The Illustrated Word

While researching St. Margaret of Scotland for an icon commission, I came across an illuminated gospel book of Anglo-Saxon provenance which had belonged to this revered queen of Scotland. Saint Margaret was of the House of Wessex, the royal house of England, and became queen of Scotland upon her marriage to King Malcom III of Shakespearean fame - his father, Duncan was the one Macbeth murdered with such tragic consequences. St. Margaret’s Gospel book is a manuscript with a legend and a miracle attached to it like so many things in those times in which the capacity for wonder had not been stifled by self-sufficiency. It’s story is inscribed in a poem at the front of the book: it seems that the book slipped from its holdings during the fording of a fast-flowing river and fell unnoticed into the water where it lay for a good long while until recovered only slightly worse for wear (slight moistening of the edges) and returned to the queen. It is presently housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

St. Margaret’s Gospel book is only one of the myriad liturgical books produced in Anglo-Saxon England between the 7th and 11th centuries, before the Norman Conquest, their echo to be found in even later Norman manuscripts. I am fortunate to reside near the well-endowed library and special collection of the Theological Seminary in Princeton and the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University. They offered up a wealth of treasures from this era. I beheld these miracles of human ingenuity with wonder, their beauty quenching a thirst I didn’t know I had. Created in times not less turbulent and violent than our own, they impart a peace to the viewer which must be due to the silent concentration of the scribes in those medieval scriptoria where skill and scholarship flourished in intricate ornament and lively imagery.

One of the manuscripts that caught my attention is the lavishly decorated Benedictional of St. Aethelwold, a service book of prayers made for the bishop of Winchester between 970 and 984, now part of the British Library collection. Written on parchment, it contains twenty-eight full-page miniatures (it probably had another fifteen which have been since lost), nineteen pages on which text is surrounded by an elaborate decorative frame, two full-page historiated initials, and many pages where the text has been written in gold ink. Browsing through the pages of the Benedictional accessible online through the generosity of the British Museum I came across two pages written in beautiful gold script which turned out to be an introductory poem written in Latin as a preface to the manuscript by its scriptor, and possibly illustrator, the Benedictine monk Godemann. It starts thus:

“A bishop, the great Æthelwold, whom the Lord had made patron of Winchester, ordered a certain monk subject to him to write the present book—truly knowing well how to preserve Christ’s fleecy lambs from the malignant art of the devil “.

The book was to contain “many arches well adorned and filled with various figures decorated with manifold beautiful colors and with gold,” and was to be made for the good of the bishop’s soul responsible for those souls entrusted to him, and for the good of his people who needed to be sanctified by the pouring forth of holy prayers to God. The poem wraps up with a supplication of the author, for the flock that “they may be joined to the Lord in heaven without end”, for the bishop, “to the great father who ordered this book to be written may he grant an eternal kingdom above”, and for himself, “let all who look upon this book pray always that after the term of the flesh I may abide in heaven—Godemann the writer, as a suppliant, earnestly asks this” (trs. Warner and Wilson, Benedictional of Æthelwold, pp. 7–8). And so, with the artful turn of the quill, an artifact became for me a connection to a living past, a gateway to a world, a people and a man.

The next document my searches led me to is a hagiography of Saint Aethelwold written by one of his pupils, like Godemann monk of Old Minster at Winchester. Wulfstan starts his biography thus: “Here begins the preface to the life of the glorious and blessed father, bishop Aethelwold, whose sacred memory is celebrated on the first of August…” From its pages shines the figure of a remarkable man who could inspire the love, admiration and devotion which the next words convey:

“(Christ) spread throughout the world the light of many apostolic teachers; bathed in the brilliance of the faith proclaimed in the gospels, they were to banish the blind darkness of ignorance from men’s hearts, set alight the minds of believers with the fire of heavenly love, and, driving away the hunger and poverty that had long afflicted the mass of the peoples, fill them full with the banquet of eternal life. Of the company of these teachers was the blessed father and elect of God, Bishop Aethelwold. He burst on his time brilliant as the morning start among the other stars; the founder of many monasteries and teacher of the Church’s doctrines, he shone alone and unique among all the English bishops.” (Lapidge and Winterbottom 1991)

Wulfstan was primarily responsible for his canonization and the customary translation of his body to the cathedral of Old Minster, but I soon found that these sentiments were not unique to him. Wulfstan’s words are a reflection of the loving and fatherly attention with which Aethelwold imparted his vast learning to all his students in the school he established at Winchester.

