Chapter II From Memoria To Visio (85 - 148)

CHAPTER TWO
FROM MEMORIA TO VISIO :

REVISING THE DONOR
At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject

and this remains so even when the subject is radically
transformed and recognition becomes correspondingly
extended; it remains so not because we seek the subject
matter despite the complications of painting but because
recognition and complication are each furthered by the
other, each serves the other.
Michael Podro, Depiction1
How did the relexive owner image come into being, and what were the
speciic conditions under which it distinguished itself from other varie-
ties of depiction that might be understood as portraiture? Although schol-
ars examining thirteenth-century books often remark on the presence of
owners in the pictorial program, and in some cases build enticing histor-
ical narratives from them, these images are frequently lumped together
in iconographic indices and surveys of manuscript illumination under a
generic umbrella of “donors” or “patrons.”2 In many cases, little or no doc-
umentary evidence internal or external to the manuscript suggests that the
depicted individual was the donor or the patron of the book, but the term
persists. Because donor and patron portraiture does constitute a major cat-
egory of both medieval and early modern representation, the owner images
that start appearing in thirteenth-century manuscripts with some regular-
ity look, to modern eyes, very much like these cognate types. However, as
I argue in this chapter, to medieval eyes, their likeness to donor and patron
imagery, as well as to other categories of medieval portraiture, was in fact
the very element that signaled their altered mode of address and engaged
their viewer in the play of internal relection and heightened self-awareness.
Like the images of the Holy Face discussed in the last chapter, these repre-
sentations of book owners took on a mirroring and corrective quality that
84
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FROM MEMORIA TO VISIO : REVISING THE DONOR 85
distinguished them from other genres of portraiture and gave them a spe-
cial place in the practice and experience of book-based devotion.
Michael Podro’s observation that “recognition and complication are fur-
thered by one another,” originally made in relation to a rather different
strain of abstraction than that found in medieval igural art, nevertheless
aptly describes the ways in which owner imagery took shape. Relying on
their audiences’ abilities to recognize a variety of iconographic formulas
and spatial representations, early owner images complicate the very models
they emulate by repositioning the viewer in relation to the representation
and collapsing the viewer with the object of the gaze. To say that owner
images complicate preexisting formulas is not to say that the formulas
transformed in these images were themselves simple or simplistic. In the
irst section of this chapter, I look at the conventions of portraiture from
about 1000 to 1200, when representations of patrons, donors, authors, and
scribes most often appeared in the context of objects associated with the
liturgy, including manuscripts and metalwork. All of these images make vis-
ible relations between both discrete individuals and classes of political and
sacred actors. Some more than others igure vision as a problem within the
context of prayer and draw attention to their own materiality. My survey is
not intended to be exhaustive but instead examines some major represen-
tational issues that characterize donor and patron imagery, particularly in
books, before 1200.
The second part of the chapter presents a case study in the shifting semi-
otics of donor, author, and owner imagery. The Orationes sive meditationes,
or Prayers and Meditations, of Anselm of Canterbury, composed between
1063 and 1072 by the great Italian contemplative (who served as abbot of
the Norman house of Bec and later as archbishop of Canterbury), has long
been recognized by scholars of affective piety as one of the foundational
texts of the more emotional, individualized strain of religious experience
that characterized the later Middle Ages.3 A small number of the twelfth-
and thirteenth-century manuscript witnesses to the popularity of Anselm’s
richly visual language are illustrated, and in these manuscripts it is possible
to see the blurring of boundaries between depictions of donors, authors,
and owners. Also visible in these manuscripts is the way in which represen-
tations of owners take on meanings through mimesis of such Christological
narrative topoi as the Noli me tangere.4 The feminine gendering of the
owner image also comes into view in some of the early manuscripts of
Anselm, which appear to have keyed their imagery to an imagined audience
that included lay women, perhaps in emulation of Anselm’s own interest in
the spiritual lives of women.
Although Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations fueled the ires of affective
devotion, the core text of personal as well as liturgical prayer remained
86 VISION, DEVOTION, SELFREPRESENTATION IN MEDIEVAL ART
the Psalter. In the third part of this chapter, I investigate the Psalter as a
proving ground for the relexive representation of book owners, partic-
ularly in relation to the depiction of bodies in attitudes of penance and
humility. The insistent repetition of supplicating igures in the initials to
the major divisions of the Psalter gives the written text a bodily frame of
reference. The insertion of what appear to be ordinary living people into
the initials where tradition would lead the eye to expect the Psalmist or
another sacred actor collapses the distance between the author or author-
itative model and the reader/viewer who gives voice – and body – to the
text. On the basis of manuscript evidence, I ultimately argue that what we
see happening in the course of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries
is the cultivation of an embodied and envisioned self-awareness on the
part of the lay devotee. The images, and the books to which they belong,
are, to return a psychoanalytic term to its linguistic roots, orthopsychic:
soul-shaping.5
One goal of this chapter is to examine how medieval artists, their
patrons, and their audiences used images to construct, but also to critique
and investigate, the “natural” order of relations between human beings and
between humanity and the sacred. I am interested in how images were
operative in the thinking through of gender and difference. The owner
images were part of a complex system of representations that participated
in the construction of individual and corporate identities, identities that by
their very nature rested on the identiication of dichotomies between “us”
and “them.” Toward the end of the chapter, I turn to the ways in which the
complex of visual images, texts, and performative and sensorial experiences
that framed devotional vision worked to heighten the devotee’s awareness
of his or her embodiment in and of a community deined by its difference
(and implicitly its superiority) in terms of class, race, and gender. Although
this triad of alterities relects a modern theoretical paradigm, the physical
traces of late medieval devotion also speak, on their own terms, of an active
engagement in visual discourses of difference and differentiation.
Patrons, Authors, Scribes: The Visual Vocabulary of

Portraiture before 1200
From the ninth century, at least, western European patrons of manuscript

illumination, metalwork, and other media intended for viewing in a sacred
context frequently saw themselves represented in the works they had
commissioned. Almost as frequently, recipients of such objects, whether
they were living persons or representatives of the Court of Heaven, were
also depicted. And sometimes the depicted patron was not so much the
18. Second Cross of Abbess Mathilda

of Essen, ca. 1010. Photo: Martin
Engelbrecht Rhineland. © Domschatz
Essen
living commission-giver as a revered and deceased founder or past patron

of an institution. Some dedicatory images featured both patrons and
recipients, as well as other parties involved. The results can be fantastically
complex. For instance, the Carolingian palatine count Vivian appears as
a courtier attending at the presentation of the Bible created for his king,
Charles the Bald, in the mid-ninth century; he is accompanied by a crowd
of canons from the abbey of Saint Martin at Tours, whose involvement
in the production of the manuscript may even have subtly engineered its
visual message to undercut Vivian’s authority and to remind Charles of
what, from the canons’ point of view, constituted proper relations between
the king and the Church.6 A century and a half later, the princely abbess
Mathilda of Essen (d. 1011) kneels before the Virgin at the foot of the
sumptuous liturgical cross known as the Second Mathilda Cross (Figures 18
and 19, Color Plate III). Scholars of Ottonian art do not agree whether
the work was originally commissioned by Mathilda herself and completed
19. Detail of Abbess Mathilda, enamel, Second Cross of

Abbess Mathilda of Essen, Rhineland, ca. 1010. Photo: Martin
Engelbrecht. © Domschatz Essen
under the reign of her successor, Sophia, or whether it was (as the most
current German scholarship argues) a commemorative work ordered by
Mathilda’s second successor, Theophanu, who also installed a monumental
tomb for Mathilda and evidently commissioned a liturgical commemora-
tion of her predecessor as well.7 Across the English Channel, King Canute
and his Anglo-Saxon queen, Emma/Ælfgyfu, stand at the altar and offer up
to Christ a golden cross in the tinted drawing that opens the New Minster
Liber Vitae of 1031, an image that builds its meaning up from visual refer-
ences to the earlier New Minster Charter and to objects and buildings in
fact associated with the patronage of the Danish king and his spouse.8 A
census of such depictions of donors, founders, or patrons would cross many
regions and periods – it was one of the basic visual topoi of the Middle
Ages, and continued to lourish well into the modern period.9
Iconographically, the roots of the donor or patron portrait, like those of
so many other motifs, were in the Byzantine East, and ultimately in Roman
imperial art, where the representation of acts of largesse had worked to
bolster the credentials of emperors and aristocrats.10 However, by the
ninth century, when such images began to be produced in signiicant num-
bers in the west, they had acquired additional semiotic baggage, namely
the penitential and juridical ideology of high medieval Christianity. Acts of
donation were viewed, in the economy of salvation, as speciically weigh-
ing against the sins of the donor in the eschaton.11 Furthermore, as Eliza
Garrison has recently discussed, the constellations of objects gathered in
imperial church treasuries constituted important strategic gestures in the
emerging political theology of the medieval west.12
No comprehensive history of donor portraiture in the high Middle Ages

has yet been attempted.13 Perhaps this is not so strange – the sheer diver-
sity of examples, and their speciicity to the particular conditions of their
production and use, make it dificult to construct the overarching narrative
a “history of” any such genre implies. Nor do I attempt here to construct
a narrative of this sort. Rather, I am interested in how individual instances
of donor portraiture bring forward an array of visual themes and repre-
sentational concerns that would ultimately provide material for the earli-
est experiments in representing book owners to themselves. As such, my
investigation naturally gravitates toward those examples most in sympathy
with later relexive owner images in terms of their attention to the role of
vision in prayer and the tensions that arise between the pictured vision and
the experience of looking at material images. In the following discussion,
I investigate a small group of representative works that, in my view, exem-
plify some of the more general pictorial habits that would have informed
both artists and audiences of the later Middle Ages. The survival of these
works into the twenty-irst century in part supports their legitimacy as com-
paranda to the thirteenth-century experiments in owner imagery; they were
carefully preserved by their late medieval custodians, having gained an aura
of sanctity and authority that often accrued to particularly luxurious prod-
ucts of earlier Christian cultures. Moreover, they stand for a whole range
of inherited artistic practices and visual-interpretive skills that were handed
down and mutated from generation to generation. The painters and viewers
of the earliest depictions of owners had irsthand experience of such prac-
tices and skills, a point that is central to the second part of this chapter.
The liturgical cross of Mathilda of Essen resonates with later experi-
ments in relexive representation in formal, conceptual, and even contex-
tual terms, though it is very much representative of its own period. As a
large (45 cm high), showy, technically elaborate ritual object that proclaims
its provenance loudly in both visual and verbal terms, it is consonant with
other conspicuous instances of imperial, royal, or aristocratic donations to
monastic foundations throughout late Ottonian Germany. On the other
hand, at the level of such details as the relective mood in the depiction
of Mathilda, and the interest in destabilizing the boundary between rep-
resentation and real space, it shows that already, at the millennium, the
concerns that were to come to dominate later medieval art in general, and
portraiture in particular, were present in artistic practice. The relationships
between the various parts of the cross call attention to its very materiality
and artiice, and the insistence, nonetheless, on its visionary, rather than
merely visual, nature.
In the enamel panel at the foot of the jewel-encrusted front side of the
cross (Figure 19), Mathilda, wearing a white habit, kneels to the left of an
enthroned Virgin with the Christ child seated on her lap. Her hands held
together and raised in prayer, she strains to look upward. The imprecise
nature of the medium and the damage it has suffered through restoration
make it dificult to discern whether she looks devotedly on the Virgin and
Child or beyond them, and beyond the frame of the enamel, to the cru-
ciied body of Christ, depicted in high relief on the central part of the
cross.14 In either instance (and the ambiguity could be intentional), the
representation of Mathilda brings to the fore several important aspects of
the praying donor portrait. First among these is the way such images incul-
cate a heightened awareness of the act of looking and the materiality of the
very objects and representations to which they belong. The depicted act of
looking replicates the viewer’s beholding, but in miniature: unlike the lick-
ering and transitory quality of the bodily act of looking, Mathilda’s pictured
looking rests steadily and insistently on the divine. The viewer, observing
the cross as it passes by in procession, or as it stands, at a distance, on the
altar, might contemplate the gap between her experienced visual percep-
tion and the idealized, visionary beholding of the deceased abbess; but she
might not – the enamel is very small, and invites a more intimate mode
of visual address than that structured by the liturgical function of such an
object. The miniature scale of the enamel suggests a less theatrical viewing
context, one in which the eye has ample time and proximity to study the
imagery and the sumptuous materials, to engage in absorption. This atten-
tive, devout regard would emulate the depicted regard of Mathilda, joining
the viewer to this revered benefactress of her community.
The goldsmith who made the Second Mathilda Cross manipulated mul-
tiple media to encourage the viewer to attend to the distinctions as well as
the lux between modes of representation, a strategy that would serve to
deepen and prolong visual contemplation. Mathilda, the Virgin, and the
Christ child appear in cloisonée enamel. This medium and the technique
announce the high artistic ambitions of the commission; pictorial enamel
work was highly valued in northern Europe in the eleventh century, and
despite the vicissitudes endured by the Second Mathilda Cross, the quality
of the original work appears to have been of a high order.15 The choice of
medium and technique does more than simply demonstrate how the artist’s
skill competes with the beauty of the gold and jewels from which the cross
is fashioned. It also creates a discrete visual ield within the jeweled frame
of the cross, distinct from both the framing elements and the central relief
panel, with its three-dimensional and monochromatic depiction of the body
of the cruciied Christ. The genius of the work is its ability to seamlessly
combine, without confusing, the dazzling and frankly material elements of
the frame – golden iligree, cut gemstones, antique intaglios and cameos,
enameled bosses – with the shimmering vision of Christ’s human form,
bodied forth in gold, and the miniature reminder of Mathilda as a seeing

subject. Compared with the more conservatively composed cross commis-
sioned by Mathilda with her brother, Duke Otto of Bavaria, between 973
and 982, the later work plays with the viewer’s awareness of materiality,
vision, and embodiment in far more sophisticated ways. The enamel plaque
near the foot of the earlier cross depicts Otto and Mathilda standing to
either side of a processional cross on a staff, a clever bit of mise-en-abyme
that refers the viewer back to the object as a whole; the cross they present
in the enamel is presumably meant to be understood as the cross on which
it is depicted.
The later cross avoids such immediately satisfying visual games, instead
asking the viewer to think about the very physical activity of viewing the
object rather than about the object per se. It accomplishes this by means
of its attention to the act of looking, which is collapsed into the act of
praying. Mathilda kneels, puts her hands together, and looks upward – the
gesture is uncommon this early, when the act of prayer was still quite often
represented by a standing igure with lifted hands, and the act of submis-
sion or supplication by prostration in the Byzantine manner.16 Essentially,
her kneeling pose and her proximity to the enthroned Virgin cast her as a
feudal subject, pledging fealty to her domina, a relationship that was, in this
period, wreathed about in the rhetoric of intimacy, mutual trust, and love.17
At the same time, the sacred context expands the implications of this rela-
tionship through a carefully orchestrated play of visual elements. One key
to the semiotic density of the cross is Mathilda’s depicted regard, which can
be understood as straining for a glimpse of the cruciied body above. This
looking-made-visible exists in a no-man’s-land between fulillment and
frustration; she occupies the same visual ield and indeed the same cramped
space as the Virgin and Child, but a protruding gemstone obscures her
sightline to the feet of the cruciied Christ. Despite its miniaturized, eter-
nalized contrast to the viewer’s gaze, the poignancy of Mathilda’s visual
position strikes a chord in the viewer, who both sees the divine body and
knows that it is only an image, glimpsed “but through a glass, in a dark
manner.” The contrasting two-dimensionality of the enameled portrait
and three-dimensionality of the Cruciied Christ also call attention to the
bodily nature of vision and the intermediate position of the viewer; Christ
is in some ways more embodied than Mathilda, but Mathilda’s posture and
her yearning, dificult sightline link her to the embodied viewer, who is also
praying and also struggling to see clearly.
The Second Mathilda Cross had a speciically liturgical function, partic-
ipated in highly choreographed rituals of display, and was part of an ensem-
ble of objects and spaces associated with Mathilda’s personal and familial
patronage of the convent at Essen.18 This does not, however, mean that it
did not address individuals or participate in more interiorized experiences

