Reviews 921
richly painted historiated initials (MS 2, cat. no. 104), and a Virgil with late-fifteenth-
century illustrations in the style of Maitre Francois (MS 493, cat. no. 269)—it also contains
"finds." One is an elegant early-fourteenth-century breviary of the Use of Saint-Benigne
(MS 113, cat. no. 216), identical in style with a group of manuscripts made for members
of the Bar family of Lorraine; this is a newly published attribution, broadening the
geographical range of the activities of these artists and decorators. Also destined for
Dijon use was the mid-fifteenth-century pictorial history of the foundation of the hospital
of the Order of the Holy Spirit of Dijon, still in the archives of the hospital (A H 4, cat.
no. 245). Its twenty-one large illustrations are in a local variant of the Flemish style of
works executed during the time of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy; the three figures
in color and six in black-and-white make the pictures available for the first time.
The Corpus des Manuscrits Enlumines des Collections Publiques des Departements
has been initiated with a volume devoted to the holdings of a comparatively well published
library for somewhat murky "raisons administratives." If the present volume is intended
to serve as a model, however, the publication of future volumes in the series, especially
those cataloguing illuminated manuscripts in less-known collections, is to be awaited with
eager anticipation.
LUCY FREEMAN SANDLER, New York University
PAOLA ZAMBELLI, The "Speculum astronomiae" and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and
Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy
of Science, 135.) Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 1992. Pp. xvi, 352; color
illustration. $112.
This volume is made up of two major sections. The first two hundred pages contain an
examination of Albertus Magnus's wide-ranging interests in the astrological "science"
current in his time. In twelve relatively short chapters Zambelli proposes to set to rest
the controversy engendered some eighty years ago by Father Pierre Mandonnet's attempt
to deny Albertus Magnus's authorship of the Speculum astronomiae and to attribute the
work instead to Roger Bacon. Zambelli buttresses her demonstration of Albertus's fa-
miliarity with astrological science through a large number of quotations from his other
works. The thoroughness of her research guarantees the definitiveness of her resolution
of this question.
The second section of the book (pp. 203-306) consists of a reprint of the Latin text
of the Speculum published in Pisa in 1977 by some of Zambelli's students; an English
translation produced by the author in collaboration with C. S. F. Burnett, K. Lippincott,
and D. Pingree; and identification of the Latin sources (translated from the Arabic) used
in the Speculum as noted by the editors of the 1977 edition. An extensive bibliography
(pp. 307-33) and indexes of names (pp. 335-49) and manuscripts (pp. 350-51) conclude
the volume.
There can henceforth be no doubt about the truth of the attribution of the Speculum
to Albertus Magnus. What then is the "Enigma" announced in the title? Zambelli thinks
she has detected in some passages of the Speculum faint hints of a new mystery, which
she details in a two-pronged argument. In the first place, she argues that although the
work is to be attributed to Albert, he probably had collaborators in its preparation (pp.
48-50, 73). Secondly, she suggests that the work was written, not in the wake of the
condemnations of 1277, as Mandonnet proposed, or between 1245 and 1255, as I have
argued, but in the late 1260s and on the occasion of chance gatherings of such eminent
scholars as Campanus, Witelo, and William of Moerbeke at the papal court in Viterbo.
These points are based on misreadings or undue stretching of meaning in Albertus's
922 Reviews
text, and they completely disregard the facts of the intellectual climate in Paris in the
first half of the thirteenth century, the circumstances of which I have elsewhere described
in print (in the paper originally delivered at the Fourteenth International Congress for
the History of Science held at Tokyo in 1974; this paper is erroneously listed as "un-
published" in Zambelli's bibliography).
Zambelli's suggestion that the Speculum is a collaborative work is based on extrapo-
lations (e.g., on the supposed practice of friars to work in teams, p. 48), possibilities
(e.g., "the collection of bibliographical data is often a work that lends itself to cooper-
ation," p. 48), and misreadings of Albertus's text (e.g., the vir cited on pages 48 and
256 turns out to be Albertus himself or his Latin source, not a contemporary colleague).
Thus, Zambelli's book is valuable for the abundance of its quotations from the works
of Albertus and other Scholastics regarding astrology, although her interpretation of
them is often wrong due to a misunderstanding of the Latin (see, to cite one egregious
example among many, page 34, where Zambelli's translation of a passage in Albertus's
In secundum Sententiarum, "the first intelligence . . . contains forms which cannot be
explained by the movement of its own orbit," contradicts what Albertus actually said:
"the first intelligence . . . is full of forms produceable by motion in its orbit"). In addition,
the thesis of the book regarding the origins of the Speculum rests on misunderstandings
of the primary sources and fails to take into account alternative arguments. Specialists
in this area should also be warned that the Latin edition reprinted here is far from
definitive since it is based on only a few of the multitude of surviving manuscripts.
Moreover, the English translation of the Speculum is not merely infelicitous but frequently
fails to capture the precise meaning of the Latin. Listing all instances of its fuzziness
and even misinterpretations would require too much space, so this reviewer holds on
diskette a detailed list of those he could catch and is ready to make it available to anyone
desiring it.
RICHARD LEMAY, City University of New York, Emeritus
JOANNA E. ZIEGLER, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pieta and the Beguines in the Southern Low
Countries, C.1300-C.1600. (Institut Historique Beige de Rome, Etudes d'Histoire de
l'Art, 6.) Brussels and Rome: Institut Historique Beige de Rome, 1992. Paper. Pp.
414; 119 black-and-white plates. BF 1,900. Distributed by Brepols Publishers, Turn-
hout, Belgium.
According to Francesco da Hollanda, when asked by Vittoria Colonna why Flemish
painting "seems more devout than that in the Italian manner," Michelangelo replied,
"Flemish painting . . . will generally please the devout better than any painting of Italy,
which will never cause him to shed a tear, whereas that of Flanders will cause him to
shed many; and that not through the vigor and goodness of the painting but owing to
the goodness of the devout person. It will appeal to women, especially the very old and
the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense
of true harmony" (R. Klein and H. Zerner, Italian Art, 1500-1600 [Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1966], p. 34, a passage discussed most recently by P. Nuttall, "Decorum, Devotion
and Dramatic Expression: Early Netherlandish Painting in Renaissance Italy," Decorum
in Renaissance Narrative Art, ed. F. Ames-Lewis and A. Bednarek [London, 1992], pp.
70-77). It has taken modern scholarship much longer to come to a similar, if less con-
temptuous, conclusion: that women were among the primary and formative audiences
for devotional imagery in northern Europe and that the meanings of those images were
as much defined by affective response as by any inherent aesthetic qualities.
What, one wonders, would Michelangelo have thought of the well over one hundred