Educated at the Benedictine monastery of Glastonbury under the vigilant and erudite eye of its abbot, St. Dunstan, we are told “[Aethelwold] learned skill in the liberal art of grammar and the honey-sweet system of metrics”. (Lapidge and Winterbottom 1991) He read extensively from patristic writers and practiced the discipline of prayer and fasting. Aethelwold shared with his teacher and abbot a passion for the faith and an ardent desire for monastic reform. They dedicated their lives and efforts to this task with the indispensable patronage of the equally enthusiastic and pious royals, Eadred and Edgar (959-975) and his wife Aelfthryth. Under Eadred, Aethelwold was given a small place called Abingdon where “there had been of old a small monastery, but this had by now become neglected and forlorn. At the king’s wish, and with the consent of Dunstan, it came about that the man of God Aethelwold took charge of this place, with the aim of establishing monks there to serve God according to the rule.” (Lapidge and Winterbottom 1991). That is how Abingdon followed Glastonbury’s suit and became under King Edgar, one of the three monastic centers that led what is known as the Benedictine Reform Movement in England.

St. Augustine arrived to the English shore in the year of our Lord 597. The two centuries after his arrival had been an intellectually and culturally effervescent time, full of religious fervor. Benedictine monasteries sprang up all over the island, and with them, learning flourished. For instance, the minsters at Wearmouth and Jarrow were founded in Northumbria by the nobleman Benedict Biscop in 672 and 682 respectively. The first abbot of Jarrow, Ceolfrid (682-716), was a remarkable man and a bibliophile. He traveled to Italy in search of manuscripts to endow his monastic library and ended up purchasing books from another famous library: Vivarius in Calabria which had been created by the Roman former senator and later day monk Cassiodorus more than a century earlier (circa 544). Jarrow under Ceolfrid’s rule became one of Europe’s most influential centers of learning and culture in the 7th and 8th centuries. Its fame was due in no small part to the Venerable Bede who came there as a ward of Ceolfrid’s at the age of 7 and spent the entirety of his fruitful life under its benign Benedictine discipline. Ceolfrid established at Jarrow a scriptorium and was a major contributor to the project to produce the famous Codex Amiatinus Bible with a fascinating history of its own.

By the 9th century, however, monastic life at Jarrow as in other monasteries in England declined and so did Christian zeal, learning and culture. Monasteries were increasingly staffed by secular canons more interested in the wealth these minsters generated for them than in the shepherding of the flock or the promotion of christian culture. That is where King Alfred (871-886) stepped in ushering in England a cultural renaissance which was to reach its zenith in what is known as the 10th century Benedictine Reform Movement. At his court, Alfred nurtured an atmosphere of piety, reverence for the teachings of the church, and love of learning in all its aspects.

What I find remarkable from this time are the glossed manuscripts of liturgical texts, especially psalters which his scriptorium produced and which became standard in Anglo-Saxon England. The idea was that the text was meant to be understood both on the level of language and on the level of meaning. Therefore, the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts received interlinear translations and Latin and vernacular glosses. That means that in-between the lines of Latin text were penned lines of translation into Anglo-Saxon, the practice making these texts the first translations of Biblical material into a contemporary vernacular in Europe. The manuscripts also sported extensive glosses or commentaries on the margin of the text both in Latin and Anglo-Saxon. These glosses, although original to their writers were nonetheless steeped in continental scholarship, Anglo-Saxon libraries being well stocked with manuscripts of the works of Augustine, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, Hilary of Poitiers, Jerome, Origen and many others thanks to the avid collectors like Ceolfrid of previous centuries.

In the spirit of King Alfred, Edgar and his queen Aelfthryth encouraged and offered their patronage to the reformation, restoration and rededication of Benedictine monasteries. They commissioned Aethelwold, a proficient Latinist, to translate the Rule of St. Benedict, the primary source of Benedictine monasticism, into Old English which he did at Abingdon. The translation of Regula S. Benedictii aims toward accuracy and clarity, with the expressed purpose of making the work widely accessible to interested laymen who might be drawn to the monastic life. In the preface to the translation, Aethelwold writes: “although keen-witted scholars () do not require this English translation, it is nevertheless necessary for unlearned laymen (). Therefore, let the unlearned natives have the knowledge of this holy rule by the exposition of their own language, that they may the more zealously serve God”.(Gittos, H. 2014)

In time, Aethelwold became bishop at Winchester where in the wake of the synod for monastic reform (970-973) he wrote the Regularis Concordia, the English monastic customary regulating the daily organization of the monasteries and liturgical practice. This document is based on the 810 document of the Carolingian synod at Aachen which contains the Rule of St. Benedict and a supplement with practical guidance as to the ordering of monastic life intended to encourage uniformity of observance. While the Regularis opens the liturgy to Continental practices it also contains native customs as well, such as the private devotion to Mary known as The Office to Mary. The later widespread use of the Horae de Beata Maria Virgine might owe its existence to this office as there seem to be no records of it before the 10th century.

