between france and flanders: manuscript painting in amiens in the fifteenth centuryby susie nash

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Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Painting in Amiens in the Fifteenth Century by Susie Nash Review by: Stephen Perkinson The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 610-612 Published by: The Sixteenth Century Journal Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2671843 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 17:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sixteenth Century Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:46:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Painting in Amiens in the Fifteenth Centuryby Susie Nash

Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Painting in Amiens in the Fifteenth Century bySusie NashReview by: Stephen PerkinsonThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 610-612Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2671843 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 17:46

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.113 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:46:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Painting in Amiens in the Fifteenth Centuryby Susie Nash

610 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXII/2 (2001)

of a monarch capable of invoking Sidneian romance on the eve of his own death. But by the 1660s, the writer's work came to betray, however begrudgingly, an appreciation for the dis- tinctly female cast of poetic creativity. Like Shakespeare's Cleopatra, Milton's Eve stands apart as a romance figure of free will whose self-assertion challenges Paradise Lost's epic drive. She carries the literary authority that Eggert argues is for Milton "enabled" by its association with feminine authority. By carrying the poem's poetic energy, Eve comes to project the will and imagination that establish her as the "predecessor monarch of the paradise within."

Eggert's remarkable work does not go without its passing infelicities. For instance, the author encapsulates the received perspective on Elizabeth's literary influence as "the Mount Everest theory of authorial motivation. Why write about the queen? Because she's there." Against this, she poises her own "Willie Sutton theory.Why write about the queen? Because that is, figuratively, where the money is."The one characterization is too reductive, the other too awkwardly glib, to do proper justice to either party. And, as even this abbreviated over- view intimates, a good deal remains to be debated, clarified, and refined.

But such issues hardly obscure her splendid achievement. Eggert realizes admirably an ambition to establish a sense of artistic lineage concentrated in the common focus of Eliza- beth's monarchy. Beneath her fully plausible surface theory lies a subtle and important chal- lenge to the way we think about the gendering of characters in the literature of the period. Showing Like a Queen will no doubt come to enjoy the distinction of generating a good many echoes and responses that should continue to bring us closer to the enigmatic and fertile energy center of Elizabeth herself. Christopher Martin . ....................... Boston University

Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Painting in Amiens in the Fifteenth Century. Susie Nash. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 421 pp. $90.00. ISBN 0802041140. Dr. Susie Nash's study of manuscript illumination in fifteenth-century Amiens is an

impressive example of what L. M. J. Delaisse called "the archaeology of the book." Delaisse urged scholars to explore every aspect of the manuscript as physical artifact-its script, the layout and preparation of the page, the systems of ancillary decoration, and so on. Combin- ing a methodological sophistication with a highly perceptive eye, Nash conducts a rigorous forensic examination of Amienois manuscripts, enabling her to plot in great detail the tra- jectory of illumination in an important regional center and to reconstruct the complex con- ditions under which these objects were produced. The resulting book constitutes a significant contribution to the field, as well as a lucid methodological paradigm.

Chapter 1 explains how, through a combination of geographic location, economic conditions, and politics, Amiens became a major trade center balanced between the powers that dominated western Europe in the fifteenth century-the most literal sense of the title, Between France and Flanders. As is well known, the English occupation of Paris in 1420-36 ended Parisian supremacy in the manuscript trade, opening the door for regional centers to increase their market share. Amiens came to specialize almost exclusively in Books of Hours, and hence that genre constitutes the overwhelming majority of the cases Nash studies.

No surviving manuscript contains explicit evidence (such as a colophon) to place its production in fifteenth-century Amiens, so Nash must use other methods, presented in chap- ter 2, to place her manuscripts. She relies most heavily on liturgical evidence, but notes cor- rectly that it cannot be seen as independently conclusive, as scribes in one city often produced manuscripts in the "use" of another. Nash thus wisely relies on a confluence of characteristics,

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Page 3: Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Painting in Amiens in the Fifteenth Centuryby Susie Nash

Book Reviews 611

including orth ographic dialects, signs of ownership, and compositional similarities with sculpture from the facade ofAmiens Cathedral. She does a marvelous job of sorting through a thicket of information to produce a coherent picture of the Amienois Book of Hours.

In chapter 3, Nash turns to a close examination of the manuscripts she has localized to Amiens. She demonstrates that the first distinct Amiens style (which appeared c. 1430-50) resulted from the working practices and the commercial success of an artist known as the d'Ailly Master. Through attentive formal analysis, Nash substantially revises the account of this artist's career presented by John Plummer in the catalog of the 1982 Last Flowering exhi- bition. Nash discerns the artist's hand in no less than four manuscripts and finds a close rela- tionship to images in thirteen others. She greatly clarifies Plummer's opinions concerning this artist's formation, suggesting convincingly that the illuminator was trained in the Pari- sian milieu of the Bedford Master but was also well versed in the work of contemporary Flemish panel painters (specifically Campin)-thus the second sense of the book's title.The diffusion of the visual strategies of the early Flemish panel painters is a fascinating topic, and Nash's research is a solid contribution (and corrective) to previous scholarship, such as the work of Erwin Panofsky.

