When the State Library of Victoria opened its astonishing exhibition of medieval manuscripts, The Medieval Imagination, in 2008, this was the promise that was offered, and taken up by unprecedented crowds. The statistics associated with this exhibition tell their own story about the modern fascination with medieval culture. More than 110,000 people attended the exhibition. Many made return visits, and 10,000 people attended the Medieval Faire Day, an event that combined charming geekiness and opportunities for serious play with the chance to pore over the beautiful stillness of the volumes open for display. The majority were brought from Cambridge, but Australian and New Zealand libraries, museums, and galleries also contributed a number of manuscripts. Every concert and lecture associated with the exhibition was fully booked, and 550 people came to hear Jeffrey Hamburger give the public lecture that opened the conference, whose proceedings are gathered in this splendid volume.

Hamburger’s essay, ‘Openings’, is the centrepiece of the collection. He starts from the key distinction between the codex and the scroll: the codex, or book that opens, is ‘binocular’. The experience of opening the book acquired deeply symbolic meaning in the Middle Ages, whereby the material act of opening mirrored the opening of the mind or spirit to divine revelation. The form of the parchment book, moreover, was more welcoming to illumination than the papyrus scroll. Not only did the finite boundaries of the page provide a natural frame for illustrations, but their precious pigments and delicate surfaces were also more stable in a book that opened and closed than they were in a roll. Where the scroll was more suitable for public spoken reading, the codex lent itself far more to private or solitary reading, and the design and integration of text and illustration reflect this, not just in the single page, but often also across the two pages that open to face each other.

The fifteen essays by Australasian scholars that follow are much shorter and focus on particular manuscripts, texts, or themes. In the main, they achieve a remarkable balance between scholarly insight and discovery, and clear explanations for the reader not versed in the intricacies of the medieval liturgical year, for example. Margaret Manion curated the exhibition, and her introduction is a wonderful guide to the diverse nature of the manuscripts referred to in the book. Overall, the writing in the collection is clear; and it is beautifully edited and illustrated.

In its lavish reproductions, The Medieval Imagination models the theme of many of its essays: the idea that words and images are closely linked. Even though the images here are surrounded by commentary and comparisons with other manuscripts, the collocation of text and image certainly assists, if not our devotions, then our meditations on the past. Each essay is illustrated in full colour; only rarely does one have to turn a page to examine the manuscript being discussed. Even when two adjacent essays discuss the same image of Mary Magdalen as a desert hermit in Pacino da Bonaguida’s miniature c.1340, with her long hair covering her entire body as she receives her final Communion, the image is reproduced again, a mere ten pages later, so the fortunate reader can meditate on this image without flipping back. The collection is framed by a thoughtful introduction by Gregory Kratzmann and Constant Mews, and a brief reflection from Shane Carmody of the State Library.

Of special interest, perhaps, are those essays that focus on the State Library’s own treasures: the late Bill Kent on the Scriptores Historiae Augustae made for Lorenzo de’ Medici; Hilary Maddocks on Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine; Mews on the Poissy antiphonal;Bronwyn Stocks on The Adelaide Hours; and Jane Morlet Hardie on a group of liturgical music manuscripts held in Sydney.

Kent examines the circumstance in which Lorenzo commissioned this manuscript of Roman history around 1478, when he was particularly embattled, when there were print copies available, and when even his father’s manuscript copy of the same work was already in the Medici library. Kent suggests this confidently executed manuscript, with its ‘very accomplished and rich images of emperors on fine vellum’, might have helped him ‘imagine some connection between his past life and an uncertain future’.

The Deguileville is nowhere near as glamorous as many other manuscripts featuring line drawings, not richly coloured illuminations, but as Maddox shows, its line drawings of the Seven Deadly Sins, for example, are expressive and compelling. Maddox reminds us of the differences between remembering, seeing, and vision: in this manuscript the figure of Memory appears with her eyes firmly closed, looking back into the past, rather than at the present. In contrast, we might say, the experience of looking into a book does not help us to remember the past so much as it inspires us to imagine it.

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010