Aethelwold was a man of letters, versed in both grammar and metrics, who wrote extensively and who exposed his students to a large variety of theological and poetic works which constituted the core of his curriculum. Closest to his heart were the psalter, the monastic canticles and hymnal (while at Abingdon he brought monks from the Corbie monastery in France to teach plain-chant to his Abingdon monks), and the books pertinent to the regulation of monastic life. It was at the Winchester School that the Anglo-Saxon language became standardized through the linguistic efforts of Aethelwold. It was also here under his tutelage, and growing out of a century long tradition of creative translations into vernacular of liturgical texts, that an Old English literary language came into being.

This language reached its pinnacle with Aethelwold’s pupils Aelfric of Cerne and Wolfstan, two of the most prolific authors of the 10th century. Aelfric was a prolific prose author. He wrote an extensive collection of Lives of Saints written in Anglo-Saxon, as well as an Anglo-Saxon Latin Grammar - the first such in Europe, and built upon Aethelwold’s scholarship. Wulfstan, meanwhile, passed on his master’s rule of metric in his substantial corpus of poetry including the Life of St. Aethelwold himself. The trademark of the school is said to be clarity and accuracy in translation and clarity and precision of expression. The Winchester school of Old English continued to bear fruit even after the Benedictine reform lost its momentum and was finally extinguished, yielding such jewels of Old English poetry as Beowulf in the late 10th and early 11th centuries.

Under the same renaissance spirit, Aethelwold breathed new life in the royal scriptorium at Winchester. During Aethelwold’s term as bishop and beyond, the Scriptorium produced the finest examples of what is known as the Winchester style of illuminated manuscript, a beautiful instance of this being the Benedictional of St. Aethelwold. The Winchester style is characterized by florid, heavily ornate borders and restless energy in the treatment of drapery. It shares with other Anglo-Saxon manuscripts the linear approach to illustration, with fluid, sensitive lines complemented by minimally modeled fields of color.

There is a good reason why copying used to be an important part of a fledgling artist’s training. Mindful copying is like deciphering a code, a way of understanding not only the technical aspects of an artist’s work, but how artistic decisions impact meaning and how successful the artist ultimately is in communicating it. In order to unlock the artistic language of the Benedictional, I decided to copy one of its full page illustrations, the image of the Annunciation.

Looking at an image, the first thing the eye takes in is color: rose, hematite, blue, English red, earth green and gold applied as pure local colors. This and the clear outlining of the forms makes this composition highly and immediately readable despite its exuberance. The next thing I noticed was the application of lights, which do not serve to define volume but to underline and reinforce the lines and their purpose. Thirdly, I noticed the rhythmic quality of the composition which creates order out of chaos.

Rhythm was defined by Hellenic tradition as a dynamic equilibrium, expressed here through intersecting axes, or lines of movement. For example, the diagonal formed by the angel’s outstretched hand, the wing, and the line of architecture rising to the right is counterbalanced by the intersecting axes of Mary’s right arm, the book and the lectern, and the fold of drapery over her left hand. This imparts dynamism to the image, bringing it to life. Another aspect of the rhythm of the composition are its vertical elements: the body of the angel, the column of the lectern, the body of the virgin, and the three columns of the tabernacle. These act to anchor the composition and move it forward in a narrative fashion, from left to right, like the reading of text on a page. The three columns of the tabernacle balanced by the horizontal of the floor on the bottom and the horizontals of the capitols at the top impart monumentality and stability to the scene.

This rhythmic approach to composition can be observed not only in the overall composition of the image but also in its constituent elements, such as the garments, the wings, and the architectural elements and serves to reinforce the symbolic structure of the composition. For instance, the rising fold over Mary’s left knee intersects the rising fold over her arm, enlivening an otherwise static form. The folds of the angel’s garment are a myriad of intersecting lines anchored by a few optimally placed verticals. The dais and steps under Mary’s feet and the wall to the very right receive linear and static surface decoration, whereas the baldacchino’s curved intersecting lines reinforce the symbolism of the circular form.

