The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Vaast at Arras was founded in the mid-seventh century and dedicated to the first bishop of the combined dioceses of Arras and Cambrai, Vedastus (d. 540). Its early years are obscure, but it enjoyed a certain flowering in the Carolingian period, illustrated by the abbacy of Rado (808–815), whose name has been tentatively associated with the production of a modestly illuminated pandect Bible, now preserved in Vienna (ÖNB lat. 1190). In late Carolingian times, the Franco-Saxon style of book illumination seems to have held sway at Saint-Vaast, though it was perhaps not the principal center from which it was diffused. The three-volume Bible to which Diane Reilly’s substantial study is devoted (Arras, Bib. mun. Ms. 559 (435)) is a highly idiosyncratic work, designed for the prescribed choir and refectory reading of the Scripture per circulum anni, and an early version of the large-scale editions of the Old and the New Testament that became a staple of Romanesque book production.

Reilly’s project, which evolved from a University of Toronto doctoral dissertation completed in 1995, has several antecedents worthy of note. André Boutemy, whose many publications did much to bring to public awareness the riches of early medieval and Romanesque Franco-Flemish illumination, first drew attention to the Arras Bible in an article of 1950 (“Une Bible enluminée de Saint-Vaast à Arras (Ms. 559),” Scriptorium IV (1950): 67–81). He was attentive to its mutilated condition, calculating that it had lost through neglect or vandalism in the early nineteenth century more than a quarter of an original 624 leaves. His characterization of the style of the illumination as primarily Franco-Saxon in derivation combined with elements drawn from Anglo-Saxon England has been generally accepted, as has been his somewhat tentative judgment that the manuscript should be dated in the first half of the eleventh century.

The catalogue entry (no. 142) of the memorable manuscript exhibition of the Bibliothèque nationale organized by Jean Porcher in 1954 fortified this opinion with the observation that the style of the illumination was common to a number of Arras manuscripts hypothetically datable in the same period (Manuscrits à peintures du VIIe au XIIe siècle, Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1954, 61). On the other hand, while Boutemy viewed the illumination of the Bible in generally neutral or positive terms, the brief catalogue text calls it “a work at once grandiose, strange, and sometimes clumsy,” betraying an understandable and perhaps justifiable mixture of fascination and unease in the face of painting and draftsmanship so at variance with the formal excellencies of the masterpieces of contemporary Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon art.

Two years later, Sigrid Schulten published an article, based on her doctoral dissertation, concerning Arras illumination during the eleventh century as a whole, of which she identified seventeen surviving manuscript witnesses (“Die Buchmalerei des 11. Jahrhunderts im Kloster St. Vaast in Arras,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst VII (1956): 49–90). She discerned two distinct phases in this corpus, the first (Frühstufe) roughly initiated in the decade 1020–30 and the second (Spätstufe) situated in the years from 1060–80. Work on the Bible was initiated and largely carried out during the earlier phase, coinciding with the abbacy of Leduinus (1018–1040; Reilly, p. 97, has 1024f.), whom a contemporary chronicle, the Gesta pontificium Cameracensium, praises for “having restored the monastery in its entirety and enriched it with all things useful.” Schulten makes even more modest claims for the workmanship of the manuscript, finding the illumination characterized by “uneveness, lack of planning and crudeness” (51), though observing a progressive qualitative improvement as the labor progressed from the first to the third volume. As the entry of the Porcher exhibition catalogue had already hinted, the project, perhaps left unfinished for a time, was completed with the execution of a number of miniatures in a more robust, painterly manner that Schulten assigns to a second and later phase of the scriptorium’s activity.

