Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts by editors Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing is the fourth volume in De Gruyter’s series Sense, Matter, and Medium. The book complements recent exhibitions and publications on the materials of medieval manuscript illumination, such as the Fitzwilliam Museum’s landmark Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (2016). Projects such as these have drawn on the expertise of scientists and conservators, guided, as the introduction here states, “by the conviction that a sustained incorporation of technical data deeply enriches the art historical project.”

Ornamenting a manuscript with precious metals, however, as the editors explain, had a significance beyond that attached to ordinary pigments. Ackley and Wearing introduce the collection in an essay entitled “Preciousness on Parchment: Materiality, Pictoriality, and the Decorated Book.” They note that gold in powdered or leaf form, whether used to enliven a page or depict actual metal objects, was precious not just for its monetary value but because the Heavenly Jerusalem itself was built of shining gold (Rev. 21:18). Illumination, usually understood to mean decorating a book with precious metals, especially lustrous gold, did not just “put the lumen in illumination”: it was literally “the stuff of heaven” (37, 3). The introduction sails through centuries of manuscript examples, thoughtfully touching on issues of presentation and representation, from whole texts written in granular gold, to liturgical vessels rendered in gold leaf, to the fifteenth-century painter’s supple application of powdered gold.

Nancy Turner’s essay, “Surface Effect and Substance: Precious Metals in Illuminated Manuscripts,” ably constitutes all of section II, Technique. She tests what we know from painters’ manuals against her experience with the manuscripts themselves to provide more precise answers to the questions, what exactly are these metals and how are they used?  Detailed photographs allow us to look over the conservator’s shoulder and see the evidence of mixed metals and the distinctions between matte, mordant gilding, and the pillowy shine of raised gilding, sometimes given punched and incised patterns or glazed with color, and the ultrafine texture of shell gold. She also considers the changing light effects of these techniques on contemporary readers’ experience as they turned a page, and their beliefs about the nature of precious metals—silver mutable like the moon and gold pure and unchanging like the sun.

Section III, Representation, begins with Brigitte Buettner’s “Metal Labor, Material Conversions: Goldsmiths in the Life of St. Denis and in Parisian Life, ca. 1300.” She uses the familiar miniatures of artisans working on the bridges of medieval Paris in the Life of St. Denis to explore their working conditions. Goldsmiths are represented a surprising eight times and the moneychangers who supplied them, eleven times, their professional skills at refinement and conversion evoking spiritual metaphors. The next essay, “Copying, Imitation, and Intermediality in Illuminated Ethiopic Manuscripts from the Early Solomonic Period” by Jacopo Gnisci, looks at Ethiopian manuscripts after 1270, when they include depictions of metal liturgical objects such as crosses, chalices, and censers, and uses these depictions not just as tools for dating but to investigate their symbolism, use, and materiality. Roland Betancourt’s “The Colors of Metalworks: The Painted Materials of Machinery in Byzantium” focuses on the archetype of a tenth-century siegecraft treatise. The illustrator seems to use color not just descriptively, but to indicate quality and finish. Alone among the manuscripts discussed in the volume, this instruction manual could omit the text if the drawings were precise enough, as the Byzantine author himself notes.

Material Translations, section IV, opens with Beatrice Leal’s “Metal, Materiality, and Maṣāḥif: Ornamentation in Abbasid Qur’ans,” which looks at the golden verse markers in ninth-century Qur’ans, suggesting they may be skeuomorphs for precious gold objects and guarantors of caliphal approval. Leal notes that coins and seals, as well as scriptural codification, were the province of rulers. “Manuscript as Metalwork: Haptic Vision in Early Carolingian Gospel Books” by Beth Fischer focuses on the gold script and metallic pigments that ornament Ada School Gospel books. Remarking that the gold initials are outlined in black and superimposed on the borders that imitate the gems and framing panels of gold altars and reliquaries, she proposes that the manuscripts foster a haptic experience. The reader thus sees not a flat page but coruscating, “dimensional metal objects,” protecting sacred text like a reliquary (229). In “A ‘Multimedia’ Manuscript: Metalwork and the Siegburg Lectionary,” Heidi C. Gearhart builds on the resemblances between the panels in the twelfth-century lectionary and ars sacra in Cologne; these correspondences have long been useful for dating and localization, but such crossovers also create varietas (a delight in variety) to aid the reader’s contemplation. Sophia Ronan Rochmes’ essay, “Illuminating Luxury: The Gray-Gold Flemish Grisailles,” explores a group of manuscripts that paired shell gold and gold leaf with the silvery tones of grey (grisaille), a combination she sees in mixed-metal sculptures and later in the grey-gold look of glass treated with silver-stain and painted with black enamel.