Chapter 4 explores the thorny issue of "workshop" production in the oeuvre of the d'Ailly Master and his "associates."With her discerning eye and a sensitivity to later echoes of the d'Ailly Master's compositions, Nash reconstructs the working methods of individual followers. Some artists replicated d'Ailly forms through laborsaving devices (apparently sim- ilar to the techniques discussed by scholars like J. Douglas Farquhar), while others creatively reformulated d'Ailly compositions. Throughout, Nash takes heed of Michael Baxandall's caveat concerning "artistic influence"-that art objects do not spontaneously generate responses, but rather are chosen as models for particular reasons that can be recovered and described through historical analysis.

Nash's conclusions regarding working procedures in chapters 3 and 4 are based primar- ily on formal analysis.The author possesses a remarkable visual acuity, but she recognizes that earlier studies of fifteenth-century illumination (notably The Last Flowering and 1993's Manuscrits 2 peintures en France) have been undermined by reliance on stylistic characteristics alone. She therefore buttresses her conclusions with an in-depth codicological examination of the manuscripts, presented in chapter 5. Through meticulous attention to characteristics such as catchwords, ruling, and script, Nash describes an organized system of manuscript production in Amiens not unlike the systems that arose a century earlier in Paris (as docu- mented by the work of Richard and Mary Rouse), in which specialists worked under the supervision of a project coordinator-perhaps a libraire, perhaps the illuminator. Supporting codicological materials appear at the end of the book: a comprehensive catalog of the manu- scripts central to her study; a series of tables describing their liturgical features, page layout, and physical structure; and appendices providing a model calendar and the readings for the Hours of the Virgin and the Office of the Dead in manuscripts from Amiens.

Chapter 5 addresses manuscript illumination in Amiens before the d'Ailly Master's style achieved hegemony. Nash highlights the degree to which Amiens manuscript production changed with the arrival of the d'Ailly Master, while placing that artist's appearance in Amiens in the context of an apparent influx of foreigners in the 1420s. Chapter 7 discusses that influx, presenting various forms of evidence implying that Parisian, Flemish, and Nor- man illuminators came to Amiens to ply their trade.

Finally, the eighth chapter treats the emanation of the Amiens style to other centers. The city's most celebrated expatriate was Simon Marmion, who was active primarily in

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Valenciennes. Nash's attempts to discern distinctly Amienois characteristics in early works attributed to Marmion are inconclusive in the end. Nevertheless, her careful codicological examination of early Marmion manuscripts helps to clarify the method of their produc- tion-for instance, demonstrating that Amiens was not a center for the production of secular manuscripts, as had been assumed, and implying that Marmion probably began his career as a specialist in miniatures (similar to working procedures discerned later in Marmion's career by Bodo Brinkmann).

This book thus sheds light on an important regional center of illumination, while also providing a case study of the working practices of late medieval artists. Nash builds upon the work of previous scholars-from Paul Durrieu, to Millard Meiss, to Francois Avril-who sought to reconstruct schools and methods of manuscript production. By combining her predecessors' visual skills with the "archaeological" approach espoused by Delaisse and an awareness of the methodological implications of more recent work, Between France and Flanders greatly advances the body of knowledge. Dr. Nash deserves our congratulations for having produced a solid piece of scholarship, and our gratitude for having provided us with both a model and a basis for further work in this field. Stephen Perkinson . ......................... . University of Denver

Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. Anne J. Cruz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. xvii + 297 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0802044395. In this admirable study of the Spanish picaresque novel, Anne Cruz places literary

works in the context of historical attitudes and social policy regarding the poor. That, in itself, is probably not new; what is new is how these literary works are placed: not as mirrors of the times, but as indicators of the foundations of contemporary social reform and as cre- ations that served a cultural function. Cruz races a dialectical relationship between the pica- resque and policy; between the adventures of Lazarillo and his kin and the treatises and pro- grams emanating fi-om Madrid; and between the picaro's failings and vulgarity and the antip- athy toward the poor that accompanied and explained the monarchy's failure of nerve when it came to implementing progressive solutions. In Cruz's words, she aims to "simultaneously recover the picaresque genre's materialist base and to examine the profound implications of poverty and social reform for the culture of early modern Spain."

The first three (of five) chapters explore the place of the poor and the pfcaro in a society that had increasingly little tolerance for difference and in which the virtue of charity was being replaced with revulsion toward its recipients. Writers wondered how responsible Christians should regard and treat the growing numbers of poor people: with charity, as had been the rule in past centuries, or with discipline? The distinction between poverty and idle- ness, between the true poor and the false poor, was of special concern to writers whose moral struggles illustrated the conflict inherent to what Jose Antonio Maravall described as the transition from religiosity to secularization.

It is at this point that Lazarillo appears on the scene and Cruz tells us that "the aban- donment of the Christian ideal of charity is precisely what is at stake in the novel." She notes that his name can be no accident, evoking Lazarus and lepers, the epitome of objects of both pity and fear, and in the sixteenth century the poor began occupying the material and sym- bolic space previously occupied by lepers. Lazarillo's ambiguity, as victim and rogue, is log- ical within the context of the mid-sixteenth-century crisis of values. If he remains as he is he is despicable; if he tries to escape, he transgresses God's law.

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