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Secrets of medieval manuscripts
00:51:58
Michelle P Brown explores centuries of medieval British history through the illuminated manuscripts the era produced
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- [00:00]
Daniel Kramer Arden
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Michelle P. Brown
Thoughts I read somewhere that the average American spends 13 hours a year waiting in pharmacies for prescriptions. Clearly I am above average. I thought being above average would feel better. Hmph. Maybe I'll read some greeting cards next time.
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Michelle P. Brown
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Daniel Kramer Arden
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. On first glance, what might you notice about a medieval manuscript? Maybe the material it's made from, the elaborate script or the ornamental illustrations. But look a little closer and there's a lot more to discover. In fact, as historian and curator Michelle P. Brown explains in her new book, Illumino, these medieval artifacts are a portal to the past with life stories of their own. Emily Briffitt spoke to Michelle to unravel some of their secrets.
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Emily Briffitt
Talking about your new book, Illumino. It offers an insight into the medieval world through 12 of its illuminated manuscripts, and I'd really like to get acquainted with some of these. But first, before we go there, what do you think makes medieval manuscripts such a fascinating source for telling Medieval history.
- [03:22]
Michelle P. Brown
I've always found them one of the most complex and engaging forms of medieval evidence. And you can excavate each book rather like you would Sutton Hoo or any other major archaeological site. So it opens up the world of the physicality, it's the economy, it's the trade. How did these materials get to be where they are, who actually was engaged in making them? And then you move in from that, obviously, to the textual content. But even beyond the textual content, the illuminated manuscript world can actually allow you to dig deeper. And, in fact, much of the import and the meaning of them isn't actually pictures at all. They're not just illustrations. They're things that serve to help you articulate and navigate your way around massive amounts of information, and also then to commit them to memory. So it's how the book acts as a repository for disseminating its contents in all sorts of ways, not only the main text, but, for example, you might have scurrilous political commentary, commentary in the form of the equivalent of political cartoons and satires in the margins. And then the people who actually made them and the people who caused them to be made, because many of them are key players in the pages of history themselves. And the interface between the person with the money and the person with the agenda, and those who are actually physically doing the work, and the middle men and women, the prototype publishers who facilitate that, together give you an incredible window into the age in which any given manuscript was made. Each one is made by hand, they're all individual, and you need to engage, I think, with all of the different aspects of evidence to really get to know them. And they have biographies, they have a provenance. You can also, through studying them, work out where have they been? Where might they have been born? Who have they met on the various stages of their journey? So what I wanted to do here was actually take us on a journey across about 800 years of British history, but also its art history, its materiality and its book history and its transformation and also the transmission of ideas. All that in the package of these beautiful books that speak of things, often were far from beautiful, but which can also act either as tremendous works of inspiration for the present, or also as the most dire cautionary tales.
- [05:59]
Emily Briffitt
What a wonderful sales pitch for interest and fascination in medieval manuscripts. Given that your book only covers 12 of these, I am very curious. How did you select only 12? What dictated your choices?
- [06:14]
Michelle P. Brown
I know. It's like casting out the rest of your children, isn't it? Because they each tell us something different. There are obviously many, many things going on. I've taken one for each century or half century, and they cast a particular light on what was going on in that. They're also the ones that have very powerful human interest stories related to their making and using. And as in any family party, you don't only meet the lead players, you meet a lot of their relatives in each chapter. So they move out into other areas in which the people who commissioned them were active and those that they knew and the books that they produced as well.
- [06:56]
Emily Briffitt
So let's meet and greet some of them. If we start back in the 8th century, we should zoom in on your first choice. And this is a pretty famous one, the Lindisfarne Gospels. What is so special about this particular choice?