Section V, Treasuries in Books, Books as Treasuries, reminds us that books in so-called treasure bindings were stored not in libraries but alongside other fine metalwork. It begins with Eliza Garrison’s “The Golden Spaces of the Uta Codex,” which treats that splendid and challenging manuscript as a liturgical object integral to its original setting—protected by a jeweled golden case with a relief of Christ in Majesty that served as a reliquary for the Christ logos. In “The Matter of Memory: Illuminated Metalwork in the Vita of St. Albinus of Angers,” Sasha Gorjeltchan ties the four golden liturgical objects depicted at his funeral, rendered mimetically in metallic gold, to French comparanda and to Cluniac death rites, restoring the Vita of the saint to its institutional context. Julia Oswald’s “Packaging the Sainte-Chapelle Relic Treasury, Paris ca. 1500,” discusses four miniatures that present Louis IX’s Passion relics apparently as they were displayed (grouped and labelled, in the dark recess of the elevated reliquary chasse in the royal chapel) until their liquidation in 1791. The image type appeared in manuscripts made for the administrative elite, confirmation of their access to royal power and to the relics themselves.

Section VI, Phenomenology and Piety, begins with Megan H. Foster-Campbell’s essay, aptly titled “Pilgrimage across Borders.” She describes the practice of collecting and sewing actual pilgrim badges into a believer’s prayerbook, which inspired the illusionistic copies—complete with the threads that stitched them to the parchment page—painted in the borders of some devotional books likely made in Ghent or Bruges. The imitation badges upset our notion of collecting souvenirs as a reminder of an individual experience. Foster-Campbell suggests that these suites of gold and silver trompe l’oeil badges from well-known shrines (most surviving badges are lead-tin, but shrines catered to wealthy pilgrims as well) did not require a visit to be effective but offered instead the possibility of virtual pilgrimage and perhaps a link to the Burgundian nobility’s favorite shrines. Susan Barahal and Elizabeth Pugliano’s “Peripheral Primacy: Metallic Illumination and Material Illusion in the Aussem Hours” examines the depictions of jewelry in a Cologne Book of Hours, asking about the jewels’ significance and how these images might affect the owners’ experience. The fictive brooches and pendants suspended against the border and the liturgical vessels depicted in the miniatures seem to have been made from gold variously cast, chased, soldered, enameled, and set with gems, but there is no evidence they represent jewels owned by the Aussem family.  

Illuminating Metalwork lives up to its title, casting light on the use of metal in a variety of medieval manuscript traditions, enhancing the essays with multiple indices and a generous number of color figures, and bookending the whole with essential background gained from the daily experience of a conservator and a curator. The volume concludes with Lynley Anne Herbert’s “A Curator’s Note: The Tarnished Reception of Remarkable Manuscripts,” which gives silver its due, seeing through its diminished modern condition, usually matte, tarnished, and staining on the verso, so we can imagine its original cool shimmer. In the Carolingian Saint-Croix Gospels, which has an image of Christ in Majesty now clad in a brownish pallium (gold) over a robe of muddy purple (silver), she works backward to reconstruct its original appearance. Flecks of silver in the gold and gold in the silver have not aged well, but Herbert argues that such a mixture follows Ezekiel’s description as interpreted by Gregory the Great, as “metallic electrum” emblematic of the dual nature of Christ. Herbert’s closing essay argues for human observation, as trained eyes can see details that photographs cannot capture. And she offers a lesson—an object lesson—echoing the introduction on the benefits for scholars of collaborating with conservators and scientists. Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts’s depth and breadth, incorporating new approaches to understanding the ways artisans experimented with materials and techniques and the ways medieval readers took in the world through their books, demonstrate how fruitful that collaboration can be.