of piety than the usual “public” conception of liturgy suggests. Recent work
on the relationship between liturgical ritual and devotional experience
points toward what John Lowden has described as a “continuum” along
which works of art operate both in the formal, external performance of
ritual and on more intimate, internalized pathways.19 Mathilda’s cross was
certainly intended for use in a liturgical environment that was more public
than private, but this public was exclusive – presumably it encompassed
the nuns of Essen, perhaps a few distinguished visitors, and the clergy who
served them. The portrait of Mathilda addresses itself to an audience not
limited to its subject but also not as broad as “the general public.” Just as it
pictures a privileged visionary experience for Mathilda, it also offers a priv-
ileged visual experience to a select group of those whose access to it and
whose familiarity with such objects is complete enough to allow them to
contemplate the iner points of its composition. Although Mathilda’s cross
comes very early in the history of the rise of individualizing, somaticized
approaches to Christian devotion, already part of its visual argument is
grounded in differentiation: who sees, and how.
Such complex visual effects could also be attained in two-dimensional
media.20 Nearly contemporary with Mathilda’s cross, the Uta Codex, a
partial evangelistary composed for the abbess Uta of Niedermünster in
Regensburg around 1125 similarly uses a sophisticated spatial scheme to
bring attention to the relationship between prayer, embodiment, and vision.
In the dedicatory frontispiece to the manuscript, a framework of gold and
polychrome elements structures a densely patterned pictorial space from
which the human igures appear to emerge (Figure 20).21 In the large roun-
del at the center of the page, the enthroned Virgin, with her child on her
lap, literally bursts the conines of the framing device; her haloed head and
her feet overlap the inscription that encircles her, making the igure loat
free of the ground, as if in relief. Many of the eight igures depicted in
waist-length busts in the four square and four round compartments around
the exterior of the miniature also break the frame in various ways; the most
charming are the two crowned igures in the roundels to either side of
the Virgin, who appear to lean forward from their settings, their jeweled
crowns projecting over the gold of the roundel, and in the case of the igure
on the right, one of her sleeves overlapping the lower right portion of the
frame. Rather like the forward tilt of the high-relief igures of Mary and
Eve on the great bronze doors from Hildesheim (also contemporary), these
igures seem to enter the viewer’s space in their eagerness to see “around”
the depicted settings. Meanwhile, Uta, the only human igure without her
own setting, is both constrained by and supericial to the visual organiza-
tion of the ground. I say constrained because of her posture; she neither
20. Dedication
frontispiece to
the Uta Codex,
Regensburg,
ca. 1102–1125
(Munich,
Staatsbibliothek,
Clm. 13601,
fol. 2). Photo:
Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek
München
stands completely nor kneels, but as if to it herself to the space between

the lower boundary of the frame and the roundel that contains the Virgin,
she lexes her knees and hunches her back slightly. At the same time, the
trailing folds of her habit overlap the square setting that houses the igure
in the lower left corner. She holds a large codex in her hands and looks
upward toward the Virgin.
Both Uta and the Virgin, then, are clearly depicted as being in front
of, rather than integral to, the visual iction of the richly worked ground
against which they appear. The half-crouching posture Uta assumes
makes a certain amount of sense in light of her status – she is a supplicant
approaching her enthroned mistress, and this body language is consistent
with contemporary notions of how the ritual of “begging favor” should be
conducted.22 But does the picture intend that Uta literally sees the Virgin?
It seems unlikely, given the concept of pictorial space at work here. David
Ganz has pointed out that medieval artists used such spatial schemata as
the mandorla to help the viewer “stake out” the relationship between the
internalized spiritual vision, the sensible world, and God’s view of creation,
rather than attempting to create some kind of ictive window into a visu-
ally continuous space.23 Here, the painter plays with the spatial framework.
Whereas the two igures who lean out of their roundels to look at the
Virgin appear to respond with raised hands to the success of their move-
ment, Uta’s upward gaze is not accompanied by any gestural indication of
its fulillment, nor does the Virgin seem to look at her. Both Uta and the
Virgin hover in space, but their relative positions in that space are uncer-
tain, and this instability leads the viewer to an awareness of his or her own
uncertain relationship to the space of the page, which is at once so clearly a
painting on a two-dimensional ground, so insistently a three-dimensional
object crafted of gold and enamel, and also a foil for the free-loating ig-
ures of the Virgin and Uta.
Another important example of the way in which Ottonian representa-
tions of female donors drew attention to the materiality of depiction and
its eficacy as a tool for spiritual communion comes from the dedication
miniature of the Hitda Gospels, dated to the irst decades of the eleventh
century.24 In this well-known image, a Benedictine abbess, identiied by
inscription as Hitda, stands in proile to the left of a frontally depicted igure
standing on a dais, who is identiied as Saint Walpurga. Hitda, as the spon-
sor of the book, holds up a codex bound in gold, and Walpurga, acknowl-
edging the gift, turns her head toward Hitda and places a hand on the
upper right corner of the codex. This arrangement recalls numerous tenth-
and eleventh-century Byzantine examples, including the frontispiece of the
Leo Bible and the frontispiece to the Homilies of Gregory Nazianzus now
in the Dionysiu Monastery on Mount Athos, in which the book’s patron or,
in the latter case, recipient is depicted on the left, linked to the saintly per-
sonage on the right (respectively, the Virgin and Saint Gregory Nazianzus)
through the conduit of a book touched or held by both igures.25 In partic-
ular, the way that Hitda presents the book and Walpurga accepts it looks
back to the way these earlier images use the depicted book to draw atten-
tion to the material book, the resplendent object that commemorates and
perpetuates an act of donation. The book, both as a representation and as
an object, becomes the hinge that connects the mortal, earthly donor with
the divine sphere. The book’s user, holding the volume in his or her hands,
or more likely resting it on a lectern (due to its weight and the preciousness
of its binding), experiences a kind of doubling, in which the depicted touch
of the dedication miniature is mimed by the present physical experience of
touching. The onlooker’s body, the material book, the pictured exchange,
and the notional relationship between the living monastic community and
the eternal and sacred community of the elect are here collapsed on one
another, creating a complex and layered visual argument about vision,
materiality, and representation. If, as some have argued, the Hitda Gospels
were intended to serve a dual purpose – both as a presentation volume and
as a tool for individual devotional contemplation – this complexity makes
eminent good sense, for it was in providing food for thought that images
were considered most spiritually effective.26
In some instances, the boundary between the donor portrait and a more
intimate, personalized, and possibly self-relective mode of address blurs.
This is true of a number of Carolingian, Ottonian, and Anglo-Saxon books,
for instance the prayer books of Charles the Bald (Munich, Schatzkammer
der Residenz) and Otto III (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm.
30111, formerly Pommersfelden, Graf von Schönborn-Wiesentheid,
Schlossbibliothek, Hs. 347 (2940)), as well as the Gospels given by Judith
of Flanders to the abbey of Weingarten around the turn of the eleventh
century.27 In the late Anglo-Saxon Gospel manuscript, the Cruciixion
frontispiece depicts the diminutive igure of a woman who clutches the
foot of the cross, and she has long been identiied as Judith, the book’s
patron and possibly also its original primary user.28 Like the portraits of
Mathilda, Uta, and Hitda, this image of Judith is situated in the context of
an object that might equally serve as an element of public or at least com-
munal ritual and as the focus of individual contemplation. It places Judith,
as both patron and potential viewer, in Jerusalem at the moment of the
Cruciixion, making a strong visual argument for the eficacy of her prayer
and the power of her pious patronage. Although the book may originally
have been commissioned for use in Judith’s “private chapel,” in the late
Anglo-Saxon context of Judith’s irst marriage, to Tostig Godwinson of
Northumbria, this was still a relatively public space where family and
household gathered for worship, and so the image would have addressed
an audience that included, but was not limited to, Judith.29 The elaborate
golden binding of the book (still intact), and its ultimate use by Judith
as a gift to the Benedictines at Weingarten (an establishment founded
by her second husband, Welf of Bavaria), point to its primarily liturgical

signiicance.30 Judith, hierarchically smaller in scale than the sacred actors
in the depicted drama, assumes the kneeling pose that in contemporary
life denoted humility and supplication, and that was also deemed appro-
priate for veneration of the cross.31 Both scale and posture distinguish
her from the standing igures of Mary and John the Evangelist, and the
cruciied form of Christ. Mary and John, in addition, each hold a book,
drawing the viewer’s attention back to the sacred and material nature of
the codex in which the picture appears. The unpainted parchment ground
of the highly colored and gilded miniature also returns the eye to the
material of the book in both its physical and spiritual dimensions (it is
literally lesh). Judith, who lifts her eyes to gaze on the impaled feet of
Christ, may be present at the scene, but the artistic strategies employed –
differences in scale, visual reminders of the object, tensions between sur-
face and ground – work to make visible the space between what the image
depicts and the embodied viewer who perceives it, what Susan Stewart has
named “the distance between the situation of reading and the situation of
depiction.”32
In the preceding examples, depicted acts of looking, depicted bodies,
and the very materiality of depiction are all queried by the orchestration of
igural and nonigural elements. Acts of donation, which all of these images
memorialize, are caught up in the oscillation between the materiality of the
objects donated and their spiritual eficacy. The particular focus of these
images on women as donors provides a useful prelude to my examina-
tion of how this type was transformed and reimagined in books of the late
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Yet, even in instances of high medie-
val donor portraiture that seem less concerned with addressing the subject
of depiction in a relexive mode, the commemorative images are calculated
to make visible relations that are both bodily and notional, notably the
ties of loyalty, duty, and amity between clients and their patrons. Visual
representations of the relationship between a living donor, or indeed a liv-
ing artist or scribe, and a divine or distant personage frequently make use
of the materiality of the depiction to bring attention to the way in which
images and, moreover, the physical acts of looking at images and handling
representational objects activate and make present the very relationships
they commemorate. Whether the client is a scribe and the patron a bishop
or the client a prince and the patron a holy or even divine personage, donor
portraits explore the dificult problem of how to ix such relationships in
visual terms, without falsely constraining them or oversimplifying them.
These portraits do not merely reproduce, in pictures, the nature of these
hierarchical and reciprocal arrangements; they produce them, or at least
participate in their production.
21. Dedication page, Pontiical of Mainz, Rhineland, 1249–1251

(Paris, BnF MS lat. 946, fol. Av). © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
22. Colophon page, Pontiical of Mainz, Rhineland, 1249–1251

(Paris, BnF MS lat. 946, fol. 127v). © Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, Paris
One rather late example, in its conservative nature of a piece with many
eleventh- and twelfth-century works, testiies to the longevity of the motif.
It occurs in a German pontiical from about 1250.33 In a dedicatory full-
page miniature (Figure 21), the archbishop of Mainz, Christianus, appears
as a small igure kneeling to the left of a huge, enthroned Saint Martin; he
holds up his hands and utters a prayer, which is written in the blank space
above him. On another dedicatory page, Christianus is depicted again,
now standing and looking monumental himself (Figure 22). To the right, a
kneeling igure in a monastic habit holds up a thick volume. An inscription
identiies him as Frederic, a monk, who has written the book and therefore
23. Henry II receives his bishop’s blessing. The combination of written and pictured
presents the book
prayer in these two dedicatory miniatures maps out the hierarchy of rela-
to the Virgin,
Gospels of Henry tions between monks, prelates, and the saints in general. At the same time,
II (Bamberg, it memorializes speciic individuals (Saint Martin, Christianus, Frederic)
Staatsbibliothek, and visualizes their acts of prayer, donation, and even the physical labor
Hs. 31/ Msc.
Bibl. 95 (A.II.46), of writing as a frame for the sacred ritual inscribed within the pages of the
fols. 7v, 8). Photo: pontiical – itself a book that would serve to structure a physical, embod-
Gerald Raab ied performance of a rite (the Mass) ultimately concerned with the Body
of Christ. These are complex images, despite their formulaic appearance;
they communicate networks of human and sacred interaction that are both
political and profoundly personal.
The bodily concerns of donor portraiture in manuscripts demonstrate
how the codex, as an object, enables a certain kind of thinking about acts of
patronage and the physical relationships they establish. A two-page frontis-
piece from a Gospel book commissioned by “Henricus rex pius” (probably
Emperor Henry II, reigned 1002–1114), presents the donation of a book
by the king to the Virgin in what initially seem relatively straightforward
terms (Figure 23).34 The king stands on the left (verso) page, holding the
book in his hands. He is framed by a classicizing arch with its identifying
inscription, a match to the arch that likewise frames the standing igure of
the Virgin on the facing (recto) page. She looks impassively toward him,
her hands extended in front of her torso as if to receive the book. But
again, the materiality of the book leshes out this static depiction.35 As the
opening closes, the depicted book in Henry’s hands will touch the open
hands of the Virgin, thus reenacting the moment of donation. This habit
of using the opening of the book to activate (and endlessly iterate) such
ritual, physical gestures seems to have been characteristic of the period.
Another example comes from a lectionary for Cologne Cathedral, commis-
sioned by Archbishop Everger (985–989), where the two-page frontispiece
depicts Everger prostrating himself on the left page and Peter and Paul
enthroned on the right page (Cologne, Dombibliothek Cod. 143, fols. 3v,
4). The apostles are seated in the upper two-thirds of their miniature, while
Everger assumes his humble posture in the bottom half of his, so that when
the pages are closed, he is quite literally at their feet.
While such an image draws attention, through the activation of pictured
bodies, to the material nature and operation of the codex, another genre
of portraiture that lourished in the high Middle Ages puts the spotlight
on the bodily aspect of writing (and, by extension, painting) itself. Author
portraits had been part of the visual repertoire of the codex almost from
the inception of the format, as examples such as the portrait of Mark the
evangelist in the Rossano Gospels demonstrate.36 Some of the most pow-
erful performances of Carolingian and Ottonian illumination come in the
form of such author portraits: the striking classicism of the evangelists in
the Coronation Gospels and the expressionist fervor of those in the Ebbo
Gospels in the ninth century, or the otherworldly calm of the double por-
trait of Gregory the Great and the deacon Peter in the Registrum Sancti
Gregorii painted for Archbishop Egbert of Trier in the late tenth century.37
This last example also contains a scribal portrait, a variant of the author
portrait that igures the writer (or the putatitve writer) of the book as a
secondary author.38 Here, Peter is mentioned in the dedicatory verse at
the beginning of the Registrum, which proclaims, “Peter wrote this holy
book in your honor [Emperor Otto],”39 and is identiied in the portrait as
“notarius.”
Carl Nordenfalk observed that the portrait of Gregory in the Registrum
is also a portrait of the book’s patron, after a fashion: “If it does not give us
an idea of what Egbert looked like in real life, it certainly does show how
he would have liked to appear.”40 Peter, the scribe, a living contemporary
and subordinate of the archepiscopal patron of the manuscript, facilitates
the oscillation between Gregory and Egbert by appearing as an agent of
transmission. The secondary status of Peter to both patron and author is
undeniable, but his transhistorical presence (he bears witness to both the
divinely inspired authorship of Gregory and the divinely inspired patron-