- [07:13]
Michelle P. Brown
It's a very personally special one for me. I was its curator for a number of years, as with a number of these other manuscripts, when I was a curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library. But before that, I'd been taken to see it when I was age 4 by my aunt, Irish father and Northumbrian mother. Is very strong for their culture. When it was then in the British Museum and I went back home and wrote in my little girl diary that instead of being an astronaut, I was going to be a librarian and save the world that way. And so it has a very personal thing. And I think one of the things that Lindisfarne Gospels does is a very, very, very formative period in the nature of the British Isles and its identities. This book emerges as an attempt to actually reconcile and celebrate unity and diversity. And that's something that I very much appreciate and which I think speaks in many ways to the present as well. Now, this book, which is one of the most carefully produced and with the most carefully constructed agenda of faith, ethos, spirituality, rail politicians and the practical challenges of making at a very early stage in our history, is quite remarkable. And whereas other books made in the 7th and 8th century may have six or seven scribes and artists taking their turn in a monastic scriptorium, both men and women in convents, this book, possibly the most carefully and elaborately ever made, I've suggested, was made by one gifted artist scribe, an experimental chemist, a technical innovator, and an incredibly busy man, the bishop of Lindisfarne Ead V from 698 until his death in 722. And I've suggested that the reason that his work is so contained and doesn't produce a whole scriptorium is that much of his work, as the busy bishop of the North. He was doing it on a little island called Cuddy's Isle, a lump of rock in the North Sea off of the tidal isle of Holy island Lindisfarne, on what's now the English Scots borders, in 715 to 22, an age of tremendous internal international affairs and churchmanship in which he was intimately involved. And for the busy seasons of the year, he would have limited time to work on such a project. But for the penitential seasons of Lent, the 40 days and Advent, he was allowed to go on retreat onto this little island, during which time he would be both a spiritual saint in the making, but also a Bear Gryll survivalist. And working with very limited materials available, he could produce a palette which when we digitized at high resolution in 2003, Photoshop says has 90 different pigments, which challenges the silk roots and Constantinople. And when we conducted a non invasive pigment analysis, Raman laser analysis, along with the Christopher Lingold labs in ucl, we found that it was six locally available rocks and plants. And yet he could get 40 shades of purple out of the lichen that grew at his feet by knowing that the alkalinity and acidity variations. But it's not just aesthetics. It's because his best buddy, Bede, who's making books available to him from monk William of Jarrow, is writing about the temple and the tabernacle and the 40 shades of purple of the temple hangings in Jerusalem that signify the journey of the righteous soul. Everything in it geared towards contemporary political and churchmanship. Disputes about do we become a local church and a local set of kingdoms for local people, or do we participate on the international stage, stretching from the deserts of Syria to the west coast of Ireland? All of this can be deciphered by actually engaging with a meticulous exercise in la chaologie du livre, the archaeology of the book and the tremendous spiritual ethos and legal and spiritual reforming zeal to transform society, society and one person who was a saint in his own lifetime doing the work to establish the cult catheter that became the most visited in the west until Beckett was done as an offering, like the desert fathers, like Christ in the wilderness, on behalf of all. And yet the number of skins that you would need to make such a perfect, unblemished work in the region of 3,000. So every farm in the north and beyond must have been involved in providing the substrate resource for that collective act of an offering to their God that one person was entrusted with making.
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Emily Briffitt
What an extraordinary story behind it. You so often see pictures of it and you see its illuminations, its illustrations, but the story behind it gives it so much more gravitas in why we should be looking at this. If we turn to one of your other choices, your one from the 9th century, this is also a source that came from those fired by faith, the Book of Sun. It also shifts our perceptions of the Anglo Saxon world. Can you tell us about this one?
