growing and diverse audience of readers, the Flemish-Artesian illuminators treated both secular and religious commissions with marginalia. The concentration of marginal imagery in this region’s manuscripts, therefore, affords a glimpse into the intersection of artistic, literary, and social values in book production and ownership. Surviving manuscripts produced in the counties of northern France and Belgium during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries exhibit a variety of different and overlapping styles that have led to difficulties in identifying their origins and to their third-cousin status in relation to elegant styles of illumination in Paris and England. Recent and forthcoming scholarship remedies the problems of stylistic attribution. Maurits Smeyers, in his recent survey of manuscript illumination, outlines the regional developments in detail and highlights the best manuscript products of the major centers.13 

Judith Oliver’s monograph on illumination in Liège provides an in-depth study of an overlooked but rich area of manuscript production in one diocese.14 The dissertation by Kerstin B. Carlvant, “Thirteenth-Century Illumination in Bruges and Ghent,” provides additional background to the painting styles discussed in for the Dampierre group as some of the illuminators are related to manuscripts linked to Bruges.15 The backbone for research  on the manuscripts addressed in this study comes from the work of Alison Stones, who has identified the individual hands of illuminators and specific styles practiced in Thérouanne, Arras, Tournai, Douai, and Cambrai. Her forthcoming catalog of manuscripts illuminated in France, ca. 1260–1320, promises to clarify the puzzling sphere of individual hands and workshops based in northeast France and Flanders.16 These studies of northern French and Flemish workshops show an intriguing body of religious and secular manuscripts, many of them containing marginalia and dating roughly from the 1260s to 1290s. As Stones emphasizes, the relevance of model-book images to sacred or profane texts was blurred by the last decade of the thirteenth century.17 For example, warriors in biblical battle scenes are dressed as medieval knights in chain mail and tunics, as are those who skirmish in the margins of psalters, romances, and encyclopedia. Profane themes of everyday life such as agricultural labors and courtly games were already present in calendar illustrations and continued in ivory carvings that decorated luxury domestic objects. Ceramic production was particularly strong along the North Sea; surviving fragments show that the marginal designs were shared among artisans in different media, including manuscript illumination and stained glass. 

The popularity of marginal motifs from the repertoire only increased through the fourteenth century, but the application of these motifs to earlier customized manuscripts provides immediate contexts for understanding the cultural significance of each book. The fact that the exact same figures and compositions were applied to different types of illumination programs, by copying a model, template, or even a preparatory sketch, would seem to indicate that artistic choices were made independently of the text.18 The fringe, or physically peripheral, location of the marginal images, furthermore, has led many scholars to celebrate the so-called “freedom of the artist” in the choices of motifs, variations on themes, and plays on words.19 Yet in some cases, directions to the illustrator were written in French, then cut off or erased from the outer margins.20 As the debate on artistic literacy continues, Keith Busby offers a sensible proposition to the margins of an Alexander Romance: “While the illuminator need not have read the text, it is certain that in this and many other cases, the planner had.”21 Individual bookmakers—variously called planners, advisors, or the French term, libraires—may have been responsible for organizing the workshops of scribes, illuminators, and binders.22 A planner may have played a significant role in the choice of marginal subjects where it interested him to expand upon or alter a motif from the repertoire.23 In addition to proximate imagery, the rubrics and text also supply probable sources for the choices of marginal motifs. Examination of the contents of each individual manuscript and the imagery contained within its pages provides archaeological evidence for aspects of production and customization in the workshop practices and also fosters inquiry into the impact on the manuscripts’ readers or viewers. The working habits and expanding iconographic repertoire of artists in the diocese of Thérouanne, centered in Saint Omer or Thérouanne, can be examined in manuscripts made for liturgical, devotional, secular, and didactic uses. 

