Books can be many things. In Penned & Painted: The Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval in Renaissance Manuscripts they are the central feature, sign, and iconographic motif in illuminated manuscripts. In this beautifully produced volume, Lucy Freeman Sandler takes the prevalent pictorial phenomenon of book-images in manuscripts and thematically unpacks it into a wide-ranging study. She includes representations of books that are open or closed, rolls (representing written words), and scrolls (representing oral speech), forming a compelling study of book-images in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts through various contexts of donation, destruction, and use. Sandler writes that the idea for this book started at the 2019 Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, “The Medieval Book as Object, Idea, and Symbol,” supported by the organizers who recognized the lack of a broad review on this subject. The history of the book as a discipline—focused on the origin, production, and reception of books over time—has otherwise experienced a surge of publications in recent decades, including A Companion to the History of the Book edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose in 2007 (2020, 2nd ed.), and The Book: A Global History edited by Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and H. R. Woodhuysen in 2013. Furthermore, scholars, such as Pamela Sheingorn, Cynthia Stollhans, and Laura Saetveit Miles among others, have treated the iconography of the book in more focused studies, considering images of the reading Virgin Mary or Saint Catherine of Alexandria. In this context, Sandler’s Penned & Painted is new in its broader focus. It provides a template for the reader to explore widely the depictions of books, which were once so expected in the hands of figures that they were often overlooked as standard-issue attributes.

Sandler’s research for Penned & Painted took place mostly during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when access to physical collections was often impossible. She acknowledges that the substantial digitization efforts made by the British Library over the last decade provided her with the means to remotely access the images of illuminated manuscripts for this study, and this collection formed the bulk of examples in Penned & Painted. In total, there are ninety color illustrations, and many of the images are printed in full-page and great detail. The front cover image features a fifteenth-century miniature of Saint Luke, the Evangelist physician and scribe, sharpening a pen over an open book on his lap. His desk and bookshelves are hastily stacked with red, blue, and green-bound codices—the usual iconography of a scribe’s quarters. The image of Luke’s busy study is emblematic of the heightened manufacture of hand-produced books during the latter decades of the fifteenth century in Europe, a development that is thoroughly distinguishable in the arc of Sandler’s book through the selected examples and commentaries. Sandler begins her rich introduction with sections addressing the physical format of books, the symbolism and use of books, and books beyond European boundaries and the early modern period. In these essays, Sandler establishes an evolution of the represented book from antiquity through a history of forms, including rolls, scrolls, wax tablets, and their containers. From the fourth century, the codex is the dominant form of the book, and Sandler makes careful distinction between codices that are shown open or closed in representations. She notes how if a book is shown open, it may be blank or bear inscriptions. If it is closed, the book may be interpreted as a symbolic object, or it is perhaps passed between people as an object of presentation. Sandler’s organization of this material is novel and accessible in that it privileges thematic groups of book representations over chronological and geographical parameters.

Penned & Painted is organized into two parts comprising sixty manuscript examples with a short commentary for each. In part one, “Books as Symbols,” the first twenty-two manuscripts are examined for book-images of metaphorical importance. Here, Sandler considers the placement, position, and scale of books to draw out further meanings from scenes. Several examples in manuscripts are discussed as they form sacred symbols to the Christian faith that stand in for concepts, such as the “Word of God” and the “Book of Life.” Sandler examines the figures that hold books, including apostles, Evangelists, and prophets, who in their bearing become emblems of the gospels. She describes how books frequently bear symbolic weight in scenes of the life of the Virgin Mary, including her often represented Annunciation. Here, the Virgin’s book signified her prayerful contemplation, sometimes mirrored by the books of her pious supplicants. Similarly, personifications of virtues held books to convey the concept that moral and spiritual guidance could be attained through dutiful reading, therefore becoming charged signs in the hands of their users. Throughout, Sandler invites readers to focus on the details of the depicted books, such as their binding types, the hue of pages, and how the books are held, such as in draped hands (the Latin term for this is manibus velatis), which enhances our understanding of the book as an iconographic subject.

In part two, “Books in Use,” Sandler writes about the people who produced books, instructed with them, and presented with them in religious and secular use. This part covers the greater part of the volume, including thirty-eight more examples of manuscripts. Her commentaries highlight key figures in the bookmaking process, mainly scribes and authors, but she also expounds on how books are used in ritual and social practice—functioning within reading communities and teaching relationships. Some examples include images of the learning university student, the instruction of the young Virgin Mary, and women readers and their model teachers. Accordingly, Sandler’s deep engagement with these examples leaves us with a greater understanding of the usual figures—the saints, rulers, clerics, scholars, and other figures—who interacted with books in meaningful ways. Sandler concludes this part with a handful of examples that illustrate historical book-burning and the miraculous salvage of books, an iconic and provocative close. 

Sandler’s end matter is especially rich in resources for manuscript studies. Her glossary contains eighty-one terms that are used more than once in Penned & Painted. With specialist depth, it covers technical terms for codicology, as well as terms for major stylistic periods, specific religious orders and roles, and definitions for iconographic subjects, such as Christ in Majesty, in which books feature. For further reading, Sandler divides the over forty bibliographic references into headings for major stylistic divisions in manuscript studies, as well as general, regional, and religious imagery. As indicated in the preface, the British Library digital resources were vital to her research on this book and are cited here for further reading, save one helpful addition, the online “Glossary for the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.”

The three separate indices that follow the bibliographic references contain lists of library shelfmarks, including lists organized by date and location of origin. The “Chronological Index of Manuscripts” starts with a reference to a second-century Aristotelian manuscript and ends with four references to sixteenth-century works. The chronological list reveals the greatest representation of book-images in manuscripts covered by Sandler as dating to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This index is followed by a subsequent “Place of Origin” index, containing the geographical names of countries and their parts where manuscripts were originally made. The richest sections here are “France, northern, eastern, and central” and “England, post-conquest,” with twenty-five and twenty-three references respectively. Through this careful survey, Sandler writes a solid and inspective commentary about representations of books within books, drawing them together from a variety of contexts, even as the examples concentrate more fully on manuscripts made in Western Europe. As such, Penned & Painted is foundationally important for the study of book iconography and provides a place where we might build more visual and comparative analysis.

The study of the iconography of the book in medieval and Renaissance art is experiencing a renaissance of its own, reflected in the fact that Penned & Painted was published just one year before a significant North American symposium on book-images from antiquity to the present took place at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (November 16–18, 2023). This conference also publicly launched the Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art (BASIRA) project, which introduced a new digital resource for locating representations of books in works of art produced between approximately 1300 to 1600 CE (https://basira.library.upenn.edu/). The growing discussion and research interest in book iconography is palpable, and Sandler’s proficient eye for iconographic detail and manuscript illumination on this subject makes this book a valuable contribution for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Penned & Painted decisively offers readers wider parameters to consider how medieval and early modern books operated in the lives of their original readers/viewers and how books appear to us today as points of contact and shared knowledge. As a result, the subject of the written word is energetically alive on these pages, communicating ideas about books—that are so many things—with clarity and breadth.