- [12:44]
Michelle P. Brown
Yeah, sure. That was my PhD manuscript. So, again, I've got a great affection for it. It's actually a mercy and prayer book made at Litchfield in the 820s for the bishop of Litchfield at the Wall. And this is a rather moved on from the golden age of the Northumbrian Renaissance and the mixture of influences from Celtic, British, Germanic, Anglo Saxon, Mediterranean and Byzantine and Eastern sources into a world which is now dominated by the threat of the Vikings and also by the dynastic politics. To see which of the different kingdoms that now formed Bede's concept of England was actually going to be top dog. And at this period, Mercia, the people of the Marches, the Midlands and the Welsh borders, had constructed a kingdom that was exerting overlordship over many of the others, or most of the others. And Offa of Offa's Dyke had managed to wipe out most of his own relatives in order to secure the succession for his son, who only outlived him by a couple of months, such as the Stratagems of man. And so the world in which Bishop Athelwold's prayer book is made is one of having to dance quite a careful courtier relationship with very, very dangerous monarchs. And his personal prayer book is something in which he relies upon his relationship with the whole communion of the faithful across time and space. It's a bit of a quantum book, okay? It takes him into another dimens, or even if he's having to be really cautious about those really around him in the present, he knows he's actually got support from those who've gone beyond and hopefully for those still to come. And the body of the faithful with Christ in its head. So his prayer book is a very personal thing. And in fact, there's a little instruction at the front on how to use it. And it's written in one of the earliest examples of Old English prose, way before Alfred the Great. It says that he pioneers that at the end of the century, if you like. It says that every day he's to prostrate himself in front of the whole of the communion of faithful across time and space. He's to humble himself. He's then to recite an abbreviated version of the Psalter. He's then to read these extracts from the Passion narratives and the four Gospels. And then he's to pray all of these prayers by Ephraim the Syrian, by Irish sages. Loading Lothcan. Etc. All of those voices of men and women from different places and times coming together to support him in his aim, which is to help the rulers in contest at that time, to actually live ethical lives and to bring us good government. So it's girding his loins not only for a personal spiritual battle, if you like, it's also to prepare him as one of the most important churchmen in England at that time, for his role and to enliven it for himself. He. He has these lovely little brontosaurus type creatures who stalk the pages and they'll occasionally take the end of a little letter because the artist scribe, which may have been the bishop himself, has actually left a little bunch of grapes there for them to munch on because that's a symbol of the Eucharist and partaking in the wine, Christ's body and being part of that communion. But there are all sorts of things. The evangelist miniatures are incredible. I mean, we think we've invented hypertextuality and intertextuality, but in these pictures of the evangelist with their symbols, Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the Bull and John the eagle, it's reversed. You've got the full length symbols and just little rather effete little roundels containing the evangelists in human form, you know, posing with their pens, etc. And the captions are amazing because keywords in those titles, in those things ring bells in the audience's mind. So things that were useful for teaching preaching, but also for reminding you that if you are a follower of Christ, then looking at the different attributes of Christ and his ministry and what he represents of the divine and human, and what you should aspire to as a social leader and a social model are there visually in front of you.
- [17:24]
Emily Briffitt
This sounds wonderful. Another one of your sources has royal connections, but this time it features Queen Emma of Normandy. Can you tell us about this particular source and what it tells us about how Emma sought to assert her position in the turbulent Anglo Saxon world?
- [17:44]
Michelle P. Brown
Absolutely. So this is one of our 11th century models that I've taken as showcase. Queen Emma is an interesting lady. She was a Norman princess, she was the daughter of the Duke of Normandy and she is given in marriage to King Aethelred Unred, which actually means the ill advised, not the ethelred unready of 1066 and all that. And she doesn't seem to have been frightfully impressed with Aethelred. Normandy had been established as a Viking protectorate and this policy of actually giving way to them and paying Dane Geld and just paying protection money, basically, because all that happens is they keep coming back for more. The Viking raids aren't just raiding and hit and runs, they're actually royal sponsored conquests. Svein Falkbeard is eyeing up king of Denmark and Norway. And Ethelred actually has to go into exile at one point. And Emma plays very important role in dynastic politics throughout. She has two sons by Ethelred, she has Edward the Confessor of 1066 fame, and she has his brother