age of Egbert) calls attention to the centrality of scribal and artistic activity.
I propose that just as Gregory stands in for Egbert, Peter the “notarius”
also stands in for the painter here. This doubling is implicit in the igure’s
gesture; following the hagiographic tradition irst documented in Paul the
Deacon’s Vita of Gregory (ca. 780), the secretary makes a hole in the cur-
tain with his stylus and watches as the saint receives divine inspiration in
the form of the dove, who places its beak between his lips, giving rise to
words that the scribe then records.41 In the Registrum Gregorii, the stylus,
raised to pierce the curtain, can also be read as a painter’s tool, with which
the igure gives a dark contour to a highlighted fold of the depicted curtain.
This gesture then becomes one that focuses visual attention on the materi-
ality and corporeality of image-making. The act of depiction competes for
the viewer’s attention with the depiction itself.
In this respect, the Master of the Registrum Gregorii engages in what
Michael Gullick has identiied as a practice of making “self-referential
portraits.”42 In these relatively rare images, mostly dating to the twelfth
century, the connection between the corporeal activity of the scribe or art-
ist and the materiality of the book is made explicitly visible. Unlike the
more common types, in which the depicted scribe or artist works on a
depicted surface, these self-portraits have the depicted artist working on
the actual text or image; the small igure reaches up with his quill or brush
and “writes” the letter the eye reads, or “paints” the loral decoration on
a foliate initial. Such sophisticated and often humorous play contrasts and
entangles the spiritual and the carnal; the ideas expressed by words and
images in these books, no matter how lofty they may be, are brought back
into the realm of the physical when the eye is reminded of the bodily acts
of making, and by extension the bodily aspect of perception.
The Gregory portrait demonstrates that a strict hierarchy of author,
patron, and scribe/artist is not always respected in medieval representa-
tions, nor are the lines between scribal and authorial and patronage activi-
ties always maintained. The famous Eadwine portrait from the eponymous
Eadwine Psalter is one example in which patron and scribe are collapsed
into the traditional visual formula of the scriptural author portrait.43 An
even more complicated representation of the relationship between patron,
recipient, author, and scribe comes from the early thirteenth-century pic-
torial colophon to the Toledo-Morgan Moralized Bible (Figure 24). Here,
the illuminator (rather than the scribe) is igured as a subordinate responsi-
ble for the physical matter of the book, which is authorized by the cleric sit-
ting on the left. However, his subordination is brought into question by his
vertical alignment with the youthful king depicted above him, who seems
to receive instruction from a queen depicted above the cleric – perhaps
24. Dedication page, Toledo-Morgan Moralized Bible, Paris, 1226–1234 (New York, Morgan Library MS
M.640, fol. 8). ©The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
the instructing igures are not so much in control as in a position sim-

ilar to that of the councilors often depicted at the right hand of Christ
or earthly kings.44 The inclusion of the scribe or illuminator in any such
picture inevitably reminds the eye of the book as a discrete material object
manufactured by human hands, and if John Lowden is correct in reading
the inscription in the cleric’s open book as “Laist ci a foi teind(re),” or “Let
it be left here to faith to paint,” then the picture also takes up the spiritual
dimensions of the illuminator’s work.45
The intimacy of both artist and scribe with divinely sanctioned authority
and with the divine itself returns us to Matthew Paris, whose self-portrait
in the Historia Anglorum presents such powerful visual rhetoric of artistic
devotional agency. In the portrait of Matthew at the knees of the Virgin
(Figure 6), the invocation of the Augustinian prayer “O felicia oscula” pro-
vides a textual avenue by which the pictorial representation of Matthew
can be assimilated with the objects of his devotional attention. The sug-
gestion by Jonathan Alexander that Matthew’s pose may constitute a direct
visual quotation of earlier English depictions of monastic humility fur-
ther underscores the artistic self-consciousness of this image.46 Matthew’s
imitatio is multilayered, with references to such sainted scribal and artistic
forebears as Dunstan as well as to the infant Christ, whose gestures, both
as depicted and as described in the prayer, are parallel to Matthew’s own.
Furthermore, Matthew’s depiction of the Virgin and Child was likely an
act of artistic imitatio as well. Suzanne Lewis has argued that the style and
iconography of Matthew’s frontispiece were a response to that “most ele-
gant image” of Mary carved by Walter of Colchester for Abbot William
of St. Albans, intended for display above the altar.47 Describing Matthew
as extremely discerning and well versed in the sacred art of his own time
collected at St. Albans, Lewis pointed toward one of the ways in which
Matthew’s artistic self-concept was formed.48 The visible self depicted at
the feet of the Virgin in the Historia Anglorum is at once Christomimetic,
hagiomimetic, and, to coin a term, pictormimetic. In making the image,
Matthew emulates Christ, the saints, and the makers of images he views as
his artistic mentors or models.
Matthew’s pictorial self-fashioning argues for a medieval conception of
the artist, like the scribe and the author, as an active partner in the transla-
tion of ineffable, divine meanings into humanly sensible terms. His manip-
ulation of such inherited modes of depiction as the iconography of monastic
humility or the majestic classicism of early Gothic sculpture points toward
the character of thirteenth-century visual experiments in self-representa-
tion. Adaptation and strategic repositioning of recognizable formulas for
the representation of authority and the sacred allowed artists to depict new
subjects, including the devotional body and vision of the book owner. Such
images resonated with their precedents in the tension between recogni-

tion and complication described by Podro in the epigraph at the beginning
of this chapter. This resonance relied on the visual skills of an audience
trained to recognize a representational theme and its variants. In order for
new varieties of portraits to be at once recognizable as manifestations of
other modes of representation and as distinct from them, viewers needed
to possess visual familiarity with and understanding of those modes. These
were highly specialized skills possessed by few. The habitus associated with
high medieval donor, patron, author, and scribe portraiture was restricted
to the relatively small and elite group associated with ecclesiastic or impe-
rial courts and high-status monasteries. Both the producers of and the
audiences for this imagery were, in effect, visual literati.
Not coincidentally, these same producers and audiences were also lit-
eral literati, skilled in manipulating and decoding the particular signiica-
tions of verbal and visual rhetoric associated with Latinity.49 Thus literacy,
as a set of verbally based skills, performances, and associations, cannot be
disentangled from what one must call, for lack of a better term, “visual lit-
eracy.” The history of medieval literacy has received volumes of scholarly
attention since the late 1960s. Simplistic formulas that once described a
“growth” of literacy from the early to the high Middle Ages have gone by
the wayside as investigations of particular historical settings have revealed
the complexity of literate practices and attitudes toward reading, Latinity,
and a host of other related phenomena. What such studies as Rosamond
McKitterick’s on Carolingian courts, C. P. Wormald’s on Anglo-Saxon king-
doms, Brian Stock’s on eleventh- and twelfth-century literary cultures, or
M. T. Clanchy’s on Anglo-Norman chanceries have shown is that literacy is
a luid constellation of beliefs, practices, and habits that nevertheless has a
powerful ability to deine and enact social relations.50 Other competencies,
such as numeracy and scientiic skills, are now coming under scrutiny as
well, and predictably these, too, prove to have been “complex, polyvalent,
aporetic,” in the words of Peter Haidu.51 Numbers, words, and pictures
are all to some degree texts, and the principle of intertextuality links them
together. The wider diffusion of a variety of verbal literacies (particularly
vernacular literacies) that tended to emerge over the course of the later
medieval centuries was matched by a wider diffusion of active engagement
with visual representation because, like all forms of representation, pictures
engage the memory and summon up other representations.
Some of the evidence for the emergence of a wider public with highly
evolved visual skills in the late twelfth through thirteenth centuries is
directly tied to the development of a commercial book trade, as described
by Robert Branner, Mary and Richard Rouse, Graham Pollard, and Andrew
Taylor, among others.52 Only a minority of books created in the urban
centers described by these authors were illuminated, but even that small
percentage meant a signiicant increase in the number of readers who were
familiar with the practice of reading illustrated texts. As regional centers
for commercial book production grew over the course of the thirteenth
century to supply the demands of the wealthy laity, the availability and vari-
ety of illustrated books increased dramatically.53 In particular, the diffusion
of illustrated Psalters and Bibles in the thirteenth century meant that a
far wider audience was becoming familiar with an array of iconographical
and stylistic references that made images an active and challenging part of
the reading experience. The variety of ways in which thirteenth-century
artists manipulated the Byzantine stylistic conventions and iconography
of the Holy Face provides one example of the kind of material on which
these expanded audiences of the thirteenth century might have trained and
exercised their powers of visual discernment.
Although pedagogical manuals of the period are for the most part mute
on the teaching of visual skills, some suggestive material does surface.
Over the course of the thirteenth century, the proliferation of illuminated
Psalters and Books of Hours with extensive cycles of prefatory illustration
certainly indicates that aristocratic mothers, charged with the primary
education of their young children, used pictures to help articulate and ix
in memory the fundamentals of Christianity even as they used the Psalms
themselves as basic texts for teaching reading and Latin.54 The Leiden
Psalter, an English manuscript of circa 1190–1200, perhaps produced for
Geoffrey Plantagenet, archbishop of York (d. 1212), contains a note, added
later, that claims that Louis IX of France learned his letters from it.55 The
two earliest copies of the illustrated Bible Moralisée also may have formed
part of Louis’s training in both verbal literacy and pictorial decoding,
as several scholars have argued.56 Although even such enlightened texts
on the education of the children of the laity as Vincent of Beauvais’s De
eruditione iliorum nobilium fail to give an account of how pictures operated
in the earliest stages of education, literacy and visual skills were inextri-
cably linked in the well-established medieval understanding of pictures
as aides to memory, along with the (literally) canonical notion that pic-
tures served as an entryway and stimulant to religion for the simple or
unformed mind.57
Another factor in the increased diffusion of visual skills from about 1100
onward must have been the development of architectural sculpture and
mural painting as organs for the expression of ecclesiastical and political
doctrine. The visibility of the sculpted portals and large-scale mural cycles
associated with pilgrimage churches in the twelfth century exposed a much
broader audience to both narrative and visionary iconography. Without
embracing the somewhat dated notion of the twelfth- or early thirteenth-
century architectural sculptural program as a “gospel in stone,”58 it is prob-

ably safe to say that even when the subtler literary or theological references
made in such programs escaped the unlettered viewer, visual engagement
happened, and profound religious truths were communicated.59 From
the charmingly plainspoken exposition of the Last Judgment at Conques
to the evocation of John’s vision of the Throne of God at Moissac, and
from the rhythmic recitation of the Creation and Fall at Modena Cathedral
to the majestic liturgical formality of the murals in such English rural par-
ish churches as St. Mary’s at Kempley in Gloucestershire, works of the
late eleventh and twelfth centuries are addressed to audiences far more
socially diverse than the elite circles for whom most extant Ottonian and
Carolingian works were imagined.60 Although lay viewers may not have
identiied all of the subtle theological points made by some of the more
sophisticated ensembles of public sculpture, their role as viewers was not
simply that of passive and partial comprehension.61 Instead, through means
of their own patronage and use of pictorial images, they began to exercise
their own interpretive skills and interests, contributing to and transform-
ing the ensemble of habits, assumptions, and discourses that constituted
their visual culture. Pilgrimage, trade, and military adventures also intro-
duced these diverse audiences to a greater array of visual representations
than might have been afforded them in their home parishes. As Anthony
Cutler has discussed, even the visual forms and aesthetic values of enemy
Muslim cultures played an important role in the expanded visual world of
the Frankish crusaders, both in the Levant and back home.62
Changing patterns and practices of lay literacy and the development of
the book trade, alongside the development of vernacular literary produc-
tion, spurred the diffusion of the iconography of donor, author, and scribe
portraiture. Together, these forces combined to provide upper-class lay
audiences with an unprecedented level of exposure to pictorial representa-
tion in general, and varieties of portraiture in particular. One well-known
and fairly early example of a manuscript that translates classically based
conventions of portraiture into contemporary, even vernacular, terms is
the scribe Guiot de Provins’s omnibus of Arthurian romances by Chrétien
de Troyes, dated to the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Here, a
“portrait” of a lady appears in the initial that opens the text of Le Chevalier
de la Charette (Figure 25). Dressed in contemporary secular fashion, seated
frontally on a low-backed throne, but looking and gesturing to the right,
the lady is usually understood to represent Chrétien’s patron, Marie de
Champagne (d. 1198). This seems a fair assessment. Not only does the pro-
logue to the poem begin with an extended appreciation of the countess’s
many ine qualities (vv. 1–18), but the writer concludes by giving her credit
for the “matter” as well as the genesis of the work:
25. Marie de Champagne, initial from the prologue to

Le Chevalier de la Charette of Chrétien de Troyes, Paris,
1230–1240 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS fr.
794, fol. 27). © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
The matter and the meaning were given by the Countess

And he [Chrétien] is dedicated to her thought
And adds nothing to it but his labor and attention.63
In effect, Chrétien cedes authorship to Marie. Thus, it would make

sense, ifty years on, to illustrate the initial to the romance with which she
is credited with a picture of her in the traditional place of the author. At
the same time, as Chrétien makes clear, Marie’s contribution was not in the
least scribal, so she does not hold a quill or write in an open book. Instead,
she gestures in a didactic manner almost identical to that of the queen in
the contemporary Toledo-Morgan Moralized Bible. Just as queen instructs
king and cleric directs artist in that image, Marie directs an unseen person,
presumably Chrétien (by way of Guiot), to make visible in the form of
written words matter and meaning.
Marie’s author portrait also resonates with a strain of author portrai-
ture in Bible illustration that emphasizes divine inspiration over the more
physical act of writing. While the prophets and evangelists were often pic-
tured with pen in hand, they were also sometimes depicted without the
attributes of authorship, attesting to the authenticity of the text with a ges-
ture.64 Paul, in particular, was often shown making a gesture very similar to
Marie’s in contemporary Parisian Bibles. John the Evangelist, whose role as
visionary rivaled his role as author, was another igure frequently depicted
as a testifying presence, rather than as an author cum scribe, particularly in
illustrations of the Apocalypse.65
The author portrait of Marie de Champagne at the head of the text of

