750 Reviews

OTTO PACHT, Book Illumination in the Middle Ages: An Introduction. Trans. Kay Daven-
port. Preface by J. J. G. Alexander. London: Harvey Miller; New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 223; 32 color plates, 210 black-and-white illus-
trations. Originally published in German by Prestel in Munich, 1984.

In his introduction to this attractive volume, the author remarks that during his
student days, in the early decades of this century, the study of manuscript illumination
was generally regarded as a minor branch of scholarship practiced by the academically
unambitious and was often carried on as a mere adjunct to the investigation of the
more favored monumental arts. That this would hardly be a fair judgment now is
due in no small part to Pacht's own fundamental contributions to this cause, of which
a list of writings included at the end of the volume, spanning the years from 1938 to
1983, provides an overview (pp. 213—14). The book here reviewed is described as the
record of a series of lectures delivered at the University of Vienna in the winter term
1967—68, for which notes and a summary bibliography have been provided by the
editors of the original German edition, published in 1984. But its approach and
insights have much older roots, and what we are offered might be said to constitute
a kind of distillation of a lifetime's work in the field of manuscript studies.
Book Illumination in the Middle Ages consists of an introduction and seven chapters,
which are entitled as follows: "Pictorial Decoration in the Organic Structure of the
Book," "The Initial," "Bible Illustration," "Didactic Miniatures," "Illustration of the
Apocalypse," "Illustration of the Psalter," and "The Conflict of Surface and Space:
An Ongoing Process." As befits a text conceived as a general initiation, the author
ranges far and wide, though he does not deal at all with aspects of medieval book
illumination that one might well expect to be treated in a work of this kind: the
illustration of vernacular literature of the high and later Middle Ages, for example,
and the illumination of music manuscripts or of legal and scientific writings. But it
should be said that Pacht's intention is not so much to provide a comprehensive and
fair-minded factual survey than to enunciate basic principles. He is persuaded that
the production of an illuminated book generates formal and structural concerns that
are "uniquely characteristic" of an "interplay of script, decoration, and picture" (p.
45) and therefore cannot be properly understood if judged within a frame of refer-
ence applicable to other artistic genres. As Jonathan Alexander justly observes in his
preface to the present volume, the kind of phenomenology of the decorated book
that Pacht thus sought to construct is rooted in concerns of the Vienna School and
builds on the work of significant earlier figures of that intellectual sphere, notably
Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl.
Pacht's interest in the analysis of problems that could be regarded as intrinsic to
book illumination is brilliantly displayed in these lectures. He has valuable things to
say about the question of narrative technique in books, an issue to which he had
earlier devoted a pioneering study. The history and permutations of the initial, in
which abstract sign and pictorial motif converge, receive an absorbing discussion.
These are, of course, now familiar topics. But others, on which the same acute formal
perceptions are brought to bear, are exploratory forays in the Viennese style that
have not yet had the same attention from students, now, on the whole, drawn to
different kinds of issues. I think in particular of the author's remarks on the role of
the frame in early-medieval illumination and on different approaches to surface
pattern (pp. 177 ff.). Pacht's art history is largely directed by immanent factors and
tendencies. "Each type of 'book,'" he characteristically writes, "appears to call forth
from within not only pictorial formats suitable to its sole needs alone but also a system
of decoration congenial solely to itself . . . " (p. 25). The absence of human agents,
 Reviews 751
or of a clearly delineated social setting in which the formal transactions brought to
light by the author's painstaking analysis might be grounded, may strike some readers
as a shortcoming of his method. But at a time when book illumination may be studied
as philology, as social history, or as literary criticism, a defense of its claims as art has
much to recommend it.
Pacht's book has been handsomely produced in a format identical to the German
edition. But a number of errors, some of them carried over from the German text,
ought to be corrected in any future republication. When the author mentions the
ownership by Christian communities of codices on paper as early as the second
century, he surely meant to write papyrus (p. 14). The discussion concerning the
origin of zoomorphic initials mysteriously alludes to examples in Hebrew manuscripts
that are said to be much older than the tenth century, but the books cited in the
accompanying note are a good deal later in date (p. 50). The capital reproduced on
page 84 (fig. 118) stems from the cloister of La Daurade in Toulouse and is preserved
in the Musee des Augustins. The provenance of the Mosan (?) manuscript of Honorius
Augustodunensis's Clavis physicae (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS lat. 6734), given
as Michelsberg in Franconia, should be stated in more hypothetical fashion (p. 158),
and the origin of the Ingeborg Psalter, said to have been illuminated at Tournai (pp.
94-95), remains an open question. The title of the Swedish exhibition catalogue
Gyllene Booker has been transmogrified into an author's name (p. 204, n. 33).
WALTER CAHN, Yale University

LEE PATTERSON, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature.
Madison, Wise: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Pp. xiv, 239. $35 (cloth);
$15.95 (paper).
How can we genuinely know the past — specifically the literature of the past? Do we
not merely project our own often unconscious assumptions upon texts of uncertain
ontological status? What is historical consciousness? Has it a history of its own? Is it
objectively possible or desirable? What is the relation of a text to its context, and what
is its context? Can we construct an accurate text out of an obscuring cloud of witnesses
which is itself "the text"? How do we locate ourselves historically, granted that all our
values are now relativistic, purely contingent, and we ourselves the product of a
probably unknowable history? These and a number of other problems are confronted
by Lee Patterson with a wealth of learning and of specific literary instances. He excels
especially in extracting the underlying drift or impulse of complex critical formula-
tions and attitudes. In addition he asserts that all academic work is "political," though
he is vague about the policies themselves. These can be summed up as conservative
(bad) or hostile to the "dominating ideology" (good).
He begins with a penetrating account of the main streams of Chaucer criticism in
the United States in the twentieth century. First, he sees brilliant historical scholarship
unable ultimately to connect with the interpretation and explanation of texts, thus
resulting in a mixture of historical positivism and mere appreciation. In reaction he
sees the New Criticism, based on a transhistorical, often ahistorical analysis of the text
on the page, confronting Robertsonian Exegesis. Talbot Donaldson's brilliant work is
one representative of New Criticism. Donaldson's achievement was to extend the
nineteenth-century notion that autonomous character generates speech to the whole
of Chaucer's writing, through the device of the Narrator. This dramatizes the poetry
and opens a gap between Author and Narrator which allows for the insertion of that
indispensable New Critical tool, irony. Charles Muscatine by his concept of the largely