Alfred Etheling. And later in the story, Edward accuses her of tempting he and his brother back from exile so that she can have them bumped off. Because by this time Ethelred and Read is dead and she has, within the course of not many months, almost has married the person who's now replaced him, which is King Canute of Denmark and Norway. And they have a son called Harthacnut. And much of Emma's later life is spent championing the cause of Hartha Canute to succeed. And so Emma is having to watch herself. There's a wonderful image before I mention her main book of her with Canute, and it's the Book of Life, the benefactor's book of the new minster in Winchester and Hyde Abbey. And there's a very elegant drawing at the front of she and Canute in their best clothes presenting a massive golden cross to the altar. Canute is being the great Christian king and Emma beside him is clutching her drapery in front of her. Now that is a standard Byzantine iconography for a virgin. So here you've got Emma declaring herself as the born again virgin queen of King Canute and great patron of the arts and of the church. Now the book that she actually commissions herself also has interesting iconography of Emma and it's a book in which she doesn't really even mention that she was ever married to Ethelred Unred. And that is the encomium of Queen Emma. Now, an encomium is basically your side of events, okay, so it's an apologia and that's because later in life she'd fallen from favour because she was meddling in the succession. And so she has a mother monk at Saint Bertin in Saint Omer in the northern France Flanders area. Her book's made there. And the frontispiece shows the author monk presenting, kneeling and presenting it to the wonderful enthroned Emma. And she has the most wonderful confection of a crown upon her head with a sort of virgin lily coming out of it. And this is the crown. In Anglo Saxon manuscripts, Lady Philosophy appears to the 6th century philosopher Boethius, when he's unjustly imprisoned for trying to save the world in the 6th century from attacks by pretenders, the Ostrogoth. So Emma's self imaging, she's moved from born again virgin queen to the embodiment of Lady Philosophy, whose wisdom is being ignored.
- [21:50]
Emily Briffitt
I mean, what a statement she makes there. One of your 12th century choices also features a female recipient, and that recipient is Christina of Marchiate. So we should definitely talk about her.
- [22:04]
Michelle P. Brown
Oh, we should. Now, after the Norman Conquest, women's rights were put back. By the middle of the 12th century, interesting things are happening both on the continent and here. Women are emerging as hermits and anchoresses and mystics. They're having visions, they're sharing those visions with others. They become great inspirational figures. So it opens up a different sort of woman's voice from the perspective of women's religious. Now, Christina is an English girl of good birth, living under a Norman regime, and she is contracted to quite a good marriage, but she runs away on her wedding night and. And she takes refuge with a hermit and she becomes a personal friend and advisor of the abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey of Gorham, and they become very, very close. But she's a great prayer and some of her visions and everything are written down by the hermit and the abbot of St Albans. And the community are so impressed by her spirituality and her strength and holding to the fact that she's committed herself as a child. And the book in question is the Alp, Barney Sorter, the St. Alban Psalter, one of the most beautiful examples of Romanesque art from the 12th century. And it's a book that was customized by Geoffrey and the community of St Cuthbert to actually honour Christina. And it seems to have been given as a gift to her because the psalms were very much the mainstay of your personal as well as your public prayer and the iconography designed in many places, I think, to reflect her. So, for example, on Easter Sunday, where you've got this wonderful image of all the apostles hiding, cowering in the upper room, afraid of the Roman authorities, there's Mary Magdalene standing outside the door, raising her finger to them and telling them not to be afraid because she's seen the risen Christ, and he told them what was going to happen all along and they've not listened. And now they've got to shape up and do something about it. And it's like Christina, yeah, advising princes, advising princes of the church and of state, etc, and hermits. And there's even a little initial that's been painted separately by the same artist and pasted over another one where she's actually shown rather humbly, being shepherded forward by the abbot and the community to Christ. So again, another distinctive woman who played a role not in power politics, but who was incredibly influential as a spiritual role model and became a focal point.
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- [26:16]
Emily Briffitt
Now. A few of the sources we've spoken about already have had religious connections, but this isn't just a period of religious writings. People at the time were also really curious about the world around them. So we should talk about Gerald of Wales. How did he seek to integrate marginal communities or what was perceived at the time as marginal communities through his writing.