Le Chevalier de la Charette similarly makes visible to the reader the abstract
idea presented in the prologue of the countess as more than patron or
muse but other than writer. It relies on the viewer’s prior knowledge of a
variety of author-portrait types and draws from the same wells of meaning;
Marie, like Paul or John, imbues the text with authority and with a visible
body. She makes the text – and its production – present in a way it would
not otherwise be for the reader. The transformation of older conventions
of portraiture extends the viewers’ recognition of the notion of authorship
into new territory (to return to the quotation from Podro with which I
began). This maneuver attests to the lexibility with which lay artists and
audiences in the early thirteenth century handled the semiotic potential of
established habits of depiction. Such imaginative and interpretive scope was
critical in the formulation of the owner portrait. Although Marie remains
an “author” and her appearance at the head of the text has more to do with
crafting authorial identity than with shaping an individual’s subjectivity, the
move that allows her to take her place among the constellation of authors
is parallel in many ways to the move that allows the traditional depiction
of the donor or recipient to become the portrait of the book’s primary
intended viewer. In the following portion of this chapter, I look at how the
tradition of illustration associated with one text exploited the polysemic
potential of images to hail the text’s readers and the manuscript’s users,
inviting and even encouraging them to see themselves within the pages of
the book.
From Authentication to Relection: Author and Owner

in the Context of Devotion
The process of transforming the iconography – and meaning – of donor,

author, and scribal portraiture into the owner portrait took place in the cli-
mate of heightened attention to the individual’s cultivation of self-awareness
and a personal relationship to God that characterized the “long” twelfth
century (generally about 1050–1250).66 Otto Pächt commented that the
rise of affective piety “fermented visual imagination and led to new artis-
tic experiences which ultimately had a humanizing effect on . . . Christian
art.”67 This is an observation very close to my own thesis that the imagina-
tive and inward-directed currents in devotion not only facilitated but were
facilitated by the development of new representational modes in the picto-
rial arts. As the monastic practice of speculatio, or disciplined gazing on an
object (material or mental), was translated beyond the cloister and diffused
among the laity, the potential for visual objects to shape the character of
spiritual consciousness increased.68 The act of gazing itself became a trope

for the devotional and desiring movements of the soul toward God, as the
fascination with the Holy Face demonstrates.
Indeed, many of the earliest illuminations that signal new, more self-
relective approaches to portraiture appear in manuscripts intended for use
by individuals in their practice of personal devotion; signiicantly, these
manuscripts were created for viewers who were not members of conven-
tional, masculine monastic communities yet apparently desired (or were
desired to) emulate the devotional practices of members of such communi-
ties. Caroline Bynum’s point that the twelfth-century self was always con-
ceived of in the matrix of the community makes this coincidence the more
striking – the individuals most in need of a tool through which they can
visualize themselves are those whose selfhood inds itself at the fringes of
normative group identity.69 Best illustrated perhaps by the adaptation of
the St Albans Psalter to the needs of the recluse Christina of Markyate by
her Benedictine mentors, a trend emerges in which the person marginal
to a regular religious community becomes the focus of artistic problem-
solving and pictorial efforts to envision and embody the devotional self.70
Although Christina herself appears at most once in direct representation
(in the initial of Psalm 105), arguably, the totality of the manuscript’s pres-
ent form owes itself in some part to a rethinking of its purpose when the
decision was taken to give it to her.71 Although the owners depicted in
thirteenth-century books come from across the spectrum of the bookish
class – they represent men and women in and out of monastic orders –
a great many of them are women, and laywomen of one sort or another
at that. Like Christina, whose unusual position invited an exceptionally
inventive pictorial response, these owners struggled to reconcile the ideo-
logically determined demands of their secular lives with the institution-
alized imperative (and perhaps their individual desires) to perform an
exemplary devotional life. And like Christina, the path toward which they
were directed was that of the imitation of the contemplative and vision-
ary aspect of the life of the cloister.72 The performance of quasi-monastic
devotion, in which mental and pictorial visualization played such an impor-
tant role, made the internalized, contemplative ideal visible; this visibility,
concomitantly, reinforced and naturalized the link between the bodily and
the spiritual, the feminine and the devotional.
Lay emulation of monastic devotion gathered momentum particularly
among high-status women starting in the late eleventh century.73 The
involvement of aristocratic and royal women in the project of Benedictine
reform engaged them with their male peers in the reevaluation and refor-
mulation of monastic devotion, and this in turn shaped their own spiritual
practice. For example, in the third quarter of the eleventh century, John
of Fécamp and Peter Damian both advised the German empress-regent

Agnes of Poitiers on the conduct of her religious life at the same time they
worked with her toward a resolution of the Investiture struggle.74 Around
1071, writing to Princess Adelaide of England, William the Conqueror’s
reclusive daughter, Anselm of Canterbury counseled her to “despise with
an elevated mind everything that must be given up even while you have it,”
and encouraged her to recite “with a humble mind” a group of prayers he
had originally composed for the use of his monastic brethren.75 Similarly,
in 1104, while in exile from England and residing at Lyon, Anselm sent
copies of his contemplative prayers and meditations to Countess Mathilda
of Tuscany, apparently at her behest.76 In the accompanying letter, he
remarked again on the originally monastic context of the prayers and
advised Mathilda, “Some of them are not appropriate to you, but I want to
send them all, so that if you like them you may be able to compose others
after their example.”77 She was to read them “little by little, with atten-
tion and deep meditation,” in order to “stir up the affections to prayer.”78
In short, though not herself a monastic, Mathilda was deemed by Anselm
capable of reading, and indeed writing, like one.
The material nature of Anselm and Mathilda’s correspondence forms the
background of my discussion in this part of the chapter. Although the auto-
graph manuscript of Anselm’s communication with the pious countess is
lost, Otto Pächt identiied two twelfth-century manuscripts, one Austrian
and one English, that arguably relect the visual component of the collec-
tion put together for Mathilda at Anselm’s request, in Lyon, by an English
scribe and illuminator.79 Although both manuscripts “seem to have been
designed for the use of nuns” rather than laywomen, Pächt saw in them
visual references to Mathilda that may have arisen in the lost source man-
uscript from her role as the prospective owner of the book.80 Pächt’s thesis
that the illustrated copies of Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations descend from
an illustrated archetype created for Mathilda under the direction of the
author himself would place the archetype manuscript among a very small
group of medieval books in which text and image were conceived together
with the author’s input. As Pächt himself allowed, few authors prior to the
twelfth century could have imagined seeing their own works illustrated.81
Pächt’s conviction that the presentation manuscript of the prayers and
meditations sent to Mathilda in 1104 was illustrated is well argued and
well supported by the evidence, but it has not gone unchallenged. Dorothy
Shepard cites André Wilmart’s interpretation of Anselm’s prefatory letter
to Mathilda as expressing a sense of haste, which would have precluded
an extensive program of illustration, and evaluates the “correspondence of
the miniatures” in the two manuscripts as “minimal.”82 Many of the motifs
employed by painters in both manuscripts were drawn from the stock of
common motifs available to them from other books produced in their own
milieus, as Shepard points out. If this means that both manuscripts were
entirely independent of the hypothetical shared model, “created ad hoc,”83
nonetheless in at least two instances close in time and similar in institu-
tional setting if distant in geography, the creators of manuscripts of Anselm’s
prayers for female audiences saw the text as suitable to and perhaps even
begging for a pictorial complement. Although this by no means makes it
certain that Mathilda ever received or commissioned an illustrated copy
of the prayers and meditations from Anselm, it still speaks in no uncertain
terms to an impulse to situate the devotional reading of a pious laywoman
within a pictorial as well as verbal environment.
The textual stemma of the Prayers and Meditations is irreducibly complex
because of the popularity of Anselm’s writings and their frequent inclusion,
whole cloth or piecemeal, in lorilegia and other devotional compendia.84
The wide dispersion of the text has been commented on and studied by
Benedicta Ward, Richard Southern, and Thomas Bestul, among others,
and their work has underscored the centrality of Anselm’s contribution
to the development of later medieval patterns of devotion and affective
piety.85 The illustrated manuscripts studied by Pächt belong to two differ-
ent branches of the textual stemma, despite whatever pictorial similarities
they may have. This problem is not unique to the Anselm material: often,
pictorial and textual stemmata for a given work are at odds, a situation aris-
ing from fundamental differences between practices of scribal copying and
those of pictorial emulation. Thus, the Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm, an
Austrian work from about 1160, belongs to a continental tradition of the
text, while the Harrold Anselm, an English work from around the same
date and the Verdun Anselm, a much-mutilated copy from about 1140
attributed to the Alexis Master of the St Albans Psalter, are representative
of different branches of the English recension.86 Nevertheless, all three of
these manuscripts share some similar iconographic and representational
concerns that cannot be understood without some recourse to the text and
the environment in which each copy was produced.
The visual rhetoric of the early illustrated manuscripts of Anselm’s
Prayers and Meditations is, like the verbal rhetoric of the text itself, drawn
from the deep wells of monastic tradition, but translates this language into
a new idiom. The Admont-Traunkirchen manuscript begins with a full-
page frontispiece depicting Anselm, seated at the right, and an elegantly
dressed woman, whom Pächt identiies as Mathilda, standing at the left
(Figure 26). Anselm supports with one hand a thick codex that the woman
takes between both her hands. In contrast to the formal architectural set-
ting of the scene and the distinctions of rank and status indicated by such
means as Anselm’s episcopal regalia and throne and the blue background
26. Anselm presents his prayers to Mathilda of Canossa, dedication miniature, Anselm of Canterbury,
Prayers and Meditations, Upper Austria, ca. 1160. (Admont, Stiftsbibliothek cod. 289, fol 1v). Photo: Ernst
Reichenfelser, Stiftsbibliothek Admont
that sets off his igure, this gesture creates an intimacy between the two ig-
ures. The depicted book operates as a hinge that connects the two actors,
just as Anselm’s letter to Mathilda (written on the facing page) draws close
two distant individuals.87 However, it is not necessarily the case that the
standing igure must represent Mathilda, or only Mathilda; her costume,
with its wide sleeves, and its coif that its tightly to the head and falls in a
long, gathered cascade down the back, closely resembles that of the women
identiied as an abbess and two nuns later in the book.
The ambiguity of the identity of the woman who receives the book from
Anselm is, I believe, intentional. Whereas elsewhere in the manuscript the
depicted igures are relentlessly identiied with tituli and banderoles, here
all such certain indicators are omitted. Furthermore, the frontispiece quotes
the coniguration, framing, and gestural language of earlier images of patron-
age and donation, implying that the depicted woman might be the scribe,
patron, or donor of the present manuscript, as well as the original “patron”
and recipient of the text. Of the examples previously discussed, it may be
closest, iconographically, to the frontispiece to the Bamberg Gospels, where
Henry II’s gesture of offering the book and the Virgin’s gesture of reaching
to accept it are activated and completed by the closing of the pages. But
there is an important nuance to the Admont-Traunkirchen picture: instead
of the lower-status igure making an offertory to the higher-status igure,
here we have the author endowing the woman with his book. The nature of
the exchange in this instance contravenes the earlier convention in which
the object being dedicated passes from the subordinate to the superior per-
son depicted in almost every case.88 The woman appears receiving the gift,
which passes from right to left, against the direction of Latin reading, as if
to underscore the unusual nature of the depicted transaction.
The picture has ixed the moment of transmission at its center, drawing
attention to the history of the text and its special status as a personal gift
from the saintly (though not yet sainted) bishop to a woman. If she is read
as Mathilda, it invokes her saintly reputation, which had become part of the
cultural heritage of pro-papal constituencies, such as Benedictines, within
the Holy Roman Empire.89 The Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm was made
for such a community – probably for the abbess Diemuth of Traunkirchen,
a Benedictine house founded in the early eleventh century and located in
the Salzkammergut in Upper Austria.90 She appears, explicitly identiied as
abbess, in a later miniature. In another reading, this frontispiece could be a
gloss on the type of dedicatory image found in eleventh- and tenth-century
books such as the Uta Codex and the Hitda Gospels, in which the depicted
book serves as a visual link between the living members of a female monastic
community and the holy dead, reminding the viewer of an abbess’s largesse
and special status within the community while at the same time drawing
attention to the book itself as an object that is far from spiritually inert. Thus
“Mathilda” receiving the book from Anselm can be understood in some
respect as a proxy for the book’s intended audience, or perhaps its patron, just
as Gregory in the Registrum Gregorii is an aspirational image of Egbert. This
again gestures toward a fundamental characteristic of medieval portraiture –
it always seeks to present its subject through authoritative and sacred models,
“truth” inhering less in supericial resemblance than in spiritual simile.
Although Mathilda was a laywoman, and the imagined audience for the
book would evidently have been monastic, it is gender, rather than monas-
tic profession, that deines both Mathilda’s and the nuns’ relationship
to the male, monastic, and ecclesiastical authority embodied by Anselm.
This point is underscored by a visual contrast. Directly across the open-
ing from the frontispiece, the text begins with Anselm’s prefatory letter
to Mathilda and the general preface to the Prayers and Meditations. It is
illustrated with a half-page miniature depicting the mode of male-to-
male monastic transmission of ideas (Figure 27). Anselm appears again,
27. Anselm presents his

prayers to his monks,
Anselm of Canterbury,
Prayers and Meditations,
Upper Austria, ca.
1160. (Admont,
Stiftsbibliothek cod.
289, fol. 2). Photo:
Ernst Reichenfelser,
Stiftsbibliothek Admont
still enthroned but now surrounded by a crowd of monks who touch the
unfurled scrolls with excerpts from the prayers that cascade from their
teacher’s hands. Although scrolls were not entirely superseded by the
codex in the medieval period, in the pictorial arts of the twelfth cen-
tury they often denote speech.91 The monks who gather around Anselm
occupy a continuous space with him, unlike Mathilda, and this further
suggests direct oral communication of the teaching in the monastic con-
text as opposed to the written codex format through which Anselm com-
municates with the laywoman.
The centrality of writing to male monastic spiritual direction of
women has been studied from numerous angles.92 Particularly over
the course of the twelfth century, as the implementation of reforms
demanded stricter separation of men and women both in and out of
monastic orders, the primary means by which a male spiritual adviser
could provide counsel to his female protégée was through the written
word. The contrast between the depicted book that intimately links
Anselm and “Mathilda” in the Admont-Traunkirchen frontispiece and
the scrolls that connect Anselm to his monks in the smaller miniature
activates preexisting visual formulas to draw attention to the importance
of the book itself as a medium of communication between an absent
authority and a female reader. The abbess or her nuns, taking this book
in their hands and opening it, encounter a cleverly constructed relec-
tion of their own relationship to Anselm, one that reinforces the gender
ideology of their historical moment but at the same time valorizes their
devotional reading, situating it vis-à-vis a near-mythical holy friendship
between Anselm and Mathilda.
But the nuns need not have been satisied only with an oblique or ambig-
uous visual reference to themselves. At the opening of the Prayer to Saint
Paul (Figure 28), the abbess and two nuns, identiied by the scroll they
hold as Liukrat and Irmintrut, kneel and look upward, their hands ges-
turing toward the igure of Saint Paul as he is wafted heavenward in a
peculiar (and unique) rendition of the usual conversion scene, which Pächt
explained as an instance of “text-inspired illustration” in light of the lan-
guage of Anselm’s prayer.93 Their gestures and their upward gazes make
clear that they see Paul’s miraculous ascent, just as the viewer sees them
seeing. Since the abbess and the nuns themselves constituted the origi-
nal audience for the book, this double vision becomes particularly impor-
tant. Furthermore, there is the very real possibility that the depicted nuns
were not only the intended viewers of the book but also its makers. Alison
Beach’s painstaking study of the activity of woman scribes, both lay and
religious, at three Benedictine houses in Upper Austria in the mid-twelfth
century revealed the extent to which women in this region participated in
28. The
conversion
of Saint Paul,
Anselm of
Canterbury,
Prayers and
Meditations,
Upper Austria,
ca. 1160.
(Admont,
Stiftsbibliothek
cod. 289,
fol. 44v).
Photo: Ernst
Reichenfelser,
Stiftsbibliothek
Admont
literate culture not just as recipients and readers of books but also as copy-
ists making books for the use of their own communities.94 If the women
pictured are at once the women imagined to be looking at the page and
the women who wrote and illustrated it, then the relexive qualities of the
image are multiplied, as in a hall of mirrors.
The relationships between text and image in this picture operate as a
counterpoint to the representational problems raised by the illustration
or verbal description of an ineffable visionary experience such as Paul’s.
Ironically, given the tension between representation and the inexpress-
ible, this is a very talkative image. Not only is the abbess’s halo inscribed
“Humilitas abbatissa,” but both the abbess and the two nuns hold the
aforementioned banderoles, with texts excerpted from Anselm’s following
prayer. Paul, too, has an unfurling scroll draped over one of his upraised
wrists, and its text alludes to the part of the prayer that the artist’s pecu-
liar iconographic choice illustrates. The banderole reads, “You reached
towards the secrets of heaven and discerned that which it is not granted
man to utter.”95 This is a variant on a longer passage in the prayer below
it, in which Anselm cites 2 Corinthians 12:4 addressing Paul as the one
who “was rapt ‘even to the third heaven,’ and heard ‘things that cannot
be said by men.’ ”96 Signiicantly, the sensory terms of Paul’s experience
shift between the written prayer and the banderole. Whereas the prayer
emphasizes hearing and speaking, as does the biblical text, the banderole
replaces the verb “audire” (translated as “hear”) with “pervidere” (which I
translate as “discern”). The choice of the latter, a rather unusual locution (it
occurs only once in any form in the Vulgate, in Esther 12:2), is important:
it signiies both to perceive mentally and to perceive visually, and it may
also intensify the sense of the root verb “videre,” “to see.”97
The intensiied and perhaps also interiorized mode of seeing indicated
by “pervidere” occurs in association with Paul’s conversion experience else-
where. Around the middle of the twelfth century, it became part of the
antiphon for the feast of the conversion of Saint Paul.98 Since the text of
the antiphon was readily available by the 1160s in antiphonals for monas-
tic use, it would have required only a short cognitive step for artists and
scribes working on the Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm to employ it in the
context of a prayer dedicated to Paul and a miniature concerned with his
conversion.99 Paul’s conversion, from being paradoxically auditory and
unspeakable, becomes an insistently visual experience, and one bound to
the viewer’s experience of reading and seeing but also to her memory of the
sung antiphon. The neumes inscribed in the scrolls in this and other min-
iatures in the Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm tie the experience of gazing
on pictures to what must have been one of the most familiar experiences of
the monastic day – the participation in and hearing of the sung liturgy. The
29. Christ
adored by
Anselm and
Mathilda, Anselm
of Canterbury,
Prayers and
Meditations,
Upper Austria,
ca. 1160.
(Admont,
Stiftsbibliothek
cod. 289, fol. 2v).
Photo: Ernst
Reichenfelser,
Stiftsbibliothek
Admont
image becomes, in this way, not only a tool for imagining the inexpress-
ible experience of conversion but also a link to lived performances and the
body’s production and reception of sensory experience.
In the context of the manuscript, the kneeling abbess and nuns who
experience what appears to be a visual rapture derived from their prayer
to Paul resonate with several of the other miniatures. The irst of these, in
which Anselm communicates his prayers to his monks, has already been
discussed. While the contrast between the frontispiece and the miniature
of Anselm and the monks makes visible the different modes of transmission
appropriate to different gender conigurations, the presence of the nuns in
the Paul miniature underscores the eficacy of the visible written document
(the illuminated book) in the devotional goal stated by Anselm in his intro-
ductory letter to Mathilda, “that . . . the mind may be stirred up either to the
love or fear of God.”100 The kneeling nuns also have another parallel set
of igures in the miniature that illustrates the irst prayer in the manuscript
(Figure 29). In this picture, Christ appears in majesty within a mandorla,
lanked by a pair of angels and a kneeling couple below. The man, dressed
in episcopal garb, is undoubtedly Anselm. The woman, to the right, wears
the same clothing as the woman in the frontispiece, so she may also be
equally Mathilda and the abbess. In the Byzantine-inluenced iconography
of Austrian Romanesque art, this visual formula makes reference to a fairly
widely available type, the Deisis, in which the majestic igure of Christ is
lanked by Mary and John the Baptist in their role as intercessors. Here, the
iconography is translated for the context of interiorized contemplation and