Two Cistercian tomes, the Henricus Bible and a theological Summa by Monaldus of Istria, serve to establish the emergence of the repertoire in relation to the decorated letter and the text in chapter 2. Linked to Bruges in Flanders through the same artists, one of the most influential workshops contributing to the repertoire is called the Dampierre group, named for the psalter made for Guy of Dampierre, the Count of Flanders (1280–1305). Analysis of this psalter’s gatherings, or quires, of folios reveals that marginal motifs occur in clusters, so a codicological approach is used to analyze a related luxury psalter and a deluxe Vulgate Arthur related to the same artists and patronage in chapters 3 and 4. The application of the Dampierre group’s repertoire in new kinds of texts, particularly encyclopedia and compendia addressed in chapters 5 and 6, reflect the growing literary tastes of patrons who afforded the extra expense for “mirrors of knowledge,” such as the Speculum majus by Vincent of Beauvais and Le Trésor by Brunetto Latini. To the south of Thérouanne, workshops in neighboring Arras and Douai were also active in the production of the same types of books—including encyclopedia, romances, lives of saints, and books of hours. Stones has identified the body of work by one master likely based in Arras, the “Maître au menton fuyant.”24 A less refined painting style characterized by minimal contours and black legs emerged out of Douai in a number of different types of texts.25 In order to examine more closely the encyclopedias of the region in chapters 5 and 6, I leave examination of the liturgical and devotional books by these workshops for the future.26 In the heftier tomes of reference works, marginal images are spread farther apart, appearing only on the folios dividing large sections of texts, books, or chapters. These texts specify and describe categories of nature, history, knowledge, and the human soul, so the relationship of the illustrations or text to the marginal images is especially acute for discerning meanings relevant to monastic or secular audiences.

METHODS AND APPROACHES 

Several recent studies on the development of marginalia in manuscripts and sculpture supply an adequate historiography concerning the problems that marginal images have posed to original viewers and to pioneers in the field  of medieval art.27 For the sculptural programs of the church, marginal motifs were seen as excessive and meaningless both by the medieval theologian, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and by the modern iconographer, Emile Mâle of the Sorbonne.28 As a result, the subjects of marginal motifs were long regarded as genre scenes, whether naively amusing or appallingly grotesque, and the marginal spaces were categorically relegated to the realms of sinful outcast or mere decoration. Manuscript catalogers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inconsistently included descriptions of marginal figures, although the sheer amount in some manuscripts made this task daunting and impractical to print. Some complete catalog descriptions, like those by Camille Gaspar and Frédéric Lyna or M. R. James, contributed to the practice of codicology in considering the whole book as archaeological artifact.29

 In terms of the social context of marginal imagery, Meyer Schapiro brought the jongleurs, musicians, and dancers out of the spandrels when he suggested that the new Romanesque style of sculpture at the Spanish monastery at Silos, next to the traditional Mozarabic style, reflected class-conscious changes among the monastic and lay communities.30 By investigating the immediate historical circumstances surrounding the use of a jongleur motif, Schapiro demonstrated more meaningful positions for marginal images in relation to both the makers and the viewers. The purpose of this study is to explore the varying contexts within which a burgeoning repertoire of subjects for the borders began to frame the manuscript text. The concept of framing is essential to a two-prong approach that accounts for both the making and reading of different kinds of texts. Jonathan Alexander, in his influential article “Iconography and Ideology,” proposes this shift in thinking about the problems of marginalia plagued by the dichotomies of its historigraphy: It is conventional to describe the scene in the border as ‘marginal’ and ‘secular,’ thus opposing it to the historiated initial as ‘religious’ and ‘central.’ But that may be tendentious. Suppose rather than ‘marginal’ we describe it as ‘framing’? Does the image not then assume a different importance and a different role, a dynamic interaction of meanings, both secular and religious, on different levels for a variety of viewers?31 The most often repeated motifs are associated with worldly activities: jugglers, acrobats, and musicians, battles or duels, and hunts or chases after prey. 