- [26:41]
Michelle P. Brown
Gerald's an interesting one. He was a bit of a George Bernard Shaw figure. He had a foot in both camps. He was the grandson of the Norman chivalric knight, Gerald of Windsor and of Nestor, the Helen of Wales. So he was both of the Celtic stock and of the Normans who had carved out their territories in Wales. And he becomes a cleric and he's much attached to the court and he's got an own personal gender that eventually brings him down. But he's ambitious at this early stage. And in the 1180s he goes to Ireland and then he's given the rather dubious task of taking Prince John of King John fame, Robin Hood, off to Ireland to preach crusade and show him what's what. And he writes a thing called the Topography of Ireland, which he refers to in its preface as the Marvels of the West. He's a bit annoyed that everybody's looking to the Crusades. All the attention now is on the marvels of the East. But look what's going on here. And this incredible book is to be shown to Henry II of England and to all sorts of important people in church and state. And one of his big agendas is to turn the work of his mercenary relatives and others into a legitimate political conquest by England. And so you have all sorts of things, incredible details topographically and of customs etc, but some of it is downright propaganda. And so, for example, there are a number of images in the margins, because he's one of the first to open up the marginal counter. Okay. This is where he can really make his own comments and not put them in words, if you like. And so there are lots of examples of bestiality or the results of bestiality. So, for example, you've got the cow man of Wicklow, who was the progeny of a local farmer and his favourite cow, who was so beloved of the local Normans in their castle that the locals beat him up and killed him one night for being a collaborator. Curator, basically. And. And then you've got Joanna of Paris, who was burnt at the stake by her royal in laws, who didn't approve of her on a trumped up charge of having sex with a lion in the Royal Zoo. And then you have the bearded woman of Wicklow, who, other than her big beard and her hairy spine, was sufficiently feminine in her attributes. And you can see those attributes. What's that about? Well, when Henry II finally gets the papal bull to legitimize the conquest of, it's on grounds of bestiality and gross moral Turpitude. But Gerald is conflicted. He's not fishing afoul. And so he shows, you know, Celtic harpists, etc, and the wonders, you know, Celtic love of nature and the environment. And so it's just fascinating. And he then goes to retire in Lincoln Cathedral. And the two copies, illustrated copies, survive from the early 13th century. You can literally tell he's standing behind the artists and scribes. He's not actually picking up the pen and doing it himself. Most medieval authors, like in the classical period, didn't actually pick up the pen and do it themselves, but he's editing the text as the scribes writing it. So there are all sorts of editorial remarks and changes in the margins. And it opens up this whole new world of the rise of the universities, time when people were traveling on Crusade and the pilgrimage to Rome, the Holy Land and Santiago de Compostela, Walsingham, etc. And people were on the move and a new type of text for a new scholastic age, this time with a scholar and an ambitious cleric at that, trying to shape his world. Whereas Gerald had inspired the use of the marginal counter in this way, which is going to be very influential in Gothic art. The next person to really pick that up big time was a monk called Matthew Paris, and he again was from St Albans, but he was also a courtier at Westminster Minster. And he becomes one of the great chroniclers of England during the 13th century and of what's going on in the wider world now. He is one of a very few desktop publishers. They think it. They are their own notaries, they write it down themselves and then they produce the books themselves. And so his text, the History of England, History of the English Historian Anglorum and his Chronica Majora and his other works are illustrated by he himself with a wonderful self portrait of him before the Virgin and Child. And then there are these wonderful marginal little tinted drawings. And he does them as tinted drawings, not fully painted and gilding, because you haven't got to put them up to dry every time you put a different colour on. It's not like a professional book production, it's more like watercolours instead of oils. He can do it almost as he goes. And again, you can see him editing. And you also see things like his depiction of the first elephant seen in the west since Alexander the the Great, because the King of France, I think, has got hold of an elephant and sent it to the Royal Zoo in the Tower of London. Matthew knows that elephants don't have kneecaps because Pliny told him so. But there's a real elephant and it's got kneecaps. Suddenly, innovation has to take over from traditional and it opens up experimental evidence coming into play, as well as the law of precedent and traditions in text and iconography.
- [32:26]
Emily Briffitt
Extraordinary. These offer such a window to the medieval world. If we move forward to the 14th century. There are two sources that you select for this century and they are from different places in society. And we should talk about both them, maybe compare them a bit little. A little bit.
