Repetition, Opposition and Invention in an Illuminated Meditationes Vitae Christi (Gesta, 53:2...

Repetition, Opposition, and Invention in an Illuminated Meditationes vitae Christi : Oxford,Corpus Christi College, MS 410Author(s): Renana BartalSource: Gesta, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2014), pp. 155-174Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of MedievalArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677347 .

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RENANA BARTAL �e Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Repetition, Opposition, and Invention in an Illuminated Meditationes vitae Christi: Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410

v53n2, Fall 2014 Repetition, Opposition, and Invention D 155

�e research that led to this article received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007–2013 / ERC grant agreement no. 249466, “Spectrum: Visual Translations of Jerusalem”). I wish to thank two of its mem-bers, Neta Bodner and Irina Chernetsky, for their helpful suggestions. I have bene�ted greatly from the astute comments made during various stages of research by Joanna Cannon, Debra Strickland, Mati Meyer, Holly Flora, and Naama Cohen Hanegbi. I am particularly indebted to the editors of Gesta, Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen, for valuable suggestions and encouragement, and to the journal’s anonymous review-ers, whose insightful critiques greatly improved the text. I thank Joanna Snelling of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for her very generous assistance. Finally, I thank Bianca Kühnel and John Lowden for their never-ending support.

1. �e Meditationes was attributed for many years to the thirteenth-century theologian Bonaventure, and from the Renaissance until the eighteenth century it was included in editions of his collected works. For a list of early editions containing the Meditationes, see M. Jordan Stallings, ed., Meditaciones de Passione Christi, Olim Sancto Bonaventurae Attributae (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 3–4. However, based on di�erences in style between Bonaventure’s known oeuvre and the Meditationes, scholars have questioned this attribution and now use the name “Pseudo-Bonventure.” �e only other putative author is John of Caulibus, from San Gimignano, sug-gested �rst by Benedetto Bonelli, whose determination was based in part on a 1385 account by Bartholomew of Pisa that mentions a “John of Caulibus from San Geminano” as the author of a tract of meditations on the New Testament. Bonelli, ed., Prodromus ad Opera Omnia S. Bonaventurae. . . . (Bassano: Sumptibus Remondini Veneti, 1767), 657. Sarah McNamer recently challenged traditional assumptions by arguing that the text originated in a short vernacular tract possibly written by a woman: McNamer, “�e Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi,” Speculum 84, no. 4 (2009): 905–55.

2. Dating of the Meditationes is still debated. Sarah McNamer dates it between about 1336 and 1364 in McNamer, “Further Evidence for the Date of the Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi,” Franciscan Studies 50 (1990): 235–61. �e terminus post quem relies on the identi�cation of the source of chapter 3 as the “Revelations” of Elizabeth of Töss, a Hungarian princess turned Dominican nun who died between 1336 and 1338. Recently, Dávid Falvay argued that the “Revelations” is not connected to Elizabeth of Töss but instead was composed in the early fourteenth century in Italy as part of the �ourishing cult of the earlier St. Elizabeth of Hungary, known for her association with the Franciscan third order. See Falvay, “St. Elizabeth of Hungary in Italian Vernacular Literature: Vitae, Miracles, Revelations and the Meditations on the Life of Christ,” in Promoting the Saints: Cults and their Contexts from Late Antiquity until the Early Modern Period; Essays

Abstract

�e Meditationes vitae Christi, now thought to have been written during the fourteenth century for an anonymous Poor Clare, is perhaps the best-known retelling of Christ’s life to emerge from the later Middle Ages. �e text invites readers to reconstruct the events in vividly imagined mental pictures. Analysis of one of the earliest illuminated manuscripts of the text, now Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, o�ers new insights into the role images played in the visually oriented practice of meditation that it prescribes. �is article focuses on the pictorial program of MS 410, which repeats whole composi-tions and parts of compositions to suggest visual analogies and narrative or thematic oppositions. In response to these image-based devices, the reader-viewer of MS 410, possibly a Poor

Clare herself, becomes much more than an empathetic beholder of the events of Christ’s life; she is stimulated to memorize, to interpret, and, in e�ect, to invent the Meditationes anew with each reading.

The Meditationes vitae Christi, now thought to have been written in the �rst quarter of the fourteenth century for an anonymous Poor Clare, transforms the rather terse Gospel ac-

counts into an emotionally charged narrative.1 Its vivid ac-count of Christ’s life soon became one of the most popular retellings of the Gospel stories to emerge in the later Middle Ages.2 While various versions of the text survive in some

Gesta v.53n2 (Fall 2014).0031-8248/2010/7703-0004 $10.00. Copyright 2014 by the International Center of Medieval Art. All rights reserved.