One other compositional aspect of this image is the absence of an autonomous pictorial space, that is, there is no depth to the image. On the contrary, the entire image intentionally moves forward toward the viewer seeming to float above the parchment. This is achieved by having the background defined by fields of color, by building up the lights instead of deepening the shadows, by the absence of foreshortening and classical perspective, and by the imaginative way in which the border is used and how it relates to the image.

Let us now read the elements of this composition in a symbolic fashion. The diagonal architecture-wing serve to separate two planes: above, heaven, also symbolically represented as the heavenly Jerusalem by the abstract architectural complex on the extreme right; bellow, the earthly realm enforced by the visibly material solidity of the tabernacle, the square having traditionally represented the earth. The circle has traditionally been the shape representing heaven, with the dome and apse of a church being a prime example of its use in architecture. In our image the semi circle of the baldacchino gives a sacral dimension to the physical space containing the body of the Virgin, a space set apart, as does the number of the vertical columns with their overt reference to the Trinity.

Interesting to note is the treatment of the lectern on which the book lays. This piece of furniture is treated as a living creature with its base of animal head and claws and the spiral, snake-like stand. The book placed at the intersection of the two diagonals formed by the angel’s and Mary’s hands and central to the composition becomes a living character in this play. Symbolically, it can be seen as the living Word of God, the place of meeting between the human and the divine, the passage of the Old into the New Testament. We can almost imagine the book being opened at Isaiah 7:14, “Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.” Observe here also the disproportionately large hands: it is a feature of Anglo-Saxon art. The hands are an expressive device capable of conveying a variety of meanings. In this case, the gesture of the angel denotes speech, communication; the gesture of the Virgin’s hand, openness and receptivity.

The rose area behind the angel represents the cloud surrounding divine apparitions. Observe the subtle way in which the squiggly lines extend to surround the Virgin’s head and shoulder. Although she is squarely contained by the two columns flanking her, this space is breached by her arm shooting out toward the angel and the squiggly line of the cloud entering her space and surrounding her. Not only that, but her body crowds the space, pushing sideways against the limits of her containment. The body of the Virgin, fully human, is barely contained by her humanity, at once reaching toward and being overshadowed by the divine. What a beautiful expression of the mystery of Mary and the Incarnation of Christ!

On one of the return trips to the Seminary library, I found, to my delight, a facsimile of the Benedictional produced in 2002 by the British Library. Bound in hard covers and printed on heavy weight semi-gloss paper, it looked brand new and, sadly, probably had not been opened since its procurement in 2002. With a sense akin to awe I picked it up and savored the feel and weight of the book in my hands. I knew it was not the original, but the experience of opening the covers and turning the pages, lingering over every detail, tracing the lines with my finger, was incomparably more satisfying than scrolling online, and brought me one step closer to the real thing. It also offered me a better sense of how the Benedictional had been structured. The first page is an image of the ‘Confessors’ with the central position occupied by St Benedict, St. Gregory and St. Cuthbert. The next two pages facing one another are titled ‘Choir of Virgins’. Next, on four pages, are the 12 apostles. This completes what we can call the cloud of witnesses to the truth and efficacy of what follows. The introduction in gold letters occupies the next two pages. And then, as you flip the page again, is my Annunciation! Seeing it thus placed at the very beginning of the book of episcopal blessings, took me out of the purely stylistic and symbolic appreciation of the image, stimulating my curiosity to discover the more profound beauty of the structure and theological and liturgical significance of this remarkable codex. For its creators, Aethelwold and his good Benedictine monks, understood that the image of the Annunciation is the entrance into the mystery of the Incarnation on which the entirety of the Christian faith rests.

References

The Benedictional of St Aethelwold, a Masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon Art, a facsimile (2002). The British Library

Wulfstan of Winchester, Lapidge M. & Winterbottom M. (eds.) (1991). The Life of St Aethelwold. Claredon Press, Oxford

Gittos, H. (2014). The Audience of Old English Texts, Aelfric, rhetoric and the ‘edification of the simple’. Anglo-Saxon England vol.43, Cambridge University Press

Rushforth, R. (2007). St Margaret’s Gospel-book, The favorite book of an eleventh-century Queen of Scots. Bodleian Library, Oxford University

Toswell M.J. (2014). Anglo-Saxon Psalter. Brepols Publishers

Warner, G. F., and H. A. Wilson (eds.) (1910). The Benedictional of Saint Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, 963–984: Reproduced in Facsimile from the Manuscript in the Library of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth and Edited with Text and Introduction. The Roxburghe Club, Oxford