emotive prayer characteristic of Anselm’s approach to devotion.
Whereas in a traditional Deisis Mary stands to the left and John to the
right in deference to Mary’s greater status, the Admont-Traunkirchen illus-
trator has placed Anselm, the more authoritative igure, to the left and his
female partner to the right, and both are in kneeling postures, with hands
held up, palms open. Nevertheless, the impression remains that Anselm
and the female igure to some degree enact the Deisis in their petitioning
gestures, and in so doing help support and optimize the eficacy of the
reader’s prayerful activity. Furthermore, their gestures and postures are so
similar to those of the praying abbess and nuns in the Saint Paul minia-
ture that the connection must be drawn between the physical bodies of
the book’s viewers and users (e.g., the nuns) and the represented persons
of the “Mathilda” igure and Anselm. In effect, the person using the book
becomes, through prayer but also through visual perception, an embodi-
ment of these authoritative igures from the past, who are in turn assim-
ilated with the even more authoritative igures of Mary and John. I am
not proposing that each time the book’s medieval users sat down with this
manuscript and gazed at these images they explicitly thought through this
series of relations but rather that through their frequent use of the book in
the nonlinear and meditative fashion counseled by its author they would
have developed a repertoire of visual, verbal, and musical associations that
allowed them to transcend the apparent boundedness of quotidian expe-
rience and move toward a closer identiication with God. In other words,
the pictures are part of an orchestration of sensory and contemplative pro-
cesses intended to be, in Anselm’s words, “stirred up” or moved toward
God, and toward “self-examination.”101
The Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm is in this sense a profoundly monas-
tic book, and many twelfth- and thirteenth-century copies of Anselm’s
prayers and meditations also bear the stamp of their direction to monastic
audiences. The earliest known illustrated copy, Verdun, is unmistakably the
work of the Alexis master, responsible for the full-page miniatures of the
St. Albans Psalter and active at St. Albans between about 1120 and 1140.102
Beyond this, the original destination of the manuscript is not known,
though it may have been brought to the diocese of Verdun by its English
bishop, Henry of Winchester, who held the see from 1116 to 1129.103
However, it is impossible to determine the extent to which the illustrations
(fourteen full-page miniatures, of which thirteen are lost) would have been
calibrated to create the kinds of relexive visual experiences of the Admont-
Traunkirchen edition. The third and the most generously illustrated man-
uscript studied by Pächt, the Harrold Anselm, seems to relect a somewhat
different perspective, perhaps, as has been suggested by Shepard, that of
a laywoman who has retired to a convent and thus lacks the deep, life-
long familiarity with the kinds of theological, liturgical, and communal
experiences that underlie the Admont-Traunkirchen version.104 The man-
uscript is associated with the English Augustinian priory of Harrold, in
Bedfordshire.105 Throughout the Harrold manuscript, a woman appears,
kneeling in various attitudes of prayer; the insistent repetition of the igure
of the kneeling woman signals an important shift in the conception of the
role of the portrait in the devotional book.
The kneeling woman appears in six of the compound miniature initials
that precede most of the Anselmian prayers in the Harrold compilation.
In some of these instances, she coincides with the placement of the female
supplicant igures in the Admont-Traunkirchen exemplar, suggesting that
both artists found similar inspiration from the highly personal, individual-
ized voice of the text. However, just as often, the supplicant woman in the
Harrold manuscript appears where the Admont-Traunkirchen manuscript
makes no reference to her. Particularly, she is depicted kneeling before the
Virgin in the initials to two prayers, Anselm’s third prayer to the Virgin
(Figure 30) and a pseudo-Anselmian prayer (“Singularis meriti”) also ded-
icated to the Virgin (Figure 31).106 In the Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm,
the third prayer is unillustrated and the latter is not included. The Harrold
artist’s frequent invocation of the kneeling woman point to a conscious
development of visual themes perhaps already associated with the text but
certainly drawn from related traditions of illustrated liturgical and prayer
texts such as the Psalter. The woman’s placement and her gestures are delib-
erate, directed toward the manuscript’s imagined audience, not, as Pächt
contended, confused memories of a preexisting tradition of illustration.
30. Virgin in
majesty with
female supplicant,
initial for Anselm’s
third prayer to the
Virgin, Devotional
Miscellany
with Anselm of
Canterbury, Prayers
and Meditations,
England, middle of
the twelfth century
(Oxford, Bodleian
Library MS
Auct. D.2.6, fol.
158v). Photo: The
Bodleian Libraries,
the University of
Oxford
Just as the Mathilda/abbess igure in the Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm

addresses the nun who uses the book in her devotions by at once envi-
sioning her individual gestures and acts of prayer, situating her within the
broader monastic community and aligning her with the exemplary igure
of Mathilda, the insistent repetition of the woman in the Harrold manu-
script hails a female viewer by integrating her prayer (gesture, word, and
thought) into the visual fabric of the page.
Medieval ideas of the self were tied to the practice of typology as what
Augustine designated a forma intelligendi, a way of understanding: the best
way to understand one’s own place in the world, one’s own identity, was
through contemplation and assimilation of laudable prototypes.107 Thus,
the blurring of distinctions between “Mathilda” and the woman holding
and using the book is unsurprising in both the Admont-Traunkirchen and
Harrold instances: the Mathilda persona here functions as a forma to which
the reader shapes herself. There are other instances of such useful formative
models for feminine piety and rectitude in both the Admont-Traunkirchen
and the Harrold Anselm manuscripts. For example, both contain scenes of
Mary Magdalene in their initials for Anselm’s prayer addressed to her. In
the Admont-Traunkirchen manuscript (Figure 32), she is depicted kneel-
ing and anointing Christ’s feet, while in the Harrold, a double scene depicts
her anointing Christ’s head on the left but kneeling at his feet in the Noli
me tangere to the right (Figure 33). In either instance, however, the prayer-
like attitude of kneeling with raised hands makes a visual rhyme with other
images in each book that depict the book’s imagined user in prayer.
Particularly striking is the resonance between the Noli me tangere in the
Harrold Anselm and the initial for the irst prayer in the manuscript’s recen-
31. Virgin
sion, dedicated to Christ (Figure 34). Christ appears in a mandorla, his dra-
with female
supplicant, initial matically animated drapery suggesting movement to the right but his head
for “Singularis turned to the left and his hand raised in a gesture of blessing. The female
Meriti,”
Devotional
Miscellany
with Anselm
of Canterbury,
Prayers and
Meditations,
England, middle
of the twelfth
century (Oxford,
Bodleian Library
MS Auct. D.2.6,
fol.161). Photo:
The Bodleian
Libraries, the
University of
Oxford
32. Mary
Magdalene
anoints the feet
of Christ, Anselm
of Canterbury,
Prayers and
Meditations,
Upper Austria,
ca. 1160.
(Admont,
Stiftsbibliothek
cod. 289, fol. 83).
Photo: Ernst
Reichenfelser,
Stiftsbibliothek
Admont
33. Noli me
tangere, initial to
prayer to Mary
Magdalene,
Devotional
Miscellany
with Anselm
of Canterbury,
Prayers and
Meditations,
England, middle
of the twelfth
century (Oxford,
Bodleian Library
MS Auct. D.2.6,
fol. 186v). Photo:
The Bodleian
Libraries, the
University of
Oxford
34. Noli me
tangere/supplicant
with Christ,
initial to irst
prayer to Christ,
Devotional
Miscellany
with Anselm
of Canterbury,
Prayers and
Meditations,
England, middle
of the twelfth
century (Oxford,
Bodleian Library
MS Auct. D.2.6,
fol. 156). Photo:
The Bodleian
Libraries, the
University of
Oxford
supplicant kneels just outside the mandorla, her hands raised and open, her
mouth also open, as if in speech. The gesture of her hands is emphasized by
the fact that they are depicted as directly in front of the trunk of a tree that
separates her igure from the mandorla and Christ. This tree implies an out-
door location for this scene and aligns it with the well-known visual topos of
the Noli me tangere. A very similar tree appears in the manuscript’s depiction
of that subject, to the left rather than the right of the Magdalene but still
operating as an indicator of the garden setting. The gesture of open hands
also hints that the female supplicant in the initial to the prayer to Christ
could be a type of Magdalene igure, bespeaking and beseeching her Lord.
The miniature for the prayer dedicated to Saint Nicholas in the Harrold
Anselm also employs the visual formula of the kneeling, beseeching female
igure. In illustrating the episode from Nicholas’s life in which he provides
the dowries for the three poor virgins (Figure 35), the artist represents the
women as a group to the left of the standing, frontal saint. Each woman
strikes a different pose: the foremost is in a kind of semi-proskynesis, (knees
and elbows on the ground); the middle kneels in proile, holding up her
open hands and opening her mouth (like the kneeling woman in the initial
to the prayer to Christ); and the hindmost, also kneeling, raises her face,
shown in three-quarter view, and gestures with the ingers of one hand
to the open palm of the other. The three virgins of the narrative might
also be read as a single person moving through three different modes of
prayerful attention to the saint that Anselm’s text addresses: awareness of
35. Saint Nicholas and the three

virgins, the dream of Nicholas,
initial to prayer to Nicholas,
Devotional Miscellany with
Anselm of Canterbury, Prayers
and Meditations (Oxford, Bodleian
Library MS Auct. D.2.6, fol.
180v). Photo: The Bodleian
Libraries, the University of
Oxford
sin, anxiety about judgment, and the knowledge of God’s mercy that will
release the soul from torment.108 Anselm described these three successively
intensiied states of consciousness as “abysses,” indicating that the suppli-
cant should lower himself or herself through contemplation into the deep-
est of all abysses, the eternal place of punishment, from which only God’s
mercy can extract him or her.109 The three virgins with their very different
postures seem to encapsulate this movement. The hindmost indicates her
sins by pointing back at herself with an expressive, speaking gesture, the
middle cries out and raises her hands in imprecation as if she were on trial
for these sins, and the foremost throws herself at the feet of the saint, beg-
ging for mercy, enacting the dramatic inal scenario of Anselm’s prayer, in
which the supplicant announces, “Before his face I cannot defend my sins;
I show them, not to excuse but to accuse. I am the accused; I am under
him, and before him I am myself the accuser.”110 The book’s user, reading
slowly and contemplatively through the prayer, might likewise lower her-
self internally, and physically through expressive bodily movements such as
the three virgins demonstrate in the initial.
This scenario, in which narrative images are both informed by and
instructive about the way in which related texts were performed and expe-
rienced, is quite familiar in Romanesque art.111 In particular, the tradition
of English manuscript illumination associated irst with Canterbury and
later with St. Albans showed a profound interest in using pictorial means to
capture verbal and theatrical expressions of faith: Pächt’s “talking world.”112
Whereas Pächt viewed the miracle plays and liturgical rituals visible in
the miniatures of the St. Albans Psalter mainly as sources of iconographic
innovation, I would argue that in the Harrold Anselm, whose artist was
in profound stylistic debt to the Alexis Master, the trafic between “the
talking world” and the page runs both ways. The reader of the book, who
returns to it frequently in her devotions and uses it as Anselm’s preface
counsels, “taken a little at a time, with deep and thoughtful meditation,”113
can see her own prayerful activities relected there but can also see models
for how she might perform these activities and how she might strive to
experience them.
Based on the repetitions and resonances between images of the pray-
ing woman and narratives that involve female supplicants in the Harrold
Anselm, I would argue that the illustrator was working from iconographic
foundations already present in an earlier source but was adapting them to
an audience with a foot in both the secular and the cloistered worlds. It is
easy to imagine a book owner who was a devout laywoman with aspirations
to retire to the cloister upon the completion of her secular duties (rather
like Anselm’s female protégées), and who in preparation for the event either
commissioned or was given this jewel-like manuscript. Perhaps this was
a woman associated with an aristocratic family that patronized Harrold,
and the book followed her into the convent. In any case, the manuscript
addresses her as a species of “new Mathilda” – a worldly woman with spir-
itual aspirations, dedicated to the ideal of forming her self through imi-
tation of such laudable exemplars as Mathilda, Mary Magdalene, and the
three humble virgins who are recipients of Saint Nicholas’s charity. Such
an origin would help account for the composition of the manuscript – the
inclusion of a calendar indicative of a St. Albans origin and Psalter keyed
to Winchester use, along with the Anselmian prayers suggest a layperson’s
cobbling together of such elements as one could lay hands on to compose
a suitable devotional book. Before the real development of a book market
geared to the needs of the laity, the spiritually ambitious layperson who
sought to live a life in emulation of the cloister had to exercise considerable
creativity in providing him or herself with the basic tools of this vocation.
In this view, the Harrold Anselm may be a representative of that class of
books, such as the St. Albans Psalter itself, that bears the traces of adapta-
tion for a nontraditional, extra-claustral use.
Another English manuscript from about 1200, now in London, also
contains a selection of Anselm’s prayers mixed with other devotional texts.
Because of its Oxford origins, I will call it the “Oxford Anselm” for ease
of reference here. Its pictorial program, as Nigel Morgan noted, is clearly
rooted in the same soil as the Harrold Anselm’s.114 But do the illustrations,
as Morgan remarked, simply “relect an illustrative tradition of the text,”115
or do they instead activate that tradition, relecting an emerging interest in
visualizing the relationship between the devotional reader and the book?
Four initials in this manuscript depict people kneeling in prayer; two of
36. Praying cleric or author, initial

to irst prayer to Christ, Devotional
Miscellany with Anselm’s Prayers
and Meditations, Oxford, ca.
1200 (London, British Library
Additional MS 15749, fol. 4).
© The British Library Board
the subjects are male, one certainly and one perhaps female. The irst male
igure, who appears at the opening of the irst prayer in the English recen-
sion of Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations (the Prayer to Christ), is a ton-
sured cleric, kneeling with one knee raised and hands lifted before him,
palms held together (Figure 36). He is a conceptual relative of the praying
canon depicted in the initial to the same prayer in the Harrold and the
monks in the miniature that precedes the Prayer to God in the Admont-
Traunkirchen; here the artist has separated the portrait of Anselm as author,
which appears in a slightly larger initial at the top of the column, from his
male audience. However, one detail complicates this reading: the curtain
that hangs from the top of the frame, pulled back to reveal the praying ig-
ure in the second miniature. This device, the revealing curtain, has a ven-
erable history as a sign of revelation; as in the author/scribe portrait from
the Ottonian Registrum Gregorii, even the curtain itself can allude to the
materiality of the painted or inscribed page. Further suggesting that divine
inspiration may be at work in the depicted scene of prayer is the small,
haloed head peeking in from the upper right of the initial. Like the dove
who inspires Gregory in the Registrum miniature, this apparition of what
might fairly be described as a visio Dei indicates divine participation in the
37. Cistercian abbot (Saint