But images in the margins are not always categorically profane, for monks, nuns, angels, and saints are among the more serious figures. In both Latin and French manuscripts, nudes and mermaids from the antique tradition appear frequently forming borders and inhabiting initials. Painted by the same illuminator for the illustration, the marginal images potentially interact with other elements of the page or quire. Rather than regarding marginalia as mere copy or afterthought, the concept of framing allows the whole of the illuminated page to be activated at once and in relation to proximate imagery. In this study, the whole book functions as the structural framework for discerning the choices made by the artists and for gauging the significance of those choices to the readers. The dissemination of marginal motifs in both religious and secular manuscripts made along the Flemish-Artesian border allows an examination of each manuscript on its own terms and offers comparisons for the different uses of popular motifs. Issues regarding the physical locations of marginal images, the significance of their subjects, and the social contexts of the viewers are addressed in the following chapters through case studies of individual manuscripts. Briefly, the contributions to research in codicology, iconography, and historical context that shaped this study are reviewed here by way of introducing the Flemish-Artesian manuscripts within the broader circumstances of late thirteenth-century manuscript production. 

CODICOLOGY 

The organizing principal for this study was to gather the data according to the working habits of the illuminators, who most likely painted folios quire by quire. Typically, marginal images are clustered around divisions in the text that are distinguished by decorated, inhabited, or historiated initials or miniature illuminations.32 The archaeological method put forward by L. M. J. Delaissé, codicology, takes the whole of the book into consideration, including the pricking and ruling, the collation of quires, and the pigmentation of the materials.33 Using this method to great effect, Richard and Mary Rouse in Manuscripts and their Makers in Paris discern the workshop practices and the role of the libraire, or organizer, in executing the various new types of commissions which in Paris were increasingly oriented toward university materials.34 Parisian workshop practices and organization influenced book production in outlying provinces catering to local nobility and clergy. Particularly instructive is the example of the Montbastons, a husband and wife team who illuminated a Roman de la Rose with bawdy scenes of a nun gathering phalluses and taking those of monks. The scenes have been connected to pilgrim’s badges and bawdy fabliaux, but their sequence failed to cohere in an intelligible narrative, seeming to point to the female artist’s illiteracy, on the one hand, and her illustrative capacity for literary allegory,  on the other.35 

The work of this pair is also well known for the scene of the husband and wife at work in the scriptorium, as bifolia hang drying along a rod behind her desk and bench.36 The Rouses took the background cue and deconstructed the manuscript—literally. Looking at the manuscript quire by quire, they were able to see that what appeared to be disjointed scenes may have been drawn on separate bifolia before the libraire collated them together into a gathering. According to the Rouses, “As far as we know, all illumination on all text pages of all manuscripts of this time was painted in the same fashion as Jeanne of Montbaston’s bas-de-page scenes in BnF fr. 25526: quire by quire and, within the quire, one sheet or bifolium at a time and, on the bifolium, one side at a time.”37 One definite rule in the medieval production of manuscripts is that the hair side (the exterior part of the original hide) of a folio always faces another hair side and the flesh (the interior side) always faces flesh.38 The sizes of the manuscripts produced during the late thirteenth century vary from duodecimo, in which four folds of parchment produce twelve pages, to folio, in which large sheets are folded once and nested. The psalters in this study are all composed of quires of fine, thin parchment containing twelve folios, or six bifolia each, measuring 10–20 x 15–25 centimeters. This indicates that each quire probably came from the same sheet of parchment, which when folded guarantees the consistency of the sides facing one another. Meanwhile, the romance and encyclopedia pages were cut from large, whitened sheets of usually heavy quality; four or six sheets were folded once and nested together to form quires of eight or twelve. To keep the bifolia straight, signatures mark the first four or six folios and a catch phrase is written on the last verso of each quire to correspond to the first words on the next one. These codicological clues, which still remain in many of these manuscripts, help the art historian follow the artistic process. 