- [32:43]
Michelle P. Brown
Right. I love this one. Okay. These two very different books, both made probably in around, like 1330s, possibly going into 1340s. We'll start with the first one, the Luttrell sorter. Luttrell sorter, made for the lord of the manor of Earnham in Lincolnshire, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, who dies in 1345. He's about to become a major baron of the realm, but he doesn't actually want to go to Parliament because it's quite a dangerous place to be at that time, so. So he's trying to stay a little bit under the radar at this time. He's in his middle age, or what would be considered old age at that time, and he wants to commission a book that is both going to be his pyramid, his enduring memorial, but also a book that is going to help save his immortal soul. Sir Geoffrey is an old soldier now. His people had come over as some of the bother boys in William the Conqueror's entourage, and they got their power by marrying rich heiress. And so by the time Geoffrey's got his inheritance, they've got estates running all the way up the A1, basically from east Anglia, right up the Great North Road, Lincolnshire, etc. And he marries a very nice heiress and there's a wonderful image with the two of them actually depicted as a donor image. Now, it's quite rare to have an image of the person that's commissioned the book to be made. And if you do, they might be like Matthew just kneeling in front of the Virgin or Christ piously, etc. Here you've got Sir Jeffrey on his war horse and his wife is handing him up his crested helm. And their daughter in law, who's from the l' Scrope family, Beatrice le Scrope is handing him his shield and she was from the big legal eagle family of the day. And Sir Geoffrey was often in court. He was evolved in the rise of the Lancastrian dynasty and he often got involved in land disputes and things, and so he needed cover and he was so determined to marry her to one of his sons, that they were affianced when they were about five or six or something like that. Now, at the time the book is being made, which is about 1334, when the heir comes of age, Sir Andrew Luttrell, into the 1340s, it would have taken several years probably to make something, and it cost about 20 to 25 pounds, which would have been the value of lateral PLC. The visitations of their rural estates show that their major estate in Earnham was worth about that much. And things on its pages are just amazing. The problem is that the government has now broken down the strong. Edward I has been replaced by Edward ii, who's recently been seen off because his French queen and her lover Mortimer accused him of preferring young men. And they staged a coup. And so it's all about bad government, good government, it's about what happens to you and yours, and it's incredibly personal. The family is shown at the New year feast and they have eyes swiveling up because they have eyes but they do not see. Their feet aren't shown under the table because their feet do not walk the paths of righteousness. Agnes, the wife, is chatting away while she carves the chicken. She has ears that do not hear. And all the while the only people listening and looking are the steward, the butler, who gets all the goodies and the silverware and the tapestries because Sir Jeffrey liked his servants better than he did his family and. And the Dominican friars who he kept on payroll because he didn't want to have to confess to the parish priest, because he might blab to the bishop, who would blab to the king and then he'd be in the Tower for plotting to overthrow them in favor of the Lancastrians. And so you have everything in the margins. You have his 12 year old daughter, who's sent to the household of one of the great nobles to try and capture the interest of his son, but she captures the interest of a young cleric on the mate. And so she's in the margin having her hair done. She's incredibly vain. Her drapery emulates the tale of a mermaid on the neighbouring page, which is the symbol of prostitution. And in the margin is a young man with a clerical tonsa growing out in a George Michael stubble because he's not going to be a priest and he's catching a bird in the net. The Mr. Darcy's of the day have to go after them when they elope. And in order to get her back with her virgin dignity declared intact, it