Bernard of Clairvaux?) in prayer,
initial to the pseudo-Bernardine
Meditationes piissimae, Devotional
Additional MS 15749, fol. 46v).
scene, either in the form of inspiration or audition. Could the praying ig-
ure then also be read as Anselm himself, the author of the prayers engaged
in divinely inspired composition or recitation of the text?
The other portrait of a praying man in this volume supports such an inter-
pretation. It occurs at the opening of a non-Anselmian text, the Meditationes
piissimae, ascribed in the Middle Ages to Saint Bernard,116 and depicts an
abbot in Cistercian habit (presumably Bernard) kneeling before an altar on
a green cushion, holding a book in his hands (Figure 37). Like the igure in
the praying portrait on folio 4, Bernard is framed by two curtains that hang
from the arch of the initial and are drawn back to reveal him. The curtains
suggest, again, that Bernard’s prayers contain divine inspiration, and since
the text that follows was understood as Bernard’s own composition, this
could safely be called an author portrait.
By contrast, both of the remaining two praying portraits in the volume
depict (or seem to depict) women. The irst appears at the head of Anselm’s
irst prayer to the Virgin, where the earlier manuscripts also depict a kneel-
ing, praying woman who may be understood to represent Mathilda and
38. Virgin in majesty with female

supplicant, initial to irst prayer
to the Virgin, Oxford Devotional
Additional MS 15749, fol. 5).
the book’s projected user at once, as I have argued. Here, she is a young
laywoman, her blonde hair uncovered and unbound, a rather different type
from the coiffed and sober igures in the Harrold and Admont-Traunkirchen
versions (Figure 38). She kneels, facing right, in the lower loop of the S that
begins this prayer. Like the praying male igure on folio 4, she has one knee
raised, but instead of placing her palms together, she holds them up open.
To her right, and dominating the space described by the S, sits the Virgin
with her son in her lap. In her right hand, she holds a lowering branch
over the bowed head of the young woman, who is about half her size. The
image transforms the visual formula found in the earlier manuscripts by
reconiguring the relationship between viewer, depicted supplicant, and
the Virgin. By giving the supplicant the attributes of a young, unmarried
laywoman, the artist has addressed the picture to a different audience; she
can hardly be understood as Mathilda, or as the book’s user operating in
the mode of Mathilda. Mathilda may in fact not even inform this reading
of the prayer, her currency and applicability as a model for piety being far
diminished for an English laywoman by the thirteenth century.
Can we be certain that the book’s imagined audience was a representa-

tive of this newly literate and devotionally ambitious demographic? For this
manuscript, it is very dificult to say. It was produced in Oxford at a time
when lay-artists and scribes were beginning to number signiicantly there,
and sometimes their clients were also members of the laity.117 On the other
hand, the manuscript may originally have been joined to a Psalter now at
the Harris Museum (Preston, Lancashire) produced by the same scribes
and illuminators; the Psalter has an initial for Psalm 101 that depicts a
kneeling, praying monk in Benedictine habit, though its calendar is not
speciic to any particular Benedictine house.118 It is important to keep in
mind that such praying igures in initials are polyvalent, and not prescrip-
tive, especially when they represent idealized, spiritually potent types, such
as monks, saints, or authors. As we have seen, Gregory can also be Egbert,
Mathilda also Abbess Diemuth, and so on. The initial depicting the young,
blonde woman, however, is a somewhat different case; unmarried girls, as a
generic type, were more spiritually threatened and threatening than ideal.
With its iconographic roots in the donor/patron type that was already
shading toward a double identiication as both patron and book user, this
initial begins to look very much like an early essay in owner portraiture,
especially when the two images of praying men, elsewhere in the manu-
script, can be understood as author portraits rather than visualizations of
the kinds of people who might use the book.
A further dificulty with understanding this image as a kind of incipient
owner portrait comes with the fourth initial in the book to contain a pray-
ing igure. This occurs at the beginning of an anonymous prayer to the
Virgin (Figure 39) and may also depict what appears to be a female igure,
this time coiffed as a married woman might be. However, the head is badly
rubbed, and what appears to be a coif might also be a tonsure. The gar-
ments, a cloak and gown, are equally ambiguous. If a woman, this igure,
kneeling to the left of the seated Virgin and Child, is very close to the one
in the initial to the Anselmian prayer to the Virgin. Perhaps she represents
the same person at an imagined or achieved later stage of life. On the other
hand, if a man, we could be looking at another author portrait, though who
this author, or putative author, might be is unknown. Unfortunately, the
initial is in such a bad state that I would be hesitant to declare with coni-
dence whether it is a male or female igure.119
This uncertainty aside, the praying woman at the head of Anselm’s
prayer to the Virgin in this manuscript seems to represent a further step in
the tradition of Anselm illustration toward a visual formula that speciically
addresses an individual book owner, placing her within the very pages that
she holds in her hands, drawing attention to and making visible the oscilla-
tion between reading, seeing, and performing that constitutes prayer. The
39. Supplicant (male or female?)

with the Virgin, initial to an
unattributed prayer to the Virgin,
Devotional Miscellany with
Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations,
Oxford, ca. 1200 (London, British
Library Additional MS 15749, fol.
42). © The British Library Board
illustrated manuscripts I have looked at so far all arise in the context of

devotional audiences that exist at some remove from the male, monastic
audience for whom Anselm originally composed his prayers. The Admont-
Traunkirchen manuscript’s female, Benedictine audience was closest, but
as numerous scholars of female monasticism have demonstrated, women’s
experiences of cloistered life were signiicantly different from those of men
even in the most egalitarian orders.120 Similarly, the Harrold manuscript
seems to address a female audience with an undeined relationship to one
or more monastic communities, a common scenario for laywomen in the
twelfth century, when many women who outlived their husbands sought
cloistered or semicloistered retirement in widowhood. Finally, the Oxford
manuscript may have been addressed to a laywoman with an interest in
both the Cistercian and Benedictine orders. If this were the case, we might
understand the Benedictine in the initial to Psalm 101 in the associated
Psalter as a parallel igure to that of the illuminator William de Brailes,
who is depicted in prayer in the initial to terce of the Hours of the Virgin
in the very early Book of Hours that bears his name.121 William, a profes-
sional artist for whom surprisingly ample documentation exists, made quite
clear in an inscription that the initial depicted him and that he was its pain-
ter, but he gave himself the tonsure and habit of a religious, though archi-
val evidence attests to his residence outside the cloister in Catte Street,
Oxford, and to his wife, named Celena.122
So, while it is impossible to determine with any certainty the exact iden-
tity or social status of the originally intended owners of either the Harrold
or the Oxford copies of Anselm, what is probable is that they belong to a
small subset of Anselm manuscripts that was conceived from its origin with
female readers in mind. This is supported by the contrast between these
manuscripts and copies of Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations clearly asso-
ciated with male, monastic audiences. The best illustration of this is the
twelfth-century manuscript that scholars of Anselm have long believed to
represent an early attempt to establish an authoritative canon of Anselm’s
works.123 Produced at Christ Church, Canterbury, just around or slightly
after the time of Anselm’s death in 1107, it contains most of his major writ-
ings. It is a large-format volume, elegantly written and carefully corrected,
with ornate foliate initials in red, yellow, blue, white, green, and purple. In
light of these high production values, the absence of igural representation
from the manuscript relects a conscious decision on the part of its makers
rather than omission because of economy. In giving the book the magiste-
rial and sober appearance associated with patristic and biblical manuscripts
intended for study rather than devotional use, the book’s makers address an
audience of scholar-monks and underscore the authoritative nature of their
enterprise. Indeed, the great majority of later monastic copies of Anselm’s
prayers receive similarly austere treatment.124
Even those few monastic copies of Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations that
do include illustration contrast sharply with the much greater level of calcu-
lation and careful adjustment present in the visual material of the Harrold,
Oxford, and Admont-Traunkirchen exemplars. In a twelfth-century mis-
cellany from Reading Abbey, the margins of two of the pages with Anselm’s
prayers are cut, but the igural miniatures that were excised have left faint
transfers on the facing folios (fols. 109v, 132v). The irst of these represents
a standing Virgin without a child in her arms, associated with the prayer
“Singularis meriti.”125 The second trace is associated with Anselm’s prayer
to Saint Nicholas, and it is suggestive but very faint. The bare outline of
a robed igure in a kneeling pose is all that can be made out. By the hood
and deep sleeves of the robe, the igure seems most likely that of a monk,
but since the head left no transfer mark, it is impossible to make a positive
identiication. In any case, it would seem that at this prayer, the illustration
perhaps once made the kind of relexive address to the book’s imagined
user that is also present in the Admont-Traunkirchen, Harrold, and Oxford
manuscripts. However, the pictorial idea is not developed very strongly
within the manuscript as a whole.
A third monastic manuscript of roughly the same period as the Reading
miscellany also contains marginal igures of standing saints for many of
Anselm’s prayers. For instance, Mary Magdalene appears, veiled and
clasping her hands nervously before her chest, next to the text of the prayer
addressed to her (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawl. C.149, fol. 43). In
this manuscript, the relation between the devotional reader and the page
is constructed quite simply: for each illustrated prayer, the igure repre-
sents the saint whom the reader is meant to address. More often than not,
the saint is depicted frontally, facing the reader. The relexive quality of
the images in which praying igures are depicted alone, or more often in
the company of the saints, is not present, and the rather crude quality of
the illustrations also suggests an artist disconnected from preexisting tradi-
tions of Anselm illustration. But that the prayers should be illustrated at all
points to a powerful impulse that associated devotional, affective piety with
material visualization, even in the context of ideally imageless monastic
prayer. Perhaps such images were imagined as spiritual “crutches” for male
novices, as Jeffrey Hamburger has discussed in his article contrasting the
pejorative implications of image-centered meditation for male monastic
writers versus the more positive embrace of the image in female monastic
devotional texts and productions.126 That might explain their crudeness
when viewed in comparison with the far more sophisticated imagery in the
books directed to female audiences.
What has this examination of the illustrated manuscripts of Anselm’s
Prayers and Meditations added to the picture of the development of the
owner portrait out of earlier medieval representational traditions of donor,
patron, author, and scribal portraiture? The manuscripts relating to the
Anselm tradition, many of which were made for the use of monastics but
some of which seem to have been intended for lay audiences, sometimes
use visual indicators of the bodily activity of prayer and allow readers to see
themselves experiencing prayer in both physical and spiritual ways. Where
this occurs, the images facilitate the devotional experience encouraged by
Anselm’s prayers by imagining its outcome and making visible its poten-
tial. The image of the book’s viewer doing what the book is designed to
enable her to do acts as a kind of corrective relection, an orthopsychic mir-
ror, to invoke the Lacanian term once more, that allows her to shape her
identity not just around emulation of predetermined types but also around
the performance of gestures, movements, and vocalizations. These visual
ideas seem to be most fully worked out in precisely those manuscripts that
address a female or lay audience and that relect a visual tradition associ-
ated with Anselm’s own direction of the text to a laywoman, in the person
of Mathilda of Tuscany.
The blurring of boundaries between author, patron, recipient, and book
user evident in the Admont-Traunkirchen and Harrold manuscripts in par-
ticular sheds light on the way that the emergent owner-portrait functioned
in the environment of devotional reading and regarding of books. Allowing
the book’s user both to see herself performing the text and to merge her
identiication with the pictured supplicant with an identiication with the
book’s original recipient, patron, or author, these images suggest that in the
performance of texts and in the visual engagement with the material book
itself, she takes on some of the qualities of these igures, thus gaining spir-
itual authority and eficacy. Nowhere in oficial church doctrine, nowhere
in the theological writings of this period, does any such explicit statement
of the purpose of images in devotional books exist. However, by the repe-
tition and alteration of visual motifs and development of the idea that the
pictured self is contiguous in some way with the perceiving self, the makers
of devotional books began to construct a de facto argument for the utility
and necessity of the owner portrait, especially in the realm of book produc-
tion that addressed itself to nonmonastic and/or female viewers.
Prayer, in the context of the illustrated manuscripts of Anselm’s con-
templative works, is framed by vision; that is to say, as the manuscripts
make visible both the author and the reader/reciter of the prayers, they
make visual perception of pictures part of the devotional performance.
Although conservative writers of the twelfth century often expressed the
oficial western European distrust of images, the visual was profoundly
embedded in the rhetoric of affective devotion. Despite protestations to
the contrary, visual imagery (either material or verbally constituted) held
a central place in the language of devotion even when it was constructed
speciically for the highly trained monastic mind. When Aelred of Rievaulx
composed a prayer cycle for the use of abbots and other pastors of spiri-
tual communities, probably sometime between his appointment as abbot
of Rievaulx in 1147 and his death in 1167, he embraced the same kind of
visual language that made Anselm’s prayers so potent.127 His incessant rep-
etition of the word ecce functions in these prayers as a supplication to God
to “behold” the soul of the speaker, as in this passage: “Lord, look at [ecce]
my soul’s wounds! Thy living and effective eyes see everything. It pierces
like a sword, even to part asunder soul and spirit.”128 Like Anselm, Aelred
imagines the relation between soul and God in speciically visual terms;
the voice of prayer both strains for visual fulillment in the revelation of
God (or some part of God) and implores a reciprocal look from God. Both
aspects of the longed for (and always unfulilled) mutual look are excruci-
ating, eliciting empathetic suffering in Anselm and here, with Aelred, the
anticipation of a piercing sword’s thrust “even to part asunder soul and
spirit.” Such language poses a real visual problem: how can such embodied
looks be depicted without opening a distance between the author and the
reader-performer that neutralizes the force of the prayer? The answer does
not lie in the mostly unillustrated manuscripts of Aelred’s or Anselm’s writ-
ings, with the preceding exceptions noted. On the other hand, the Psalter,
as the core text of both monastic and lay devotion, was associated with one
of the most widely diffused pictorial traditions of the medieval west.
Envisioning David, Embodying Prayer
The combination of Anselm’s prayers with the text of the Psalter in the
Harrold and Oxford manuscripts makes sense in terms of the ways in which
the Psalms themselves were employed in both monastic and lay devotion in
the twelfth century. In addition to their liturgical role, they functioned as
the basic texts through which the individual supplicant could address God.
Furthermore, as the texts by which the literate, or semiliterate, few learned
their alphabet and the rudiments of Latin, they were also among those texts
most likely to be memorized and reproduced in situations where prayer was
called for and no written prompt was available.129 As an increasing number
of high-status laypeople joined the ranks of those who owned and perhaps
read books, the traditions of decoration and illumination that had been
nurtured in monastic scriptoria and imperial workshops over a period of
three centuries began to be diffused along with the text of the Psalms them-
selves. In particular, illuminated volumes in which the initials to the major
divisions of the Psalms contained igural illustrations became increasingly
popular. The placement and number of these divisions varied from region
to region, and the iconography of their illustrations also had a fair degree
of latitude, but by the late twelfth century, recognizable patterns began to
emerge.130 Drawing on traditions that developed out of Carolingian and
Anglo-Saxon models of “literal” text illustration, these programs typically
focused on David as the author of the Psalms and depicted him in a variety
of ways that relected both his biography and his activities as musician and
supplicant before God.131 They also implicitly proposed David, as well as
other depicted igures, as forms on which the reader/viewer might model
his own performance of prayer, penance, and celebration; Ulrich Rehm has
explored how the igural initials in such Carolingian works as the Corbie
Psalter make visible the concept of the Word as igura, literally a (human,
bodily) igure, marking the text for the purpose of memory and mimesis.132
Laura Kendrick has further observed that David’s struggles against fear-
some opponents, depicted within dense tangles of foliage in psalm initials,
made visible an ancient Christian topos of spiritual reading as a struggle.133
David made an ideal model for aristocratic and princely book owners, as
he was both worldly and holy – Frank Büttner cites Bonaventure’s dictum
that one must “sigh and moan from one’s heart with the prophet David,”
who is also king.134 How did the visible presence of David (or other biblical
or theological personae) as both author and supplicant/performer of these
central texts of devotion provide a framework in which book users could