156 E Gesta v53n2, Fall 2014

220 manuscript copies,3 art historians are most familiar with a profusely illuminated copy, now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS ital. 115, known from Isa Ragusa and Rosalie Green’s translation and, more recently, a study by Holly Flora.4

However, MS ital. 115 is only one of four extant manuscripts of the text illuminated in Italy about 1350.5 �e surprisingly neglected Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, possibly pa inted in Perugia, is comparable in length and in the sophisti-cation of its pictorial cycle, with 154 fully colored, o�en gilded miniatures.6 Like MS ital. 115, it was commissioned for a fe-male Franciscan and provides vital testimony of the way a Me-ditationes manuscript was approached in its original context.

Analysis of the pictorial program of MS 410 can provide new insights into how images contributed to and directed the practice of meditation prescribed by the Meditationes

text. Measuring approximately 24.8 by 15.8 cm, hardly pocket-size, MS 410 was nevertheless intended for habitual reading. According to its prologue, the Meditationes was to be perused daily as part of the monastic practice of meditatio. �e pictorial program facilitated and rewarded this practice in an unusual way, repeating compositions or parts of compo-sitions to develop visual analogies and narrative or thematic oppositions. �e Poor Clare for whom the Meditationes was written was instructed to visualize the events of Christ’s life as if she herself were present, reenacting the scenes as vivid mental representations or “imaginary scenarios.”7 Art histo-rians o�en link the use of this well-rooted meditative technique to the rise of a�ective religious representations that similarly invite viewers’ empathy.8 Hans Belting associated the text with the new pictorial cycles in trecento Italy that like-wise elaborate the narrative and appeal to viewers’ emotions.9 Others, such as Beth Mulvaney, connected it to the inclination of trecento artists toward a detailed description that allowed viewers to “behold” images a�ectively as eyewitnesses.10 In a recent discussion of MS 410, Flora reiterates this focus on em-pathetic strategies. In her view, Christ’s bodily su�ering in the images of the Infancy and Passion sequences is emphasized to facilitate the reader-viewer’s empathetic and “performative”

7. “You should not think that all his words and deeds that we can meditate on were actually written down. But to make them stand out, I will tell you about these unwritten things just as if they had actually happened, at least insofar as they can piously be believed to be occurring or to have occurred; doing this in accordance with certain imaginary scenarios, which the mind perceives in a varying way.” John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. and ed. Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-Taney (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2000), 4.

8. �is meditative technique aimed to facilitate memorization, helping the reader imprint the various events �rmly on her mind and heart. See Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, “Passion Devotion, Penitential Reading, and the Manuscript Page: ‘�e Hours of the Cross’ in London, British Library Additional 37049,” Mediaeval Studies 66 (2004): 213–56; and Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 36 –38.

9. Hans Belting, “�e New Role of Narrative in Public Painting of the Trecento: Historia and Allegory,” in Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Marianna Shreve Simpson (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1985), 151–70. Jill Bennett discusses this statement in Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory: St Francis and the A�ective Image,” Art History 24, no. 1 (2001): 1–16.

10. Beth A. Mulvaney, “�e Beholder as Witness: �e ‘Crib at Greccio’ from the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi and Franciscan In�uence on Late Medieval Art in Italy,” in �e Art of the Franciscan Order in Italy, ed. William R. Cook (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 169–88.

in Honor of Gábor Klaniczay for his 60th Birthday, ed. Ottó Gecser et al. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 137–50. For further discussion of these views, see Ryan Perry, “�ynk on God, as we doon, men that swynke: �e Cultural Locations of Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord and the Middle English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Tradition,” Speculum 86, no. 2 (2011): 419–54, esp. 423–26.

3. �e popularity of the Meditationes is attested by the large number of surviving copies: some 220 manuscripts are known, of which about 20 feature illustrations. Columban Fischer lists 217 manuscripts in Fischer, “Die ‘Meditationes Vitae Christi’: ihre handschri�liche Ueberlieferung und die Verfasserfrage,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 25 (1932): 3–35, 175–209, 305–48, 449–83. A preliminary list of the illuminated copies of the Meditationes was published in Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. Ital. 115, trans. Isa Ragusa, ed. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), xxiii n5. Holly Flora updates this list in Flora, �e Devout Belief of the Imagination: �e Paris “Meditationes vitae Christi” and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 50n2.

4. For a recent historiographic account of MS ital. 115, see Flora, Devout Belief of the Imagination, 33–40.

5. �e four manuscripts include MS ital. 115 (193 illustrations); one owned by the antiquarian book dealer Heribert Tenchert (27 illustrations); MS Snite 85.25, at the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame (48 illustrations); and Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (154 illustrations). On the Snite manuscript, see Dianne Phillips, “�e Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illuminated Fourteenth-Century Italian Manuscript at the University of Notre Dame,” in �e Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors and Readers, ed. Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 237–80.

