Studies And Texts Pontifical Institute Of Mediaeval Studies

In the fall of 2016 an international scholarly conference accompanied the exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. The speakers were chosen because of their expertise and because they were known to have research underway pertaining to important manuscripts in the exhibition. The aim of both exhibition and conference was to provide a broad overview of the history of patronage and book production over the course of the High and late Middle Ages, to the extent that the eclectic holdings of Boston-area institutions permitted. Most of the papers delivered at the conference have been collected as essays in this abundantly illustrated volume which, while still linked to the exhibition, now has an independent purpose. Just as the essays cover a wide range of topics, all relating to the history of the book, but also, inter alia, to the history of law, liturgy, literature, and libraries as well as to devotion, theology, and art, so too the approaches adopted by the contributors are as varied as the materials they study, ranging from paleography, codicology, and provenance research to painstaking reconstructions of historical patterns of patronage and the interpretative strategies of authors and artists. What results is not simply a wealth of fascinating insights into individual illuminated books, their makers, and their readers, but also an indication of how much remains to be learned about the materials to which the exhibition served as no more than an introduction.

The images devised to accompany medieval commentaries, whether on the Bible or on classical texts, made claims to authority, even inspiration, that at times were even more forceful than those made by the texts themselves. Pictorial prefaces of the twelfth century represent commentaries of their own; they articulate and elaborate complex arguments regarding critical matters of faith. This study examines pictorial programmes in copies of Horace?s poetic works, the Glossa ordinaria, anti-heretical polemics, and Rupert of Deutz?s commentary on the Song of Songs to demonstrate the ways in which they helped to shape understandings of authorship at a critical historical moment.

This volume pays homage to manuscripts and early printed books as material witnesses in the Middle Ages. The essays discuss broad questions relating to the partisan interpretation of texts, but they also illustrate how small details of format, script, and decoration uncover the text, its context, and its reception. Some articles explore scientific methods, examining whether social network analysis can offer an advance over traditional methods of establishing textual connections and using statistics to understand the transmission of ancillary materials. Others present critical editions and contextualize lost genres, providing a first edition of an unedited summary of Ovid's Metamorphoses steeped in the Boccaccian genealogical tradition, exploring mock funeral eulogies for animals, and discussing the variety of texts that pay witness to Ovid's penetration into vernacular literature. A closing brace of essays catalogue collections and reflect on changing trends in the study of manuscripts.