Marginal motifs often relate to one another across whole openings, verso facing recto, creating what Camille calls a “reflexivity of imagery” that can account for the choice of motifs as much as the text, the principal image, or the intended reader can.39 Taking this one step further in a deconstructed gathering, the method of looking at the collation of bifolia is especially applicable to the psalters of the late thirteenth century, which are among the earliest deluxe examples of manuscripts with profuse marginalia. The bifoliate relationships in these manuscripts are complicated to study. The small size of the manuscripts suggests to me that they may have been ruled, written, and painted prior to folding and collating the gatherings for binding. Looking at the bifolia as sections of a larger sheet of parchment sometimes reveals associated themes within the same quires. In larger-scale texts, on the other  hand, the bifolia are rarely illuminated on two sides because the divisions in the prose text are spread farther apart. In these instances, studying the concentration or collection of images on the same page, and within and among neighboring quires, contributes to understanding the choice and significance of imagery within the whole of the book. 

ICONOGRAPHY AND AUDIENCE 

During the incipient period of border illumination in the mid-thirteenth century, marginal images echo the use and function of sermon exempla, or stories told in the vernacular to illustrate biblical points that were developed by preachers after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.40 The example of a knight afraid of a rabbit or snail illustrates the vice of cowardice, appearing on the façades of French Gothic cathedrals and frequently in the margins of FlemishArtesian manuscripts. In her studies on the Flemish-Artesian repertoire, Randall traces some of the popular motifs to sermon exempla as well as to political slander and social commentary in contemporary literature. For example, the snail may have specifically referred to the social-climbing Lombard bankers who posed an economic threat to the nobility.41 The most idiosyncratic of the Flemish motifs is the “nesting-eggs” motif, which depicts a hooded, half-naked man sitting on a basket of eggs and holding one up for examination. Randall refers to popular Flemish poetry that cited this motif as a slander against English men who were ridiculed for growing tails and hatching schemes.42 While investigating the context of the nesting-eggs motif in the Dampierre Psalter, I noticed that it appeared in the same quire as several common images based on sermon exempla, such as the music-playing ass who cannot hear and the farmer’s housewife chasing a fox. 

There is also an apparent absence of a motif in the same quire and those next to it—there are none of the heraldic shields that are frequently pictured elsewhere in the margins bearing the coats of arms of Flemish noblemen.43 In the Vulgate Arthur, likely also produced for the family of the count of Flanders, the nesting-eggs motif appears next to the miniature depicting King Arthur enthroned—in this one of many images of the English king, the ruler’s face has been rubbed out (fig. 2). Again, heraldry is absent from the margins in the same quire. In both cases, the slander of the motif of nesting eggs was clearly meaningful to the artists and the readers. Placing the motif in the context of nearby imagery raises the issue of how the contents of the text and illustrations may have also informed the relevance of a motif appearing in one manuscript versus another made for a different context. 

In her recent article on the state of the field of medieval marginalia, Lucy Freeman Sandler notes that studies limited to one sort of marginal motif, such as women, scatology, etc., have resulted in equally limited conclusions about meaning.44 Recognizing that several types of images appear within one book, Sandler suggests viewing them collectively and in relation to one another: Rather than looking at one kind of image in all books, therefore, it would be better to look at all kinds of image in any one book—or more ambitiously, all books with marginalia—and to consider every aspect of their meaning, including contradictory and overlapping meanings. Recent codicological studies of manuscripts have taught us to consider the page and the book as a whole from the point of view of its physical making; a no less wholistic approach to marginal imagery might yield new understanding of a subject that has fascinated, horrified, and perplexed historians for the last hundred years.45 Sandler also outlines the specific questions for the circumstances of production: “who wanted it, for whom was it made, who made it, and how.”46 The iconography of marginal motifs remains important to the reception of the manuscript text by a viewing and possibly a reading audience. 