situate their own experiences of prayer?
Psalters for devotional use could be divided in various ways, all of which
related to the liturgy and to monastic use. Two of these are of particular
interest here.135 The tripartite division, sometimes called “the three ifties,”
which breaks the text into equal sections beginning with Psalms 1, 51, and
101 (Vulgate), has ancient though somewhat disputed roots: it was com-
mon in Insular Psalters from the eighth century and seems to have been
known to patristic writers, including Hilary and Augustine.136 The daily
recitation of the three ifties was encoded in many Insular monastic rules
and was characteristic of the dedication to perennial prayer and athletic
feats of devotion associated with the Irish tradition.137 However, it was not
very practical, nor was it conducive to contemplation of the text’s meaning.
In the Benedictine Order, as well as in earlier continental traditions, a more
moderate schedule of recitation encouraged rumination on the text as an
element of its performance: Benedict’s Rule carefully outlines the order
and manner of recitation of the Psalms throughout the liturgical hours,
so that each week the complete Psalter is sung by the monks in church.138
The eight-part ferial division of the Psalter common in continental manu-
scripts springs from this practice: Psalms 1, 26, 38, 52, 68, 80, and 97 mark
the irst ofice (matins) of Sunday through Saturday, and Psalm 109 marks
Sunday vespers.139 Perhaps owing to the lasting inluence of Irish mission-
ary activity, especially in northern Europe, a combined version of these two
systems, which results in ten major divisions, was common in Psalters from
England, northern France, and the Low Countries. Thus, some twelfth-
and thirteenth-century Psalters have historiated initials at Psalms 1, 26, 38,
51, 52, 68, 80, 97, 101, and 109. These manuscripts are of particular interest
in terms of the development of the owner portrait, because it is at Psalm
101, “Domine exaudi,” that the image of a praying individual who is neither
David nor any other clearly recognizable biblical or allegorical personage
irst becomes established as a commonplace feature of Psalter iconogra-
phy.140 Some, but not all, of these kneeling igures belong to a new practice
of representation that hails its viewer as if by name, asking to be recognized
as an image of the self.
The earliest cycles of psalm initials identiied by Gunter Haseloff in his
landmark iconographic study are English examples from the mid-twelfth
century that rarely provide igural illustration for Psalm 101. However, his
tables show that by the end of the century a fairly standard iconography
for this initial had emerged in both English and English-inluenced ateliers
producing books for monastic and lay users alike, in which a female ig-
ure representing Ecclesia is depicted beside a standing Christ, who blesses
her.141 One early example is found in the Arundel Psalter from about
1200,142 and another in a Psalter possibly from the abbey of Saint-Bertin

dated about 1220.143 This visual gloss on the psalm relects an exegetical
tradition that stresses prayer as a foundation of the Church, as in the Glossa
Ordinaria, where verse 18 (“He hath had regard to the prayer of the hum-
ble: and he hath not despised their petition”) is understood to refer to the
voices of many joined together in harmony with the Church.144 The pres-
ence of the chalice also alludes to the psalm’s traditional association with
Christ’s petition in the garden at Gethsemane. Gethsemane was also some-
times illustrated at Psalm 101, as in the St. Albans Psalter (where it may
have originated) and in a number of the Beguine Psalters from the diocese
of Liège discussed by Judith Oliver.145
As the examples I have cited demonstrate, the relationship between
Ecclesia and Christ in these initials could be imagined in different ways –
in the Arundel example, she stands and holds forth the chalice, whereas
in the St. Bertin Psalter she kneels (though without the chalice) and thus
enacts the penitence to which the text of the psalm, and the interpretive
focus of the medieval commentators, refers so insistently.146 But it is not
always Ecclesia who kneels. David, too, may appear, kneeling either in the
presence of Christ or on his own. Haseloff identiied two examples of this
in English manuscripts from the late twelfth century, numerous instances
in north French manuscripts of the irst half of the thirteenth century,
and many more for English manuscripts dating to 1240–1300.147 A typical
example is the initial to Psalm 101 from a Parisian Bible dated 1210–1220
in which David kneels before an altar with a chalice (Figure 40). The
depiction of a curtain, looped back to reveal the praying Psalmist, alludes
to earlier traditions of author portraiture, as discussed in relation to the
Anselm manuscripts. Another contemporary instance, from a Psalter-
Hymnal associated by Branner with the “Master Alexander” workshop,
also has David kneeling and raising his hands, palms together, before an
altar, though here a large hand reaches out of the upper right to touch him
on the head.148 In a Psalter in the Ludwig collection at the Getty Museum
that relects lay use and is associated with the same artist who illuminated
the Ingeborg Psalter of circa 1200, David kneels in the initial to Psalm 101,
his hands held up together in prayer.149 An angel appears from a cloud in
the upper right corner of the frame around the letter, and the artist has
skillfully depicted the divine wind that stirs David’s robes and lifts his
hair off his shoulders. Divine inspiration for his authorship is thus com-
bined with a signal that his prayer has effectively spoken to heaven, and
been heard. As part of a cycle of historiated initials particularly engaged
with David’s penitence and his struggle with sin, this image, in Adelaide
Bennett’s estimation, “revolve(s) around David as the role model of moral
consciousness and behavior.”150
40. Penitent David, initial to Psalm 101, Bible, Paris, ca.

1220 (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 12, fol. 126). Photo:
Bibliothèque Mazarine
41. Penitent David, initial D (probably for Psalm 101),

Lyre Abbey Modelbook, Normandy, ca. 1230 (Evreux,
Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 4, fol. 136v). Photo: Ville
d’Evreux, Thierry Boufiès
A fourth example, dated to about 1230, comes from the Norman

Benedictine monastery of Lyre and points both to a strong iconographic
tradition for depicting David as a kneeling supplicant at Psalm 101, as
well as to the visual sources for this tradition (Figure 41). The Lyre Abbey
Modelbook is a collection of line drawings bound into a later compilation
of texts. It consists of pictorial templates for the initials to the ten-part
division of the Psalter and was used by artists working on at least one other
manuscript known to originate from Lyre Abbey.151 The initial D almost
certainly intended for Psalm 101 depicts David as a crowned king. His
hands are raised and open in prayer as he kneels within an architectural
space before an altar on which a chalice rests. As part of a series in which
many of the scenes depict narrative episodes from David’s life, the model
drawing makes it quite clear that the king depicted is also the Psalmist,
and the episode could easily have been derived from an earlier cycle of
illustration relating not to the Psalms but to the Book of Kings, as Larry
Ayres has argued.152 Thus the psalm is pictorially linked to David’s biogra-
phy, and speciically to his contrition for the sin of having sent Uriah to his
death in order to marry his widow, Bathsheba. The subject of David’s sin
with Bathsheba and his subsequent penance was also sometimes associated
with Psalm 101 in illuminated Psalters; the initial to this psalm in a Psalter
illuminated by William de Brailes in Oxford about 1240 was singled out by
Harvey Stahl as a particularly comprehensive visual exploration of the link
between the narrative and this text.153 Furthermore, in cycles of illustration
concerned with this episode from II Kings 12:16–20, David’s contrition is
igured in similar terms: the Moralized Bible tradition places a penitent
(kneeling) David before Nathan at this point in the narrative and moral-
izes him as the representative of “good Christians who repent for our sins,”
depicting a group of kneeling, praying igures in the corresponding rondel
(e.g., Oxford, MS Bodley 270b, fol. 154).
The author of the devotional text is thus imagined as its performer
(just as David was its original performer, as is so frequently recalled by
the image of him seated with his instrument), a move already familiar in
the Anselm manuscripts. Such pictures help the book’s user assimilate his
or her performance of prayer to that of an authoritative igure. Although
the gender of the supplicant differs, the images of both Ecclesia and David
visualize the voiced and embodied actions of prayer. This is particularly
appropriate to the text, which opens with a speciic invocation of audi-
ble noise, “Let my cry come to thee,” and then immediately implores
God to “turn not away thy face from me” and to “incline thy ear to me”
(Psalm 101:1–2). Augustine remarks in his commentary on the designation
of Psalm 101 as “the prayer of the poor man, when he was anxious and
poured out his supplication before the Lord” that this poor man “does not
pray in silence.”154 Furthermore, in Augustine’s reading, where this psalm
expresses Christ’s agony in the garden, the “poor man” is Christ as well as
David.155 The book’s user, if reading or reciting aloud, joins his or her voice
to the authorial voice of David/Christ, or the communal voice personiied
by Ecclesia, and is reminded of this by the image in the initial.
The text of Psalm 101 is, as discussed in the last chapter, also particularly
evocative of the face-to-face encounter with God. The occasional place-
ment of the Holy Face in the initial for this psalm in later manuscripts
(for example, the Longleat Breviary) underscored the text’s emphasis on
the yearning of the supplicant to see and experience God, and the desola-
tion of the soul at its distance from God. This theme can also be expressed
through the iconography of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen
Christ, the Noli me tangere. In a Psalter illuminated (probably by profes-
sional lay artists) for Christ Church, Canterbury, in the irst quarter of the
thirteenth century (known as the Little Canterbury Psalter), small, two-

part miniatures, rather than initials, feature narrative scenes at the opening
to the major psalm divisions.156 The double frames represent two narrative
strands that alternate from division to division: the life of David and the
Passion of Christ. For Psalm 101, the two subjects are the Resurrection
(left) and the Noli me tangere (right) (Figure 42). The latter is of particular
interest because once again it presents Mary Magdalene as a model for the
supplicant – here she kneels on one knee and holds up her hands, palms
together.
The kneeling posture of these exemplary igures at Psalm 101 accords
with the character of the prayer: as the ifth Penitential Psalm, it was
recited regularly in contrition for sins and, sometime between 1205 and
1216, Pope Innocent III decreed its recitation daily during Lent.157 The
association with David’s penitence for his adultery and for his indirect
murder of Uriah is expressed by his kneeling posture, and the depiction of
a chalice in so many of these illustrations makes a visual cross-reference to
Christ’s humility in his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. To a modern
viewer, kneeling to pray looks anodyne – it became the standard gesture
to denote prayer in later medieval and early modern art. However, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was a special physical posture for prayer
replete with penitential signiicance. In the high Middle Ages, it was spe-
ciically mandated as the posture of penitence, not seemly for Sundays or
feast days, when more joyful, less humiliating gestures were considered
appropriate.158 On the whole, kneeling with hands joined palm to palm was
extremely rare in the bodily vocabulary of the early and high Middle Ages,
kneeling with hands raised and apart only slightly less so.159
This is visible in patterns of Psalter illumination from the Carolingian
period forward. In an early ninth-century Psalter from Corbie, igures
of every description strike a variety of prayerful poses. For Psalm 10 (In
Domino conido), an expression of faith in times of trouble, the initial I is
formed by a standing igure in a peaked cap, depicted frontally, who holds
his hands open before his chest. Similar standing igures, sometimes haloed,
appear elsewhere, and the initial to Psalm 102 (Benedic, anima mea) has two
bust-length igures with inclined heads and uplifted hands (fol. 84v). The
predominance of upright igures accords with the Carolingian preference
for standing prayer, which Jean-Claude Schmitt described as the posture
appropriate to the notion of (implicitly monastic) prayer as “a battle against
the forces of Evil: for a warrior always ights standing on his feet.”160 Only
three igures in the manuscript are depicted in kneeling postures. The irst
appears in the lower loop of the Beatus initial, with a standing angel – he
probably represents David as the penitent author of the Psalms (fol. 1v).
The second inhabits the initial to Psalm 21 (Deus deus meus), understood by
42. Resurrection,
Noli me tangere,
miniature to
Psalm 101, “Little
Canterbury
Psalter,”
Canterbury,
ca. 1200–1225
(Paris, BnF MS
lat. 770, fol. 127).
© Bibliothèque
National de
France, Paris
43. Praying igure, initial

for Psalm 101, Corbie
Psalter, Corbie, early
ninth century (Amiens,
Bib. Mun. MS 18, fol.
82v). Photo CNRS-IRHT,
©Bibliothèque municipale
de Amiens
medieval Christians as Christ’s plea to God in the midst of the Passion (fol.
18v); accordingly, the igure represents Christ, as the cross-nimbus indi-
cates. The last of the three illustrates Psalm 101 (Figure 43); the kneeling,
nimbed igure raises oversized hands with palms apart, echoing the gesture
of Christ at Psalm 21 more than that of David in the irst initial.
Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the signiicance
of kneeling developed in new directions, and it became the standard posture
of individual prayer as well as an element of liturgical ritual. The theolo-
gian Peter the Chanter, writing toward the end of the twelfth century, took
a systematic approach to the bodily postures, or “modes,” of prayer in his
De oratione et speciebus illus, an illustrated instruction manual for prayer.161
For him, kneeling to pray was a speciically Christomimetic practice linked,
again, to the agony in the garden. He cited Luke 22:41–42, “And kneel-
ing down, he prayed, saying: Father, if thou wilt, remove this chalice from
me,” and also the legend of Saint Paul the Hermit in which the protago-
nist’s kneeling corpse is discovered by Saint Anthony, as authority for the
legitimacy of this prayer posture.162 The kneeling posture, he indicated,
was particularly appropriate to the voiced recitation of the entire Psalter,
a practice disdained, as he noted with some disgust, by certain obese and
negligent clerics of his own day.163 The illustrations of the Chanter’s text
(the earliest dating to around 1220) typically depict a igure kneeling on
both knees, hands held up with palms together, a gesture very similar to
that described in thirteenth-century massbooks as appropriate to penance,
supplication of the royal Christ, reverence before an image of the cruciix,
and reverence before the Eucharist.164
Although, as we have seen, the practice of kneeling with hands raised
together in supplication was represented in earlier western Christian art
(for example, in the second cross of Mathilda of Essen), it became far more
widespread in sacred rituals and more narrowly deined in secular ritu-
als over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; as a physical
expression of begging for mercy and calling on the duty of a superior, regal
power (a prince, or a deity) to protect the supplicant, it helped make visible
social and sacred relationships of dependence and responsibility.165 A key
gesture in the secular ritual of swearing fealty to a royal or princely patron,
it was also a performance of one’s subjugation to and dependence on God,
and, as such, a display of humility that members of the nobility sometimes
resisted as unworthy of their high social status.166 Furthermore, the gesture
of kneeling with hands joined implied a relationship of intimacy and trust
with God parallel to the ritual friendship between vassal and lord, and thus
it with the increased interiority and self-examination that characterized
devotion in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.167
Devotion is a performance made up of multiple inward and outward
elements, including affective states and bodily postures, each of which
comes bearing a network of external and internal associations for the per-
son performing them. If kneeling is the ideal posture for the recitation of
the Psalter (as Peter the Chanter and later Dominican writers suggested),
then the layperson, reading her Psalter, recognizes her own bodily pose
(and its attendant discomforts) in that of the pictured supplicant in the