6. �e pink-diapered backgrounds of some illuminations bring to mind the work of the San Lorenzo illuminator, working in fourteenth-century Perugia. For his work, see Marina Subbioni, La miniatura perugina del Trecento: contributo alla storia della pittura in Umbria nel quattordicesimo secolo (Perugia: Guerra, 2003), 73–101. I thank Stella Panayatova for this reference.



Repetition, Opposition, and Invention D 157

engagement, allowing her to place herself inside the narrative as a witness.11

In this essay, I focus on an altogether overlooked aspect of the pictorial program in MS 410: the use of repetition to create visual analogies and narrative or thematic oppositions. �ese image-based devices require a quite di�erent mode of engagement. While the images I describe advance the story line, they also, and perhaps primarily, interrelate, prompting recollections and associations. Certain pairs of images en-courage the reader-viewer to go back and forth in the volume to meditate on their meanings and relationships. �ey invite her to act as more than an onlooker or participant in the con-tinuous dramatic narrative of Christ’s life. By facilitating the collation and reinterpretation of various narrative moments, she invents the Meditationes anew in each rereading.

I use the term invention deliberately, for medieval medita-tion, as analyzed by Mary Carruthers, was an inventive prac-tice. �e Latin word inventio referred to two actions involved in meditation: memorizing textual or visual elements, thus cre ating a mental inventory; and perceiving new associa-tions among these elements to build something new.12 MS 410’s pictorial program promotes such inventive reading of the Meditationes, prompting the reader-viewer to forge new links among the di�erent scenes and text segments imprinted on her mind. Such connections, in turn, promote a deeper understanding of the theological or moral meanings embed-ded in the scenes by calling up a wide range of devotional connotations.

Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410: Use and Ownership

To understand how repetition and opposition facilitate the manuscript’s use for meditation, we must �rst consider the possible identity of its inventive reader. �e border decora-tion on the �rst page of MS 410 depicts St. Francis display-ing the wound in his side, a female �gure in a Poor Clare’s habit turning to him in supplication, and a largely obliterated coat of arms at the right (Fig. 1).13 �e joint appearance of Francis and Clare is mandated by the prologue, which intro-duces both as role models for devout meditation on the life

11. Holly Flora, “Empathy and Performative Vision in Oxford Corpus Christi College MS 410,” Ikon 3 (2010): 169–78.

12. Mary Carruthers, �e Cra� of �ought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10–14.

13. Mary Stallings-Taney notes that the �rst folio presents the likeness and arms of a lady but does not identify the coat of arms. Stallings-Taney, ed., Meditaciones vite Christi Olim S. Bonaventurae Attributae, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 153 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), xiv.

of Christ.14 �e border also o�ers clues to the identity of the manuscript’s �rst owner. �e central placement of the female �gure, who may represent the owner or St. Clare herself, sug-gests either a female patron with a Franciscan orientation, a Poor Clare, or a woman belonging to Francis’s third order. �e coat of arms and the commission of a lavishly illustrated book imply that the owner was wealthy, but she also appears to have been well educated. She commissioned the long Latin version of the Meditationes, of which MS 410 is the only fully illuminated manuscript, rather than the Italian version, rep-resented by MS ital. 115. �ese attributes do not exclude a Poor Clare as a possible owner. In fourteenth-century Italy, women who entered Clarissan convents were o�en of noble birth and sometimes continued to possess books a�er taking their vows.15 Nor was it unlikely that a Poor Clare could read some Latin; licenses for admission to a Poor Clare convent were o�en conferred on the grounds that the postulant was an “educated girl” ( puella litterata).16

�e pictorial program of MS 410, like that of MS ital. 115, promotes themes particularly suited to a female Franciscan.17

Yet the notable di�erences between the two manuscripts, which may well be linked to their patronage, call for explana-tion. �e 193 tinted drawings of MS ital. 115 provide a de-tailed visualization of the Italian text by breaking it into very

14. “If you were to read about blessed Francis and about your sweetest mother, blessed Clare the virgin, you would discover that they emerged from their many tribulations, wants and in�rmities not only long-su�ering but even cheerful. You can see the same pattern every day in those who lead a holy life. �is is due to the fact that as a result of their devout meditation on his life their souls were not residing in their own bodies but in that of Christ.” John of Caulibus, Meditations, 2. On the image of St. Clare, see William R. Cook, “�e Early Images of St. Clare of Assisi,” in Clare of Assisi: A Medieval and Modern Woman, ed. Ingrid Peterson (New York: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1996), 15–29.