Heraldic shields in the margins, in particular, functioned as the portraiture, or the group portraiture in some cases, that identified the primary owners of luxury books.47 Case studies of individual manuscripts, like the Luttrell Psalter and the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, focus on the potential text-image and imagepatron relationships, which are more conclusive in the manuscripts of the fourteenth century.48 For example, Camille examines all of the images in the Luttrell Psalter within the contexts of the hands of the artists, their repertoires, and the structure of the book.49 The relationship of the patron to the imagery is explicit in his title, Mirror in Parchment, for he approaches the margins as a reflection of the ideals of the noble audience. Such documented provenance and clues from heraldry are not always explicit in the FlemishArtesian manuscripts, but generic figures of nobles, ladies, and clerics may reflect the gender or position of an intended owner. While customized, luxury devotional books have been rewarding studies in artistic virtuosity and patronage, Sandler does not mention romances and reference texts in her description of the late thirteenth-century developments in marginalia.50 

The margins of these texts deserve more attention to support the decorative, devilish, and didactic roles such images may have played in devotional books. Rather than attempting a comprehensive survey this study undertakes an ambitious route to examine the marginal images in a cross-section of books with marginalia, involving both new and traditional cycles of illustration. The codicological, iconographic, and historical contexts of the different types of manuscripts are brought to bear on the meanings and selections of certain motifs. Schapiro’s view of marginal spaces as a realm for the “individualism” and “free invention of an artist” is shared by Camille’s enthusiasm in Image on the Edge. 51 In this book, the social sphere of the viewer, whether in the cloister, in the church, or in the court, is also emphasized.52 Camille illustrates how the broad cross-section of media that carried marginal motifs permeated sign systems of medieval viewers. From the section “In the Cloisters,” for example, Camille emphasizes the physical context of marginal sculpture and the kind of audience privy to the spaces of the church. For example, images of women beating their husbands and wielding power were the antithesis of Church doctrine and depicted on misericords; the disorderly conduct was in turn physically suppressed under the bottoms of clerics sitting in the choir stalls.53 In this circular transaction of ribald humor that at the same time reinforces what it critiques, Mikhail Bahktin’s theory of laughter may account for the dominant religious contexts of such bawdy and churlish subjects.54

 Found in both secular and religious contexts, however, some marginal subjects continue to call religious and secular dichotomies into question. Considering a moral point for one of the earliest and most common motifs, hunting, the prey is likened to the Christian soul. Its modern descriptor as a “favorite medieval pastime” could be seriously called into question, yet in the households of the courts, hunting hounds were prized by some more than manuscripts. In didactic texts, the bow is used as a metaphor for the preparation of study and the recollection of memory. The example of hunting alone shows how multiple meanings existed for the same kind of image, the liturgical, romance, or instructional context of which perhaps framed its perception. Camille’s emphasis on varying contexts and multiple audiences provides a lens for inquiries into the historical contexts of individual manuscripts. In her recent study, Reframing Medieval Art: Difference, Margins, Boundaries, Madeline Caviness explores the relationship between marginal iconography, the gender of the intended audience, and the construction of ideology. Facing the problematic subjects of nudity, obscenity, women, and aggressive actions, she emphasizes the viewer’s role in the reception of gender-charged imagery. Moreover, the intended audience of male or female, monastic or lay, or private or public seemed to affect decisions in the design and quantity of marginal subjects. The gender of “grotesque freaks” (animal hinds with human torsos and heads), emblematic objects, and gendered activities all  participated in visualizing the maintenance of social hierarchies.55

 The construction of gender through the selection of motifs, however, is less likely a unified intention on the part of the planner but more likely activated by existing ideological positions of the reader. From the feminist perspective, Caviness suggests that the overtly fecund and sexual motifs in devotional books for young women were frightening and threatening.56 Her readings are elaborated into an exploration of issues of masculinity in the margins of devotional books for both men and women.57 Marginal women appear most often in hip swaying poses, dancing or playing music. Men fighting with weapons seem to populate most of the margins of any given manuscript. Apes and men are shown hunting and trapping birds, and hounds and hares abound. As Sandler shows in her study of the fourteenth-century English Ormesby Psalter, the pointed weapons and the furry animals had bawdy genital equivalents.58 Caviness’s statistics show how the proportions of men and women, as well as animals, musical instruments, and foliage, in the margins reflect the gendered positions of intended patrons. Because different social types of men and women are figured in the margins, the social positions of the probable audiences aid in interpreting the reception of reflexive as well as repetitive imagery. A recent article by Jean Wirth provides three rules to follow in studying the manuscript context of marginal images. He first warns against making allusions that have no perceptible chance of being provable. 