costs Jeffrey and the various Nobles and bishops supporting him. A king's ransom. And we think it's the Dominican brother, William Fotheringay, who was actually painting the parts of the book that are really up close and personal. And he's giving the Luttrells tough love, he really is. He wants to get their souls into the pearly gates. So that gives one tail. Take on dangerous times in politics and the fears for how do you use your wealth to be a good steward? And what is the price you're going to have to pay spiritually if you don't? And then, if I may just briefly talk about the other book made at the same time, that's made by a cheeky Cockney artist who has a premises in Paternoster row, just behind St. Paul's Cathedral, which was the equivalent of London University, as well as a cathedral at that time. Time. And he makes Opus Anglicanum, that wonderful needlework made by wonderful female nimble fingers like the Bayer tapestry. And he's an incredible artist. We've got some of his textiles that he made for the Pope and other major patrons surviving. And he draws with his pen the way he works with his needles and his gold thread. And one day he takes it into his head. He is going to do a book that tells the whole of the story of faith, from creation, relation to the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. But he's going to tell it in pictures with captions, and the captions hilarious, like Franglais, they're the court French. You're speaking polite company church and legal Latin and the sort of Middle English you'd shout out of the kids from the upper window in the streets, you know. And it's said to have been commissioned to show to important people by a Dominican. No way would a Dominican allow any of the mistakes or opinions that this guy puts into his book there. And he puts himself center action. I've worked out who he is, and often whenever John the Baptist is there being shown, like when Salome is doing her lap dance to Herod, he's there looking over the shoulder and thinking, this is going to end badly. And he's always shown elsewhere as his eyebrows and his beautiful golden curls and his eyebrows and his eyes react, you know, shock, horror, humor. And he's always in a little group of five doctors of the law, canons of St. Paul's and it's a pictorial colophon. His name is John Fifth Hyde. John who hides in five and by this time, books and many things would be made primarily in towns and universities, not only in Monasteries and convents and the Bridge House rentals of the Bridge House Trust on London Bridge, the entrance to the city rented out a lot of properties, including those to people who made books and fif. Hyde was one of them. And we know where his premises were, et cetera. And we know that subsequently he goes on to be sheriff of Lynch London after the Jews have been expelled from England and France so the governments could renege on the national debt. You find that he gives the best depictions of Jewish liturgical practices and dress 40 years or so after the expulsion. And that's because the reason he becomes sheriff is he was in charge of regulating banking relations with Jewish bankers on the continent. Continent. And he sets the whole of the thing of redemption with himself as the major recipient. And when it comes to the Last Judgment, it's in a London pub and all of the publand, ladies and bishops and kings are being used to stoke the fire and shoveled on. And the caption says, and you think it's bad here. Once you get there, you don't even get Sundays on off. And so it's a very different take on again, the breakdown of government. What it was like seen from the city of London and not exactly ordinary people's lives if you become sheriff of London. But you know, he worked his way up and so you get this diptych of very different views. And both somebody who makes a book but makes it for himself going totally off script, and a patron who has a book made for him, but actually has the really innovative personal stuff done by his personal confessor who sits at his table, gives them new freedom to actually say new things.
- [41:53]
Emily Briffitt
We've covered so many manuscripts so far, but we should probably start coming to a close. Your book runs right up to the 16th century. How do you deal with that transition between the War of the Roses and the Tudor period?