15. John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order: From its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 406–16. By the fourteenth century, many Clarissan houses were quite wealthy, as attested by the construction of such convents as Sta. Maria de Monteluce in Perugia. Inventories from Clarissan convents in Bologna, Foligno, and San Gimignano indicate that, as in other monastic orders, many of the sisters brought lands with them for collective ownership by the convent. Flora, Devout Belief of the Imagination, 190–91; and Jeryldene M. Wood, Women, Art, and Spirituality: �e Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

16. Moorman, History of the Franciscan Order, 413n1; see also McNamer, “Origins,” 951. On the acquisition of Latin in Florence, see Paul F. Gehl, A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Ronald Witt, “What Did Giovannino Read and Write? Literacy in Early Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 6 (1995): 83–114. I thank Federico Botana for these references.

17. Flora, Devout Belief of the Imagination, 65–66.




Figure 1. St. Francis, a female �gure dressed as a Poor Clare, and a coat of arms, fol. 1r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




speci�c episodes every few lines (Fig. 2). Sometimes referred to as “cinematic,” these drawings encourage the reader to be-hold the shi�ing scenes of Christ’s life.18 In contrast, MS 410’s images are relatively simple depictions placed at the opening of each text division and set on colored or patterned back-grounds. Rather than inviting the reader-viewer to enter the narrative as a beholder, they act as visual loci memoriae, in-viting her to return to the text and create her own, more de-tailed, mental images.

Repetitions, Oppositions, and Meditations

Building on Belting’s association of the Meditationes with elaborate visual narrative sequences, Flora argues that the im-ages in MS 410 encourage a “devotional focus on narrative.”19

She suggests that placement of the illuminations at the start of each text division, referring to the �rst few lines, helps the reader to “move e�ciently from one narrative moment to the next.”20 While most of MS 410’s images are found at the open-ings of the text divisions, and many, although not all, refer to the �rst few lines, some are relevant to more than one text section and, signi�cantly, relate to an image elsewhere in the book. An example is the illumination depicting Christ before his parents, on fol. 31v (Fig. 3). It is adjacent to lines describ-ing Christ’s return home to Nazareth with his parents a�er their reunion in Jerusalem, but, unlike the immediately pre-ceding image on fol. 30r, which shows Christ as a child among the doctors in the Temple, here he is an adult with a smudge of beard on his chin. �e abrupt change in age suggests that it may also refer to the next text section, which is not illustrated:

When he had completed his twenty-ninth year, during which time, as was said, he had lived in such penury and as an outcast, the Lord Jesus said to his mother, “It is time that I go to glorify and reveal the Father; that I show myself to the world and work out the salvation of souls, for which the Father sent me. But take comfort, dearest mother, for I shall return quickly to you.” �e master of humility then knelt and asked for her bless-ing. She also knelt and with a tearful embrace, said most tenderly, “My blessed son, go with the blessing of your Father, and with mine; keep me in mind and remember to come back soon.21

18. See, e.g., Holly Flora and Arianna Pecorini Cignoni, “Requirements of Devout Contemplation: Text and Image for the Poor Clares in Trecento Pisa,” Gesta 45, no. 1 (1996): 61–76, at 65.

19. Flora, “Empathy and Performative Vision,” 171.20. Ibid.21. John of Caulibus, Meditations, 62.

�e image on fol. 31v thus appears to show Christ’s departure from his parents’ home at the age of thirty. Christ, Mary, and Joseph are kneeling; she raises her hand in blessing. �e choice of scene may have been intended to evoke another image de-picting Christ before his parents placed on fol. 45r (Fig. 4), this time illustrating their reunion a�er his post-Temptation feast. Here Christ kneels before the Virgin as she moves toward him, arms extended, while Joseph stands behind, hands crossed on his chest. Following Mary’s request to her son at their parting (Fig. 3), the reader-viewer could “keep [her] in mind,” at least until she reappears in a similar image a few folios later.

Such repeated compositions are common in the pictorial program of MS 410. More than half of the illustrations seem to draw from a limited repertoire. �e section on Christ’s ministry repeats several poses: he is shown as a preacher be-fore a group of seated or standing men; turning back to rec-ognize a follower; and with his hand stretched forward as a healer. In the Passion section, similar compositions stress the

Figure 2. Post-Temptation feast, Mary sends food, fol. 71r, ca. 1350, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS ital. 115 (photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




theme of Christ’s humiliation: he is led by a rope tied to his neck (�ve times), erect before a judge (seven times), stands with a robe pulled above his head (three times), or is shown on the cross (eight times). �e Resurrection section is equally repetitive: Christ appears a number of times before one fol-lower or a group or encounters Old Testament “fathers” dur-ing his descent to hell.