In his critique of Randall’s formal parallel drawn between the game of “frog-in-the-middle” beneath the Annunciation and the Betrayal of Christ on the facing page in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreaux, he argues instead that the game of the marginal scene belongs with the spring season of the Annunciation, the feast of which is on March 25.59 Second, the possibility of an allusion is inversely proportional to the frequency of the iconographic motif and the textual motif to which it is supposed to relate. Thus, overly symbolic interpretations of a repeated model, like hunting scenes or grotesques, to the contents of the text should be tempered by their high frequency.60 Third, because a motif’s meaning can shift according to context and audience, the signification of a motif cannot be established by an examination of its different occurrences, a point also emphasized in Sandler’s state-of-the-field article.61 These shifting contexts in the different kinds of manuscripts, I argue, are exactly those in which the marginalia perform. Most important, Wirth emphasizes the relationship between marginal images and principal images—for often the illuminator is the same for both (e.g., fig. 43).62 This relationship is especially important to my analysis of the codicology of the manuscripts in which I focus on the collation of  folios within gatherings as well as clusters of images across folios. To map the entirety of marginal models across codices as Caviness has done will take additional time and effort, but the iconography of selected motifs can be considered in terms of their individual pictorial and textual contexts as well as in the contexts of their audiences. 

HISTORICAL CONTEXT 

In “Iconography and Ideology,” Alexander proposes to look at “how art was used . . . as a representational matrix that both codified and strengthened social values and thus ensured social cohesion throughout medieval Christian society.”63 In order to examine the social positioning of repetitive and reflexive marginal images, it is necessary to inquire into the circumstances of the local noble and clerical patrons of illuminated books. Whereas some patrons are barely traceable, others help to secure the dates for particular commissions and stylistically related manuscripts.

 In considering manuscripts for which the evidence of patronage is nonexistent, scant, or even roughly suggested, the social group for which the manuscript was most likely intended—either in the court of the aristocracy or in the library of the monastery—can be understood in terms of larger trends in book production and literacy during the late thirteenth century. Meanwhile, incipient conflicts among counts, kings, towns, artisans, and the Church provide the historical backdrop for the development of marginalia in new types of manuscripts illuminated for the powerful patrons who could afford them. 

The family history of the count of Flanders in the thirteenth century is in itself an intriguing examination of familial structures. Most unusually, two sisters held the seat in succession through the middle of the century: Jeanne and Margaret, the daughters of Baldwin of Constantinople. However, Louis IX, to his favor, controlled this arrangement and their inheritance. Both countesses founded convents for nuns and contributed generously to monastic abbeys throughout the region.64 Margaret married twice, to Bouchard of Avesnes and then to William of Dampierre, so that she was Countess of Flanders and Hainault until 1278 when she abdicated.65 The county of Hainault was ceded through the first son of her first marriage, John (d. 1257), whose son John II of Avesnes (d. 1304) also gained Luxembourg through marriage and Holland upon the death of Floris V’s son, John I, in 1299.66 

Three of his brothers were bishops of Metz, Utrecht, and Cambrai, and his sister the abbess at the convent at Flines, which was founded by Margaret. The county of Flanders eventually ceded to Margaret’s second son by her second marriage, Guy of Dampierre, who himself married twice and fathered sixteen  children. Most of his offspring were placed in lucrative marriages; his fifth daughter, Johanna, entered the convent at Flines, and his third son, John, became archbishop of Liège in 1282. In 1294, the count’s sixth daughter, Philippina, was engaged to the future king of England, Edward II.67 Members of these comital families are connected to several luxury manuscripts illuminated by the same groups of artists incorporating the fashionable marginalia in exuberance into the framework of the borders. The Psalter of Guy of Dampierre was likely made for the count of Flanders some time around 1275–85. A psalter sold through H. P. Kraus (cat. 75, no. 88) painted by a hand of the Dampierre group has been attributed to the readership of Countess “Margaret the Black” herself.68 Although the heraldic devices in these manuscripts supply connections to the intended owners, heraldry is not always the firmest indicator of provenance. Stones demonstrates how the armorial evidence in the Tournai Psalter (Tournai Cathedral, Scaldis H 12/2), for example, points less likely to Louis le Hutin than to William of Termonde, Guy’s second son who was a known patron of illuminated manuscripts and romances.69 In her article on the Vulgate Arthur, shared between the Bibliothèque nationale de France (henceforth “BnF”) and Yale University Library, Stones bases the patronage on the arms of William of Termonde that appear on the destrier, or warhorse, of a knight in the bas-de-page of the opening page of the Quest. 70 Detailed in chapters 3 and 4, these manuscripts were illuminated with a high density of marginalia per gathering and were commissioned specifically for the court. Gabrielle Spiegel’s study of vernacular prose historiography in the early thirteenth century incorporates the history of the Franco-Flemish lords surrounding the count of Flanders.71 