initial to the psalm she is reading. As she gives voice to the Latin text, no
matter what her level of comprehension of that text may be, she further
assimilates herself with the pictured person, the authoritative source of the
spoken (and heard) words. Whether or not the “reader” really understands
Latin or instead simply mouths the sounds by rote matters less than one
might suspect. It is her performance (both physical and emotional), not her
scrutiny of the text, that constitutes her prayer – a situation quite different
from the traditional monastic conception in which painstaking mastication
of the text and deep meditation on its web of meanings constitutes the
work of devotion. The picturing of gestures of supplication in the context
of the Psalter combined with the conventional performance of psalmody in
a kneeling posture and with the wider implications of kneeling in twelfth-
and thirteenth-century aristocratic society all added up to an experience
in which the book user’s activity is mirrored and informed by the pictorial
igures in the psalm initials.
Thus, the historiated initials in prayer books for the laity need to be
seen against the embodied character of devotion, with its conlation of ges-
ture, movement, voice, and vision. This is especially true when the pic-
tured prayers are those of the person who is imagined as the user of the
book. As mentioned, the earliest instances of what might truly be under-
stood as unambiguous owner portraits cluster around Psalm 101.168 In the
northeastern French Psalter most likely originally produced for Blanche
of Castile, and dated to the period of Blanche’s regency for Louis IX
(1226–1234), the initial to Psalm 101 depicts a woman kneeling with hands
raised, palms together, before an altar on which stands a large, jeweled
cross (Figure 44).169 Over the lady’s head, an inverted arc of blue supports
the bust of a frontal, blessing Christ, and it is toward this igure, and not
the cross, that her gaze seems to be directed. Although she is not crowned,
it seems plausible that from the outset this picture referred implicitly to
the book’s intended owner, and pictured her in the role of the penitential
supplicant, rather than in any of the other modes embodied by David or
other biblical or allegorical igures in other initials.170 The absence of the
crown, in fact, rules out the identiication of the igure with Ecclesia, thus
avoiding some possible confusion on the part of the book’s user, who may
have expected to see that allegorical igure represented here.
Even without the personiication of the Church, the picture is dense
with allusion: the jeweled cross refers to Christ’s suffering and sacriice
but also to his glory;171 the gesture to the penitential contrition of David
but also to the devotion of the Magdalene and to the prayerful, communal
voice that constitutes Ecclesia; and the apparition of Christ in the heavens
calls attention to the visionary and revelatory longings expressed in the
44. Noblewoman
(Blanche de
Castile?) praying
before a jeweled
cross, initial
to Psalm 101,
Psalter of Blanche
de Castile,
northeastern
France, ca.
1230 (Paris,
Bibliothèque de
l’Arsenal, MS
1186, fol. 122v).
© Bibliothèque
National de
France, Paris
text. Although rooted in visual traditions of patron and author portraiture

as well as biblical narrative, this initial does something relatively new in
directly addressing itself to its viewer. In its bid to grab the book owner’s
attention, it not only offers a relexive vision of an idealized self performing
the soul-correcting imitation of David, Ecclesia, and Christ but also calls
out to the viewer and urges her to shape herself in a particular manner,
one that is full of humility and contrition for sin. It presents as an almost-
inescapable truth the performance of contrite devotion as a timeless and
deining mode of being. In its speciic location at Psalm 101, the visual
type of the praying owner is tied very closely to monastic practices of per-
forming the Psalms through empathetic identiication with the voice of the
Psalmist on a literal or allegorical level. Anselm’s desire, expressed in his
prayer to God to experience “heart-piercing . . . humility” and his frequent
description of himself as a “little man” and “most evil and sinful,” give
voice to the monastic mode of self-abnegation that was central to affective
piety and that became a chief component of this approach to devotion as it
gained popularity among the laity.
Psalm 101 quickly became the locus classicus for the owner portrait in
English and English-inluenced Psalters with the ten-part division. Such
examples from the second half of the thirteenth century as the Rutland
Psalter (Figure 45), the Marciana Psalter (Venice, Bibliotecca Marciana MS
lat. I 77(2397), fol. 117), and the Grandisson Psalter (British Library, MS
Add. 21926, fol. 135) all place images of kings and queens or aristocratic-
looking ladies kneeling in prayer, often at an altar, at this point in the text.
In substituting the expected igure of Ecclesia or David with an image of a
praying person who might conceivably be read by the book’s user as himself
or herself, these initials advance a devotional agenda in which empathetic,
bodily identiication with sacred individuals was a central and operative
element. The “owner” igures stake a claim for the people they represent,
that they belong among the sacred subjects that populate the illuminated
pages and that their belonging both results from and is performed by their
bodily and mental prayer activities: gesture, vision, speech, and affect. In
short, they belong to and embody the Church; they are christianitas.172
“Christian,” for the audiences of these books, was strictly constructed as
an exclusionary though potentially luid category: only those who professed
and performed the Latin, Roman faith could be counted – Eastern rites and
unorthodox Christianities were in their ways as alien as Judaism, Islam, and
the non-Christian belief systems collectively labeled “pagan.”173 Also, the
category of christianitas could be deined even more narrowly, depending
on one’s position within it.174 The living individuals who begin to appear
in the initials to Psalm 101 belong to that special class of people within
the larger category of christianitas who participate in an elite textual com-
munity. The term is Brian Stock’s, and his deinition is critical here: these
communities are constituted by “a more intensive use of traditional meth-
ods, and, in particular, their use by groups hitherto dependent on oral par-
ticipation in religion. What was essential to a textual community was not a
written version of a text . . . but an individual, who, having mastered it, then
utilized it for reforming a group’s thought and action.”175 Particularly the
laypeople who appear in these initials represent a group “hitherto depen-
dent on oral participation” who, as individuals, have mastered a mode of
45. Royal couple praying, initial to Psalm 101, Rutland Psalter, England, ca. 1260. (London, British
Library MS Add. 62925, fol. 99v). © The British Library Board
relationship to a text and through their exemplary use of it begin to reshape

the religious behavior and thought of their group – in this case, their fami-
lies and households, as well as their larger aristocratic peer group.
The Rutland Psalter, with its crowned couple, who may represent the
imagined owners or perhaps a pairing of David and Ecclesia, or even both
the owners and David and Ecclesia all at once, suggests one of the ways in
which such illuminations worked to visually deine and identify their audi-
ence as different from and implicitly superior to others. While they kneel,
watched over by the apocalyptic image of Christ with a sword issuing from
his mouth, the margins rustle with far less pious images. The manuscript
has been nominated for the honor of being one of the earliest “marginal
masterpieces” and has drawn the attention of many scholars interested in
the development of marginalia and, in particular, grotesquerie.176 In con-
trast to the royal couple in the initial to Psalm 101, the marginal igures
carry on in a whole gamut of unseemly ways – in a typically colorful turn
of phrase, Michael Camille has characterized the imagery as “anally com-
pulsive.”177 Many of the igures are dressed in peasant clothes and seem to
anticipate the crude peasant igures that would latter the class sensibili-
ties of the aristocratic patrons of the Limbourg Brothers in the ifteenth
century or the nouveaux-riches patrons of Pieter Bruegel in the sixteenth.
Capering, perverse, and idiotic, occupying the less bounded and yet dis-
tinctly tertiary space of the margins, they highlight the difference between
the class of people who could own and use such a book and their social
inferiors.
Class and race – insofar as medieval notions of race were tied to
christianitas – are thus prominent terms by which these initials help their
viewers recognize and deine themselves. Gender, the third person in the
trinity of difference, also plays a role here. Whereas many of the initials
depict men in the guise of David, clerics, monks, and kings, a distinct
pattern emerges in which women, often coiffed and richly clad as aris-
tocratic wives but also dressed in the habits of various female religious
orders, occupy the space of the intital. In a society where women’s status,
regardless of class, was always problematic, these initials present a solution
for women of at least the upper classes: they constitute a special subset of
“those who pray.”178 The special eficacy of women’s devotion and the par-
ticularly devoted quality of women were both subjects of discussion and
debate in this period. The idea that women were more devout than men was
already current in the early thirteenth century. For example, Lamprecht of
Regensburg, a Franciscan, marveled at the “art” of old women in under-
standing and expressing the spiritual realm, whereas learned men failed
to be either so perceptive or so articulate.179 Certainly, by collapsing the
book’s user with Ecclesia, and with the monastic igures whose pictured
prayers so often igured in books, these initials begin to suggest that the
devout laywoman also has a special place in the economy of salvation.
Conclusions
In this chapter, I have surveyed some of the representational habits that

contributed to the formation of the relexive owner portrait and have
focused in particular on the ways in which portraits in books work to shape
the experience of devotion as well as the social and religious identity of
the viewer and the subject alike. Subtle shifts in emphasis and placement
of portrait-like igures worked within medieval audiences’ visual frames of
reference to make new visual arguments about the complex web of rela-
tionships between prayer, authority, vision, and the body.
The vocabulary of donor, patron, authorial, and scribal-artistic por-
traiture was elaborated in liturgical works and in books that served a dual
function as both display objects and tools for communal and individual
devotion. Within these visual conventions, a wealth of creative experimen-
tation and reinvention could take place, particularly as artists struggled to
articulate new and more complex ideas about the relationships between
material objects, their makers, texts, viewers, and the sacred. Sometimes,
visual depictions propose arguments that were never recorded in the tex-
tual sources that inform us about the Middle Ages – this is certainly the
case with the illustrated Anselm manuscripts, in which the blending of the
identities of author, patron, and audience goes far beyond the relatively
unassuming claims made by Anselm about the prayers’ eficacy and his self-
effacing directions for their use. If Anselm suggests that Mathilda might be
inspired by his prayers to compose some of her own (a realistic assumption,
given evidence of women’s authorship of devotional prayers in the eleventh
century), he does not suggest that in reading and performing his prayers she
becomes their author.180 Far less does any twelfth- or thirteenth-century
text propose directly that women, in prayer, embody Ecclesia, or become
David, their own performance authorizing the text. On the other hand,
the growing conviction, borne out by women’s performances of piety, that
certain kinds of devotion and certain modes of eficacy were particularly
feminine speaks to the same ideas expressed and reiied in the emergent
owner portraits, especially where their subjects were laywomen.
Such eficacy constitutes a kind of power, and as power gendered femi-
nine, it was inherently threatening to a society whose discourses of power
and whose institutions were explicitly masculine. Yet representations of
book owners in initials constrain as well as articulate this power: bounded
by the letter, imagined in a posture of utmost humility, hemmed about
by textual reminders of her sinfulness and by the very real demands on

time and intellectual and physical energy made by the emulation of claus-
tral devotion, the female viewer who saw herself in these initials traded
one set of limitations for another – the eternal compromise of an identity
grounded in exclusion.
Adelaide Bennett has pointed out the insistently penitential character of
the imagery in Paris and Parisian-inluenced Psalters of the early thirteenth
century.181 These manuscripts, unlike those from England and northern
France, contain at most an ornamental initial at Psalm 101 and seldom
depict igures that could be read as book owners. Perhaps the repetition of
the igure of David performing his penitence was forceful enough to give
book owners a way of seeing themselves as, like David, supplicants mired in
sin but engaged in a close, personal relationship with God. Or perhaps not.
It was in early Books of Hours produced in these same markets (Paris and
its environs) that a new site for the owner portrait began to be explored.
The opening of the matins of the Virgin, the central devotional ritual of the
layperson’s day in the thirteenth century, provided this new space for envi-
sioning the self. In the next chapter, I examine how the Book of Hours cre-
ated fresh opportunities for the relexive mode of depiction and advanced
more audacious claims about gender, the laity, and devotion than had been
made within the fold of orthodoxy for several centuries.

Chapter II From Memoria To Visio (85 - 148)

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CHAPTER TWO

FROM MEMORIA TO VISIO :

At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject

Patrons, Authors, Scribes: The Visual Vocabulary of

From the ninth century, at least, western European patrons of manuscript

18. Second Cross of Abbess Mathilda

living commission-giver as a revered and deceased founder or past patron

19. Detail of Abbess Mathilda, enamel, Second Cross of

No comprehensive history of donor portraiture in the high Middle Ages

bodied forth in gold, and the miniature reminder of Mathilda as a seeing

did not address individuals or participate in more interiorized experiences

stands completely nor kneels, but as if to it herself to the space between

by her second husband, Welf of Bavaria), point to its primarily liturgical

21. Dedication page, Pontiical of Mainz, Rhineland, 1249–1251

22. Colophon page, Pontiical of Mainz, Rhineland, 1249–1251

divinely inspired authorship of Gregory and the divinely inspired patron-

the instructing igures are not so much in control as in a position sim-

images resonated with their precedents in the tension between recogni-

century architectural sculptural program as a “gospel in stone,”58 it is prob-

25. Marie de Champagne, initial from the prologue to

The matter and the meaning were given by the Countess

In effect, Chrétien cedes authorship to Marie. Thus, it would make

The author portrait of Marie de Champagne at the head of the text of

From Authentication to Relection: Author and Owner

The process of transforming the iconography – and meaning – of donor,

spiritual consciousness increased.68 The act of gazing itself became a trope

of Fécamp and Peter Damian both advised the German empress-regent

27. Anselm presents his

iconography is translated for the context of interiorized contemplation and

Just as the Mathilda/abbess igure in the Admont-Traunkirchen Anselm

35. Saint Nicholas and the three

36. Praying cleric or author, initial

37. Cistercian abbot (Saint

38. Virgin in majesty with female

Can we be certain that the book’s imagined audience was a representa-

39. Supplicant (male or female?)

illustrated manuscripts I have looked at so far all arise in the context of

Envisioning David, Embodying Prayer

central texts of devotion provide a framework in which book users could

1200,142 and another in a Psalter possibly from the abbey of Saint-Bertin

40. Penitent David, initial to Psalm 101, Bible, Paris, ca.

41. Penitent David, initial D (probably for Psalm 101),

A fourth example, dated to about 1230, comes from the Norman

thirteenth century (known as the Little Canterbury Psalter), small, two-

43. Praying igure, initial

(and its attendant discomforts) in that of the pictured supplicant in the

text. Although rooted in visual traditions of patron and author portraiture

relationship to a text and through their exemplary use of it begin to reshape

In this chapter, I have surveyed some of the representational habits that

by textual reminders of her sinfulness and by the very real demands on

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