- [42:10]
Michelle P. Brown
Yeah, it's such a rich period. Where do you begin to hone it down? We move into the personal world of the court and those at the very heart of government. Government. So at the very end of the book, the two that I've chosen, there are a thing called the Dixon Sayings of the Philosophers, which is in Lambeth Palace Library. And King Henry VIII's personal devotional aid, his sorter in the British Library. Now, the Dixon Sayings of the Philosophers is an English Middle English translation from the French of an author called de Tignonville, made by Anthony Lord Rivers. And he was the brother mother of Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward iv, one of the major protagonists at the end of The War of the Roses. And this book is quite remarkable. Rivers prided himself on his own scholarship, as many of these later nobles and kings and queens did as humanist Renaissance men and women. So he's done the translation himself while he was in exile, as was Edward IV on the Continent. During the Dynastic Things, he met the printer Catherine Caxton, and seems to have been instrumental in helping Caxton to set up his press at Westminster. So his personal translation of Dixon's Sayings of the Philosophers, meant to again, be a pattern of good government to advise kings and princes. Yeah. And so he has Caxton there, and it's one of the first works at Caxton prints. It's one of the first texts printed in England and Caxton printed it four times, so it was very popular. The book in Lambeth is handmade and hand illuminated. Part of the problem with printing is, for a while, the colour drains out of the world. So Rivers has this one made. The scribe Heywood is shown kneeling next to him in the prefatory miniature. The initials all the way through are in the very, very fashionable Bianchi Giori, the white vine ornament, beloved of the hu humanists in Renaissance Italy. But the script is that of a working secretary in one of the Inns of Court. So it's a cultural conflation. But the prefatory miniature is the thing I chose it for. It sends chills up your spine. You have Edward IV and his queen Elizabeth enthroned next to him. You have the young future Edward V, who only reigned for 78 days before possibly being murdered in the Tower of London or certainly going missing from the Tower of London. You've got Rivers and the scribe Hayward kneeling in front of his sister and her husband and the future heir. And in the little clique of close courtiers immediately beside the throne, clad in ermine trimmed robes and cap, is what is very, very likely Uncle Richard, who are course becomes Richard iii. And the world of scholarship and of popular history is torn asunder by did Uncle Richard have the two young princes bumped off in the Tower? And this is Rivers Christmas present. It's dated 24th of December 1477. So the manuscript must have been made incredibly quickly after the printed version was made in the 18th century of November. So a bit of a rushed job, hence the secretary script with a nice illumination to give as a Christmas present to a doomed royal family. There's a lot wrapped up in that. And then we come on to Henry VIII's sorter. This is one of several books made for Henry's personal consumption and his spiritual edification. But the Psalter is incredibly beautiful and illumin, handmade again, although we are now around 1540, Henry is nearly 50. This book is made to look like a printed book, but totally written by hand in the most beautiful humanistic script and illuminated. And amongst the illuminations, there's one of the poor old Henry, who could probably still dance a cotillion, who was forced to, or whatever the equivalent was, but who's really quite past it, sitting in an empty bedchamber. The most telling image for me is one where he is depicted as David battling Goliath on a background which is supposed to be the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the great chivalric tournament with the young king of France earlier in his youth. And then you've got the really telling one, the psalm, the beginning, it's Psalm 14, which says, the fool says in his heart there is no God. And it's Henry sitting there looking very podium pneumatic, playing the harp, great musician, as he always prided himself on being, but depicted as King David, the Old Testament type of Christ again. And turning his back on him is an accurate portrait. And these are both portraits which exist by this time, of his court jester, his fool, Will Sommers, who was the only one who could criticize him or offer him advice with impunity. And so the fool is turning his back on the fool who says, in his heart there is no God, having claimed his role as defender of the faith and a type of David and of Christ. And we end the medieval age in the dawn of the modern age with miniatures still playing a part. But now the world of portraiture and its psychology having to take the heavy loading and the heavy lifting that the these books had taken in terms of personal and public PR and messaging across the ages.
- [48:17]
Emily Briffitt
As a final question to you, Michelle, we've spoken about so many different manuscripts, but it's a small fraction, isn't it, of how many there were in the Middle Ages.
- [48:30]
Michelle P. Brown
Absolutely. It's the victors who write the histories, and it tends to be often the more opulent or treasured books, either for their sanctity or their value, that often, often make it through. For every one of these, there are the scrofulous survivors in fragments, and there are so much, so much that has been lost and other books that were devised for far more everyday purposes. They're the portals that then open the door to us to actually have an entry point into what might, for the general reader, might otherwise be more dense. History of England, history of art in England, history of the book in England, and to bring those together through the vehicle of the book and through people's lives, to actually open the vibrancy and the diversity of it up to contemporary readers.
- [49:21]
Daniel Kramer Arden
That was Michelle P. Brown, Professor Emeritus of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Michelle was previously Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library and has been a historical consultant and on screen expert on several radio and TV programs. Michelle's book on the subject is A History of medieval Britain in 12 illuminated manuscripts. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.
- [49:59]
Michelle P. Brown
This is History's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [50:12]
Colgate Advertiser
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [50:19]
Michelle P. Brown
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.