Prose historiography appeared in this region as a way to appropriate a “usable past” for the nobility’s position in the face of the increasing power of the Capetian kings, Philip Augustus and Louis IX.72 By the end of the century, the demand in this region for prose histories in the vernacular increased, especially for those illuminated with miniatures depicting battles and feats of past rulers and noblemen. For example, William of Termonde commissioned the prose text for Judas Maccabee et ses nobles frères, and the Spiegel Historiael by Jacob of Maerlant was the first written in Dutch, possibly for Count Floris V of Holland.73 Arthurian romances and “mirrors of knowledge” are similar in their large scale and copious illustration to these histories, which romanticized the past and legitimized the present. The popularity for illuminated manuscripts of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum majus, upon which the vernacular histories were based, and Brunetto Latini’s Le Trésor lent to luxury commissions with marginalia on the borders. Illustrated copies of these texts are explored in chapters 5 and 6 including artists from Thérouanne to Arras and Douai. 

In her book, Sealed in Parchment, Sandra Hindman covers the last quarter of the thirteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century in her study of the illuminated manuscripts of Chrétian of Troyes, whose works gained popularity in the counties of northeast France and Flanders.74 Spiegel argues for the development of prose historiography as a way for the nobility to articulate their identity under the shadow of the Capetian dynasty; Hindman argues a similar role for Chrétian’s verses. Hindman rereads the texts and images—mainly in the form of knights on horseback in historiated initials—to explore issues of inheritance, marriage, and social station that were sources of anxiety among the nobility. Five categories of the knight—the clerc, the bacheler, the seignor, the combateor, and the roi—are reflected in the miniatures. Both military exploits and dynastic connections are key to how the “passage from bachelorhood through marriage to lordship or kingship” shows the social expectations of the knightly class.75 Armed knights in chain mail, young bachelors with weapons, and crowned bodies occupy in the margins of the Flemish-Artesian manuscripts and highlight the noble class for whom many of the manuscripts were made. 

Malcolm Vale’s recent book, The Princely Court, on comital households brings more archival evidence to the often confusing social history of the northern Europe. He notes the linguistic difficulty of studying the French and Flemish border counties, the allegiances and powers of which changed so frequently through history.76 Sections on “Luxury, display, and the arts,” and “The structures of court patronage,” situate the status of the Low Countries’ counts vis-à-vis the royal houses of England and France. Due to the lack of Flemish material evidence, aspects of court patronage are based upon surviving accounting lists in Arras that Vale uses to show the sheer amount of expenditures recorded for the nobility and their entourages. For example, one All Saints Day’s livery, including furs and cloths from Ghent for the entire retinue of Count Robert of Béthune, who succeeded Guy of Dampierre in 1305, cost 4,650 livres flandres. 77 Weekly expenses for the count’s household in the 1270s averaged around 350–400 livres parisis, which of course increased when hosting feasts, hunts, or visiting dignitaries.78 

