[Scriptoris] Fw: [Scribes] Interesting book review
Hillary Greenslade
hillaryrg at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 4 15:42:49 PDT 2008
--- On Wed, 6/4/08, Helen Schultz <helen.schultz at comcast.net> wrote:
> From: Helen Schultz <helen.schultz at comcast.net>
> Subject: [Scribes] Interesting book review
> To: scribes at castle.org, "New Scribes List" <SCA_Scribes_and_Illumination at yahoogroups.com>, "MK-Scribes" <MK-SCRIBES at yahoogroups.com>
> Date: Wednesday, June 4, 2008, 2:45 PM
> McKendrick, Scot, Kathleen Doyle. "Bible Manuscripts:
> 1400 Years of Scribes
> and Scripture." London: The British Library, 2007.
> Pp. 160. $35.00.
> ISBN 978-0-7123-4922-2.
>
> Reviewed by Catherine Conybeare
> Bryn Mawr College
> cconybea at brynmawr.edu
>
> Reprinted from BMCR 2008.05.40
>
> This collection of beautifully reproduced leaves from
> bible manuscripts in
> the collection of the British Library seems designed for a
> non-academic
> audience -- yet one that will be intrigued to get a glimpse
> of one of the
> more attractive purviews of academia. It is a book for the
> amateur in the
> truest sense of the word.
>
> The introduction engages, in most summary form, such
> issues as the
> transition from roll to codex, textual variants, numeration
> and
> cross-referencing, large and small format bibles and their
> purposes,
> illuminations and theirs. The relative rarity of pandect
> bibles is compared
> with the proliferation of gospel books, lectionaries, and
> other excerptions.
> The introduction concludes: 'Such in outline is the
> distinctive character of the manuscript tradition of the
> Bible. To
> illustrate that tradition we have had the great privilege
> of selecting items
> from the manuscript holdings of the British Library'
> (11).
>
> After that, each page displays a leaf from a bible
> manuscript, with
> catalogue details and summary comments. The figures are
> often conceived as
> pairs across the double-page spread, inviting comparison.
> The arrangement of
> the examples is broadly chronological, though we begin
> with the e/clat of the Golden Canon Tables (sixth/seventh
> century, figs.
> 1-2) not with the less photogenic papyrus fragments from
> the second and
> third centuries (figs. 3-6).
>
> The majority of the examples are illuminated, but salutary
> attention is
> given to non-illuminated manuscripts as well. There tends,
> however, to be no
> technical comment on the script or hand, with a few
> exceptions: fig. 26
> refers to the script 'in a style developed at
> Tours', contrasting it with
> 'Insular ornament'; fig. 68 even remarks on the
> form of the 'e' in the
> Beneventan script there displayed. But there is no
> consistency in this
> labelling, and so little systematic guidance for the
> aforementioned amateur.
>
> As for the languages of the bibles here displayed: they
> are mostly in
> Latin, but Greek, Old English, Middle English (including a
> Wycliffe
> translation, and Rolle's earlier translation too),
> Syriac, French,
> Anglo-Norman, Church Slavonic, Old High German, and Catalan
> are all
> represented as well.
>
> Not surprisingly, given the location of the collection,
> some of the most
> exciting examples are from the English tradition. Fig. 16
> gives us a Latin
> psalter (in uncial, though the comments don't tell us
> that) with a
> ninth-century interlinear translation into Old English in
> an Anglo-Saxon
> minuscule, 'the oldest extant translation into English
> of any biblical
> text'. The Old English translation in fig. 37 is signed
> by the translator
> (not unfortunately on the leaf illustrated here),
> 'Wulfwi me wrat'. Fig. 51
> gives us the earliest copy in English of part of the Old
> Testament--early
> eleventh century--accompanied by a marvellous image of Adam
> naming the
> animals. Fig. 142 shows a page from Henry VIII's own
> psalter, with marginal
> notes in (apparently) the king's own hand.
>
> To list a few personal favourites: the tenth-century
> psalter in Tironian
> shorthand (fig. 38); the double-page spread from the
> eleventh-century Harley
> psalter (figs. 45-6), in which almost every verse of the
> psalms is
> illustrated with exquisite, animated line drawings; the
> psalter from the
> twelfth century which is trilingual in Greek, Latin, and
> Arabic (fig. 72);
> the startlingly different sensibility of the Silos
> Apocalypse from early
> twelfth-century Spain (fig. 60), with a richness of colour
> and organized
> density of iconographic program more reminiscent of
> biblical manuscripts
> from the Ethiopic tradition than of anything being produced
> farther North.
> Finally, there is the poignant image of Noah releasing the
> raven and the
> dove from the Ark in the Holkham Bible Picture Book
> (fourteenth century;
> fig. 114): beneath the Ark, hideously exposed in the waves,
> float the
> corpses of humans and animals. The raven feeds on a
> horse's eyes.
>
> The comments on each illustration are--as I have
> suggested--rather
> inconsistent in degree of detail and scholarly content,
> though each contains
> something of interest. There is one amusing error at fig.
> 85,
> where the plea at the beginning of Psalm 69 is quoted as
> 'Save me, O God,
> for the waters have come up to my neck' --not
> 'soul', as is conventional,
> and clearly visible here in both the Greek and the Latin
> of the parallel text. But the historiated opening
> 'S' does show the waters
> rising to the petitioner's ribcage!
>
> The amateur whose interest has been piqued by this volume
> might move on to
> the catalogue of the 2007 exhibition at the British
> Library, "Sacred: Books
> of the Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam"; or
> to the excellent
> catalogue from the 2006 exhibition at the Freer Gallery in
> Washington DC,
> "In the Beginning: Bibles before the year 1000."
> And, although a
> beautifully-produced book is as satisfying a thing as ever,
> the web-savvy
> readers of BMCR may wish to know of the Digital Catalogue
> of Illuminated
> Manuscripts [at the British Library] (DigCM), now being
> developed on the web
> (http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome.htm)
> . (If your
> internet connection is fast enough, see also the delightful
> conceit of
> 'Turning the Pages'
> (http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html) .
> Indeed, in this age of digitized images, the web is fast
> transforming the
> availability and visibility of these collections: for
> example, I knew
> nothing of the
> remarkable collection of manuscripts at my local library,
> the Free Library
> of Philadelphia, until it gained an online presence
> (http://libwww.library.phila.gov/medievalman) eighteen
> months ago. In
> this arena, the printed book is becoming merely a teaser
> for the riches
> available online.
>
>
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