While this striking repetition might be explained by the illuminator’s limited powers of invention or small inventory of visual models, it actually functions as an important device, calling the reader-viewer’s attention to the links between vari-ous scenes. Some of these scenes are further connected by color. A particular combination of colors, for example, rein-forces the association between the departure and reunion im-ages (Figs. 3–4). In both cases Christ appears in a purple cloak over a blue garment, Mary wears red and blue, and Joseph wears a gray cloak over a yellow garment.

Certain formal echoes, also seen in the departure-and-reunion pair, o�er the reader-viewer an opposing narrative

moment or theme. �e repetition of Christ with a robe pulled above his head calls attention to an opposition well rooted in Franciscan discourse: clothing and nudity, dressing and undressing.22 �e depictions of the Annunciation to the Shepherds (fol. 15r) and Mary and Joseph looking for the child they le� in Jerusalem (fol. 30r) use a similar compo-sition to contrast the themes of discovery and loss. In both images the pictorial surface is divided by a diagonal skyline across which two groups of �gures move. Another contrast of departure and return occurs in the depictions of Christ’s �ight to the city of Ephraim and his return to Bethany, recounted in John 11 and Matthew 26 (Figs. 5–6, fols. 110r and 111r).

22. See the use of this opposition in the writings of the Franciscan poet Iacopone da Todi, in Alessandro Vettori, Poets of Divine Love: Franciscan Mystical Poetry of the �irteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); and idem, “Singing with Angels, Iacopone da Todi’s Prayerful Rhetoric,” in Franciscans at Prayer, ed. Timothy J. Johnson (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 221–48.

Figure 3. Christ before his parents, fol. 31v, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

Figure 4. Christ before his parents, fol. 45r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




In both images, placed a folio apart, a similar, albeit reversed, composition shows Christ standing with a single companion before a walled city. �e two illuminations on the other side of these openings (fols. 109v and 110v) depict a group of �gures seated inside a similarly con�ning architectural space, thus using a compositional analogy to contrast Christ’s worst en-emies, the Jews, with his most faithful followers, the Virgin and her companions.23

23. �e text may also call the reader-viewer’s attention to this opposition: “Now then, watch the evildoers, seething in the worst council ever. Likewise, contemplate the Lord Jesus along with his disciples, retreating like helpless men. What do you think Magdalene would have said then? What did the Lord Jesus’ mother think when she saw him retreating in this way, and heard that the reason for it was that they wanted to kill him? Here you can meditate that our lady and her sisters then had gone to stay with Magdalene, and that, reunited with the Lord Jesus, they all had gotten some consolation from his speedy return.” John of Caulibus, Meditations, 220.

�e pictorial devices of repetition and opposition are cer-tainly not unique to MS 410 and were, in fact, common as structuring tools for pictorial programs in monumental art as well as illuminated manuscripts.24 �ey parallel two well-

24. Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 53–83. Cynthia Hahn accentuates the role of oppositions and repetitions in eliciting an a�ective response in reader-viewers of illuminated saints’ lives in Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative E�ect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the �irteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 39–45. Oppositions were used in the design of two roughly contemporary monuments of trecento Italy, the Arena Chapel and the lower church of St. Francis in Assisi. Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer’s Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); and Janet Robson, “�e Pilgrim’s Progress: Reinterpreting the Trecento Fresco Programme in the Lower Church at Assisi,” in Cook, Art of the Franciscan Order in Italy, 39–70.

Figure 5. �e Jews plot to bring down Christ and his �ight to the city of Ephraim, fols. 109v–110r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color ver-sion of this image.




established rhetorical devices for storytelling, widely dissemi -nated before the thirteenth century through such writing guides as Geo�rey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova.25 Vinsauf ’s text re�ects the preoccupation of late twel�h- and thirteenth-century authors with the techniques of ampli�cation, which use repetition as a way to draw out the nuances of a narra-tive concept or theme. As scholars of medieval literature note, these are the primary means by which authors manipulated

25. Geo�rey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Ponti�cal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010). On the Poetria and its in�uence in Italy, see Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 94–161. For the use of opposition in the Poetria, see Charles Fraker, “Oppositio in Geo�rey of Vinsauf and its Background,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 11, no. 1 (1993): 63–85. For the in�uence of the text on the visual arts, see Alyce A. Jordan, Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001).

their material to suit particular purposes.26 Repetition and opposition are two of the eight techniques of ampli�cation Vinsauf describes. �e �rst, expolitio, consists of synonymic or incremental repetition,27 whereas of oppositio he writes, “any statement at all may assume two forms: one form makes a positive assertion, the other negates its opposite. �e two modes harmonize in a single meaning; and thus two streams of sound �ow forth, each �owing along the other.”28

�e Franciscans recognized the wide applicability of the Poetria nova; Pace of Ferrara, a teacher of logic and grammar in the famous studium in Padua about 1300, wrote a popular Italian commentary on it, attesting to the use of such rhetori-cal teaching in their establishments.29 Oppositio, or antithesis, had a particular place in Franciscan thought and aesthetics.