Reilly goes over this terrain in the first chapter of her book, and largely accepts the findings of her predecessors, though with some refinements, and, as one might expect in her sharply focused investigation of a single work, greater precision. But in view of the puzzlement and even doubts expressed by these writers about the coherence of the Bible’s illumination, it may come as a surprise to read that her investigation has revealed this embellishment to be “guided not by happenstance, but by a programmer intent on elaborating a complex political agenda” (15). The apparent paradox, however, is explained by the fact that Reilly has sought support for her thesis from the figurative component of this illumination, to which earlier writers had curiously paid little or no attention, Schulten’s cursory consideration of its possible sources set aside. If not a generational difference, the omission, or perhaps “blindness,” to this aspect of the work is at least partly accounted for by the unpredictable, not to say seemingly random, distribution of the imagery and its casual and varied collocation within the ornamental framework. Thus, Genesis, strongly marked in the later Flemish Bibles of Stavelot and Lobbes as well as in the Italian Romanesque Giant Bibles by elaborate Creation cycles, is introduced in the Arras Bible with only an ornamental I within a rectangular frame. The First Book of Kings, in the same volume, usually singled out for iconographic display, also receives only an ornamental introduction, as does the following book. But III Kings unexpectedly features a pair of illustrations filling an entire page, the only such set of independent compositions in the entire work. The figurative illustrations are usually found at the beginning of the respective books, while prefatory texts have a lesser, aniconic treatment; but this procedure is reversed for Nahum (II, fol. 106v), where the prologue has a standing figure of the prophet within the initial letter. Moreover, the figurative components sometimes occupy ample spaces left free, as in the scenes preceding IV Kings (I, fol. 144v), or are given relative prominence (II, fol. 141v; III, fol. 1), but are elsewhere squeezed within medallions at the corners of the page or in leftover compartments within the ornamental scheme. It may be that the greater significance that Reilly and present-day observers are wont to attach to figuration does not entirely jibe with the value system of the eleventh-century scribe-illuminator, an issue to which Romanesque art, with its predilection for ornamental abstraction, gives particular salience.

The argument announced by the title of Reilly’s book proposes a connection between the appearance of the large-format pandect Bibles in the Carolingian era and their Romanesque descendants with the significant if amorphous movement for monastic and canonial reform that reached a high point with the papacy of Gregory VII (1073–1085) and the rise of Cluny to a commanding position in the early medieval world. Following a short but influential article published by Peter Brieger in 1965 (“Bible Illustration and Gregorian Reform,” Studies in Church History II (1965): 154–164), it links the formalized reading of the Bible in religious communities with the restoration of an idealized past, presumed to have been lost through neglect or the inevitable ravages of time. It is a connection that is not implausible, though to my knowledge not explicitly articulated in programmatic writings of the reformers. But the idea gains some traction for Reilly’s thesis since the care of Saint-Vaast had been entrusted to one of the leading figures of the Lotharingian reform movement, Richard of Saint-Vanne (ca. 970–1046), of whom Leduinus, who succeeded him as abbot of the monastery, had been a disciple. Although conceding that the exact nature of this reforming activity is now difficult to reliably grasp (95), Reilly concludes that Richard was “the spiritual guide of Saint-Vaast in the era when the Bible was copied and illustrated” (105).

The ideals championed by the reformers, as they are refracted in Biblical precepts and inscribed in the imagery of the Bible, exhibit for Reilly three particular concerns identified and explored in successive chapters of the book. The first of these is founded on the observation that in the frontispiece of Jeremiah (II, fol. 15) the prophet is depicted in the vestments and bearing the attribute of a bishop, which forms the basis of a discussion of the proper role of episcopal authority in monastic affairs as it was understood at Saint-Vaast and its milieu. Annexed to it is the frontispiece design of Ezra (III, fol. 29), where medallions housing figures of a seated king (right)—whom I take likely to be Cyrus rather than Artaxerxes—and a scene of dialogue (left) between a haloed Ezra (?), seemingly characterized as a priest, and an unidentified man. Reilly understands these medallions, less decisively to my mind, to exhibit the ideal of secular and religious cooperation, much praised in theory but only fitfully realized in practice in the early medieval world. Reilly’s analysis of this complex of themes introduces a second major protagonist for her elucidation of the ideological background of the Bible’s illumination, Gerard I, bishop of Cambrai (d. 1051), who was, in his own eyes at least, and possibly in Richard’s as well, the latter’s hierarchical superior. Her extended and well-documented account of that prelate’s turbulent career and ideas has the additional merit of drawing attention (141ff.) to the differing interpretations of French and German scholars of his actions and intentions in a territory of divided ethnic and linguistic loyalties, whose political identity still has the capacity to mobilize national sensitivities. The reader, however, may well feel that the modest images on which the argument is made to rest are too frail to support Reilly’s large, many-sided—but given the nature of the evidence, necessarily uncertain—construction.

