7 May 2014 at 6pm 

Kardinaal Mercierzaal – Institute of philosophy HIW 01.01

Kardinaal Mercierplein – Leuven (B)

The lecture will be followed by a reception. Participation is free, but registration is required. To register, please send an email to marleen.reynders@kuleuven.be before 23th May 2014.

In the history of the illustrated prayer book, the St. Albans Psalter could be likened to the big bang, which was followed by a period of rapid pictorial inflation. The remaining twelfth, thirteenth centuries and fourteenth centuries are filled with an exponentially increasing number of prayer books with picture cycles of ever-expanding ambition. In some of these books, pictures become independent of prayers, and it is this phenomenon, the independent picture cycle in late medieval books intended for prayer and meditation on which my paper will focus.

The Getty Museum recently acquired one such manuscript, a pictorial life of Christ illuminated in northern England during the last decade of the twelfth century. Whether its original complement of fifty-one or more miniatures stood on their own, without any text, or whether, as is more likely, they provided a pictorial preface to a psalter, remains uncertain, an ambiguity that underscores the kinship between what with time would become two distinct genres, one with, the other without text. The Getty’s manuscript provides the perfect pendant to one of the most remarkable devotional books of the Middle Ages, the Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin, now in the Burgerbibliothek in Bern, but originally made in Strasbourg during the last decade of the fourteenth century. To speak, however, of a straightforward evolution from prayer book (e.g., the psalter) to picture book, or, as in the case of the Begerin’s book or the Getty’s picture book, from picture book to prayer book, would be far too simple. Nor can these books simply be seen as illustrating established devotional texts.

The picture is complicated by the intersection and interplay of numerous genres. In the Begerin’s book, as in the St. Albans Psalter, both of which were fashioned for female readers, the Vita Christi is preceded by a short typological preface and succeeded by scenes from the lives of saints, which carry Christ’s example into the present. As always, typology has a triplicate, not merely a double structure; it not only establishes the fulfillment of the Old Law in the New, it also points to the future by presenting itself as the model for all that comes thereafter. In the end, however, the Begerin’s book in its original form represents far more than an extension of the pictorial principles established in the prefatory cycles of psalters such as that from St. Albans; its genealogy is much more complicated.

Although its cycle extends well beyond what could be found in liturgical readings, its closest relatives are manuscripts of illustrated pericopes. Despite its having taken the Speculum humanae salvationis as its point of departure, it is also related to picture books that clearly never formed part of psalters and thus were freed of typological constraints. Typology might yet provide the key, however, in so far as it is predicated on a principle of visualization: Christianity manifests its truth in so far as it becomes visible in the world, both as body (Christ’s) and as history (his manifest miracles). By becoming visible, salvation history it opens itself up not only to narrative elaboration, but also to imitation. This may be the most profound sense in which earlier manuscripts such as the St. Albans Psalter lent themselves to imitation. The model-copy relationships that they engendered extended from pictures to persons, with the ultimate exemplar being Christ himself, a process to which the lives of the saints and aspiring saints bore witness.

Source de l’information : Lectio