26. Jordan, Visualizing Kingship, 11–12.27. Douglas Kelly, �e Arts of Poetry and Prose (Turnhout:

Brepols, 1991), 88–119.28. Geo�rey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 38–39.29. Woods, Classroom Commentaries, 105–12.

Figure 6. �e Virgin and her companions at the house of the Magdalen and Christ’s return to Bethany, fols. 110v–111r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




Bonaventure frequently invoked Aristotle’s recommenda-tion of antithesis in his Problems: “For the identity of a thing becomes more obvious when contrasted with its opposite.”30

Oppositio was used as an organizing principle in the complex iconographic program of the lower church of St. Francis at Assisi, guiding the progress of pilgrims who visited this most-revered Franciscan shrine.31

Opposition and repetition served a di�erent function in an illuminated manuscript, where they were meant to prompt a reader to constant meditation and to facilitate both memo-rization and the recon�guration of its elements, stored in the mind, into something new: invention.32 First and foremost, these pictorial devices serve to imprint images and the narra-tive moments they depict �rmly in the reader-viewer’s mind, encouraging rumination—literally, chewing over words and tex-t ual or visual segments in the memory.33 �e prologue to the Meditationes commends St. Cecilia, who contemplated the life of Christ “day and night” (Ps. 2:2), as a model of rumina-tion: “Beginning again when their cycle was completed, and ruminating on these episodes with sweet and gentle relish, she [Cecilia] then stored them safely within the hidden re-cesses of her heart for her personal counseling.”34

Repeated compositions serve rumination in yet another way, marking the beginning and end of certain passages to help the reader divide the long content into more manageable segments. For a reader to be able to go through the entire book once a week, the text had to be read in daily sections, parsed like the reading of the Psalms in the monastic o�ces. John of Caulibus wrote:

Divide the meditations as follows: On Monday, start at the beginning (of the Lord’s life), and go as far as the Lord’s �ight into Egypt; then stop at that point. On Tuesday, resume there, and meditate as far as his opening of the Book in the synagogue. On Wednesday,

30. Aristotle, Problemata, sec. 22, note 11; see Aristotle, Problems, ed. and trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 2:73. See David Summers, “Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 3 (1977): 336–61, at 347–48, for further discussion of Aristotle’s use of opposition. Bonaventure translated the phrase into Latin as “opposita iuxta se posita magis elucescunt.” See Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae . . . Opera Omnia (Quaracchi: Collegio S. Bonaventurae, 1902), 9:306; and Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 11–12n33. For Bonaventure’s use of antithesis, see Ewert H. Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978).

31. Robson, “Pilgrim’s Progress.” 32. Carruthers, Cra� of �ought, 10–14.33. Jean Leclercq, �e Love of Learning and the Desire for God:

A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 78.

34. John of Caulibus, Meditations, 1.

proceed from there to the ministry of Mary and Martha. On �ursday, go from there to the passion and death. On Friday and Saturday, go as far as the resurrection. Finally, on Sunday, meditate on the resurrection itself up to the end of his earthly life.35

Images of departure and return thus mark the end of Christ’s childhood and the beginning of his ministry as points to stop the daily reading.

Scripture was meant to be so deeply embedded in the mind of the monastic reader that a word or part of a sentence would call up a similar one elsewhere in the Bible. Jean Leclercq calls each word of scripture a “hook” that “catches hold of one or several others which become linked together and make up the fabric of the exposé.”36 In MS 410, visual repetitions and oppositions work to stimulate an associative reading of the text. Repeated compositions or parts of compositions act as mental hooks, inviting the reader-viewer to go back and forth in the volume, to meditate further on the newly illuminated meanings of similar or contrasting images and textual pas-sages and the links between them or, to use Carruthers’s term, to “invent.”