In his history of Medieval Flanders, David Nicholas draws attention to the patronage of manuscripts, especially romances, among the Flemish nobles, but Vale neglects this rich trove of art-historical evidence.79 For instance, the Viel Rentier d’Oudenaarde is a manuscript of property accounts and inventories for the nobleman, Jean of Oudenaarde, and it is illustrated with unframed images in green and red wash of his lands and the people working them.80 Observing the surviving provincial manuscripts, as well as the architecture, furniture, and decorative arts in the region, provides scholars with historical settings for the courts as well as the towns and the abbeys. Of the latter categories of artistic production, there is much more archaeological evidence from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Flanders that, although not necessarily “high” art, belong in an analysis of material culture.81 In popular art, the sign of the count of Flanders—the lion rampant—was seen throughout the county and outside the manuscript context. Ceramic horses and knight riders blazoned with the heraldry survive from the city gates of Ypres, Ghent, and Courtrai. The ceramic tiles lining the floors of urban hôtels and monastic lavatories, as well as panels of stained glass at Saint Michael’s in Ghent, for example, displayed the lion rampant over and over.82 Not unlike the “golden arches” of McDonald’s, which to some have become emblematic of economic power and excess, the identity of the nobility was physically layered with the fabric of the towns and in the repertoire of the region’s artistic production.83 The manuscripts of this region reflect the tastes of the audience who could afford the extra decorative illumination, so the margins containing heraldry are employed to frame the reception of potential readers in their historical context. The reception and use of the marginal images in reading the Latin or French texts depends upon the unknown factor of the reader’s level of literacy.

 The religious and lay individuals who commissioned the various manuscripts with illuminations and marginalia came from the same social echelon of noble rank and increasingly of the merchant class.84 Luxury manuscripts were designed to be highly personal, as in the case of devotional books, but other large-scale manuscripts likely had multiple users. For example, Joyce Coleman supports the idea that romances were read aloud in small groups or ensembles, so the marginal imagery may have been engaged in the reading process.85 Scholars of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts argue for awareness of this transitive period between hearing texts read aloud versus reading them silently and in private, a process that was visualized in marginalia, romances, and reference texts. 

Given these fluid concepts of reading, Sandler emphasizes that the use of marginalia provides a situation in which “the experience of reading the text may be heightened and intensified through the discovery and appreciation of all the riches apparent and concealed in the words.”86 The reception of marginal images and the texts they accompany must be couched in terms of what can be known of the probable historical context in individual cases. The support of this study lies within the folios themselves. Given a changing and broadening market in manuscript production, the manuscripts of this border region—between Paris and England—reflect new ways of  accessing the authority of the text. In the guise of a decorative frame, the marginal imagery underlines these shifting circumstances, and the application of particular motifs could function to interact with the text and the reader. Chapters 2–4 focus on manuscripts illuminated by the Dampierre group including a Bible, a penitential manual, several psalters and the sumptuous Vulgate Arthur. Chapters 5–6 focus on the genre of encyclopedia and didactic compendia illuminated by artists in Thérouanne, Arras, and Douai. 

The marginalia in these manuscripts illustrate the diversity of applications of marginal motifs to supplement the reading of Latin and French texts. This region’s dynamic juncture in book illumination provides a cross-section of the broader developments across Western Europe, including the elaboration of devotional manuals, the compilation of encyclopedia, and the composition of romances created for a growing number of book owners and readers. This study examines manuscripts produced between ca. 1270 and 1310, although slightly earlier and later works inform the major trends as well. Dates in the late thirteenth century are loosely ascertained by stylistic evidence, while 1304–1305 mark the passing of two well-known manuscript patrons: Guy of Dampierre, Count of Flanders, and his half-nephew John II of Avesnes, Count of Hainault. 

The psalter of the elder count was illuminated by artists who completed other manuscripts for members of the Dampierre family; a didactic compendium on love, virtue, and happiness was compiled by the brother of the younger count, the bishop of Utrecht, and its main miniatures contain marginal motifs. Made for local patrons in the church and the court, this generation of book production reflected the tastes, morals, and values of its books’ owners. As an interface between the text and the audience, marginalia provide a culturally rich framework for gaining insight into those reflections. 

 

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