The following chapter of the book deals with depictions of kings in the Arras Bible, for which there is a larger evidentiary base, consisting of nine examples. Consideration of the distinctive and complementary roles of secular and religious authority, already adumbrated, is elaborated here from the perspective of royal and episcopal status and prerogatives, seen as divinely ordained. Gerard of Cambrai, who in his activity and the doctrinal underpinning he provided it straddled both spheres, once again occupies center stage of the analysis, which is amplified by a wealth of comparative evidence drawn from both literary and visual sources.

Along the way, Reilly is led to reflect, by way of a footnote, on questions that such ambitious interpretive claims tend to raise but are not easily answered: for whom were these images and ideas intended, and can we be confident that this audience understood them as we do, dealing as we are with an object to which there could be only limited access? It is in her view doubtful that there might have been a general understanding throughout the Latin West of the ideas and the symbolism embedded in the writings and images upon which she comments. Rather, quoting Timothy Reuter, they were part of a “closed and self-mirroring system of esthetics and theology” bound to be meaningful only to “the noble and ecclesiastical community in and around the scriptorium of Saint-Vaast” (175, note 37). But a wider circle of initiates is presupposed by her remark that the depiction of a figure within a mandorla would have been familiar to “any of the eleventh-century residents of or visitors to Saint-Vaast who had paged through the Saint-Vaast Bible” (191), a scenario that does not seem to me very likely. More restrictive again, though convincing within the terms of her argument, is the view that a reference to Moses that she discerns in the Acts frontispiece of the Arras Bible (III, fol. 141) “would only have been understandable to viewers familiar with the writings of Gerard of Cambrai” (221).

“Lessons for a Queen,” the title of the third and final complex of images, concerns depictions of women in the Arras Bible that are deemed to exemplify virtues to be cultivated by royal princesses. Attention is focused on the Sponsa in the frontispiece for the Song of Songs (II, fol. 141v), the illustration attached to the Book of Esther (III, fol. 44), and the depiction of the mother of the Maccabees in the image attached to the pseudepigraphical Passio Machabeorum (III, fol. 81v)—found as well, Reilly notes, in several other Romanesque Bibles from the region. The argument is announced as follows: “The artists of the Arras Bible wove together a series of diverse filaments by uniting the theme of marriage, motherhood, and the partnership of the king and queen in these three frontispieces dedicated to Old Testament prototypes of the ideal wife and mother” (227). Much of the ensuing discussion, informed by Biblical exegesis and canon law, is devoted to medieval theories of marriage, mundane and mystical, and their reflections in art. A different note, however, which distances the analysis from the abstractions of doctrine, is struck by the author’s attempt—fated to remain, I fear, highly speculative—to connect the discourse of royal marriage in the Arras Bible with a contemporaneous event, the wedding in 1051 of the Capetian king Henry I to a Russian princess, Anna of Kiev, to whom the spiritual and moral urgings of the manuscript’s illustrations were presumably addressed.

Reilly’s book is a work of serious and passionate erudition that makes a major contribution to the study of early medieval illumination. In line with current scholarly preoccupations, it breaks with the near exclusive emphasis on style, attribution, and source hunting to which an earlier generation of art historians was committed, and it takes seriously the social and intellectual assumptions that lie behind the creation of significant works of art. It is also a welcome effort of rehabilitation, in that its subject and the milieu in which it originated were previously thought to be rather obscure and unprepossessing, a condition of hesitant beginnings that later developments would correct and bring to maturity. That it does not always convince and may be taxed here and there with overinterpretation are best judged as blemishes inevitable in a work of such commendable ambition.