Deviations from the Text, Visual Analogies, and Devotional Associations

To facilitate such associative reading, some miniatures, particularly in the Infancy and Passion sections, deviate from the lines they accompany and instead appear to have been chosen, altered, or designed to refer to another image or im-ages in the book. Flora’s focus on the visual aids that would prompt empathetic engagement is particularly pertinent to the Infancy and Passion sections, where the reader is o�en urged to place herself mentally in the scene and to visualize the event in detail. However, Flora pays scant attention to a signi�cant contradiction: the illustrations in these sections o�en diverge markedly from the text. �e departures are so striking that they led Pamela Busby to ponder whether the il-luminators were using standard workshop models rather than responding to the text before them. She treated the second gathering of MS 410, which includes the sequence describing Christ’s early childhood, as an indepen dent unit copied from a separate exemplar.37

35. Ibid., 332.36. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 79.37. Pamela Busby, “A Study of the Illustrations in Oxford Corpus

Christi College, MS 410: A Fourteenth-Century Copy of the Latin Version of the Meditationes Vitae Christi” (BPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1968), 40–41.




Reading the images of the Nativity sequence in the context of the entire manuscript refutes this hypothesis, however, and shows that the deviations from the text are intentionally de-signed to evoke an image from the Passion sequence. �ese formal links, opposing the Savior’s birth and death, allow the reader-viewer to do more than mentally place herself inside the devotional drama; rather, visual cues and compositional analogies encourage the reader to associate two or more seg-ments of the narrative with one another, inviting her to inter-pret and reinterpret the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation.

For example, the third image of the Nativity sequence shows the holy couple in the cave (Fig. 7, fol. 15v). �e text describes the child held by his mother and urges the reader to kneel and kiss his feet:

And you who have lingered on a bit, kneel and adore your Lord God, and then his mother, and reverently greet the holy old man Joseph. �en kiss the feet of the child Jesus lying in the manger and ask our Lady to hand him to you and even allow you to hold him. Take him and hold him fast in your arms; gaze on his face. Kiss him with loving reverence and delight con�dently in him. You can do this because he came to sinners for their salvation. He humbly conversed with them and �-nally le� himself as food for them.38

In the accompanying miniature, Mary holds the child’s feet, while Joseph supports his head. �e child reaches his right hand to touch one of the ox’s horns. �ese deviations from the text can be explained by noting its striking parallels and oppositions to the Lamentation scene much later in the man-uscript (Fig. 8, fol. 144r).39 Here Mary bends down to kiss her son’s head; in the Nativity, Joseph’s outstretched arms barely touch the head. In the Nativity, Mary holds the child’s feet; in the Lamentation, John is at Christ’s feet, although the Meditationes text says the Magdalen, not John, anoints Christ’s feet. While the emphasis on touch of both scenes may be explained in part by the author’s demand that the reader physically engage with Christ’s feet, the respective touching of the head and feet could alert the sensitive reader-viewer to contemplate Christ’s dual nature and the mystery of his Incarnation in accordance with the well-known exegetical argument that his feet symbolize Christ’s humanity and his head, his divinity.40

38. John of Caulibus, Meditations, 28.39. Flora (“Empathy and Performative Vision,” 170–71) notes that

the child’s elongated body recalls the scene of Christ’s Lamentation but does not draw a speci�c comparison with the Lamentation scene chosen by the designers of MS 410.

40. Pope Gregory the Great saw the anointing of Christ’s feet by Mary Magdalen (Luke 7:38) as an allegory of his two natures:

While in the Nativity scene Mary’s gaze and Joseph’s raised hands seem to present Christ to the viewer for a kiss, its anal-ogy with the Lamentation also o�ers Christ to the viewer as food for thought. Medieval writers had long con�ated the newborn in Bethlehem with the sacramental victim of the Mass,41 and here the child’s elevated and naked body pre�g-ures the dead Christ of the Lamentation, evoking the child-host trope. �e unusual upward extension of his arm (Fig. 7), which does not refer in any way to the Meditationes text, could also recall the gesture of elevating the host. In reaching to-ward the ox, an animal sacri�ced in the Temple,42 the gesture further suggests sacri�ce, and it is echoed in the Lamentation scene by the upraised arms of the Magdalen, whose hands are li�ed in a familiar gesture of grief and despair (Fig. 8).43

�e infant Christ’s unusual gesture toward the ox almost certainly has additional connotations. As is well known, the presence of the ox and the ass at the Nativity derives from an early Christian interpretation that associates the Bethlehem manger with the words of Isaiah 1:3, “�e ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood.” In Sermon 204 on the Epiphany, Augustine argued that the horned ox stands for the Jews, among whom the horns of the cross were prepared.44

“We can also understand by his feet the mystery of his Incarnation, by which his divinity touched the earth because he took a body to himself. . . . We can appropriately take his head to represent his divinity.” Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 273–74. Ernst Kantorowicz, �e King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political �eology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 73–74, also uses this argument. For the motif of Christ’s feet in trecento Italy, see Joanna Cannon, “Kissing the Virgin’s Foot: Adoratio before the Madonna and Child Enacted, Depicted, Imagined,” Studies in Iconography 31 (2010): 1–50; for the identi�cation of Christ’s feet with his humanity and other interpretations, 15n59.

41. Leah Sinanoglou, “�e Christ Child as Sacri�ce: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48, no. 3 (1973): 491–509.

42. See, e.g., 2 Chronicles 7:5, describing Solomon’s sacri�ce of twenty-two thousand oxen.

43. Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 57–86.

44. Augustine, In epiphania Domini 6: “In eis coepit bos agnoscere possessorem suum, et asinus praesepe domini sui. Ex Judaicis animal cornutum, ubi Christo crucis cornua parabantur. Ex Gentibus animal auritum, unde, praedictum erat: ‘Populus quem non cognovi, servivit mihi, in auditu auris obaudivit mihi.’ ” In Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1844–64) (herea�er Migne, PL), 38 (1865): col. 1037. I thank Debra Strickland for this reference. The Meditationes, like many Passion meditations written in the later Middle Ages, emphasizes the Jews’ complicity in the Cruci�xion. See Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 69–110.




At least as early as the twel�h century, however, the stub-born ass came to stand for the unbelieving Jews and the ox for believing Christians.45 �e strong visual analogy between the ox’s horns and the Magdalen’s raised hands might lead the reader-viewer of MS 410 to ponder her own salvation, prom-ised by Christ’s sacri�ce on the cross.

Another image from the Nativity sequence that deviates strikingly from the text prefaces the section describing Christ’s Circumcision (Fig. 9, fol. 16v). �e text exhorts the reader:

Su�er together with him, and cry with him, because today the infant cried hard. . . . You have heard how great a�iction and want he experienced at his birth.

45. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 1:470n1.

Among other things consider the fact that when his mother placed him in the manger, she placed his head on some small stone with perhaps just a little straw in between. . . . One would suppose that she would have more willingly placed there a lavish pillow if she had had it, but since she had nothing else she could put there, with heartfelt regret she placed that stone there. You hear also that he shed his blood today, for his �esh was cut by his mother with a little stone knife. Is it not �tting to su�er along with him?46

Departing signi�cantly from this emotionally charged and detailed description, the accompanying image is divided into two registers. In the upper one, Mary is again in the cave, touching the swaddled child who lies between her and the observing ox and ass. In the lower zone, one female �gure


Figure 7. �e Nativity, fol. 15v, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

Figure 8. �e Lamentation, fol. 144r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




holds Christ while another performs the Circumcision. A third woman turns her head away from the scene, while Joseph looks on.47

Presenting the act as performed by three women rather than by Mary herself is not accidental.48 �e composition of

47. As noted by Flora, “Empathy and Performative Vision,” 172, the female �gures, none of whom has a halo, echo the midwives who bathe Christ in certain Nativity scenes, such as that by Duccio in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. �e representation of Mary and the swaddled child above the seated �gures of the women and Joseph further suggests this visual model. �e illuminator’s di�culty in adapting it to a di�erent scene is evident in the �gure of the woman adjacent to Joseph, whose right hand is shown twice, supporting the infant’s right arm and holding his outstretched leg.

48. An equally rare image, in which Mary performs the Circumcision, occurs in MS ital. 115; the Virgin cuts her child’s �esh with a stone knife. Flora discusses this image in detail in Devout Belief of the Imagination, 65–66, 101–15; and eadem, “Women Wielding Knives: �e Circumcision of Christ by his Mother in an Illustrated Manuscript of the Meditationes vitae Christi (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France ital. 115),” in �e Christ Child

the entire image and its speci�c deviations from the text cre-ate a speci�c visual analogy with another image in MS 410 that is signaled by the colors of the garments worn by the three women. In the Circumcision scene they wear grayish blue, reddish orange, and purple, and the only other scene in which three female �gures wear this particular color combi-nation is that of Mary fainting when Christ’s side is pierced at the Cruci�xion, more than 120 folios later (Fig. 10, fol. 139r). �e repeated detail of three similarly dressed female �gures provides a memorable visual cue, linking two images that are far apart in the book. �e images are further associated by the pose of the male �gure at the right; both the elderly Joseph at the Circumcision and the young John at the Cruci�xion are shown seated and supporting their heads on one hand.49

Most obviously, however, the images are connected by Christ’s naked and bleeding body at the center of the com-position: the two scenes show his �rst and last wounds, the Circumcision and the pierced side. �e connection between these wounds dates to the early church fathers, and, as Leo Steinberg points out, by the ��eenth century this association was typical in Passion imagery, in which blood �ows from Christ’s breast down to his groin. �e Meditationes evokes this link, using the Circumcision to assert Christ’s human nature:

Today our lord Christ began to shed his consecrated blood for us. From the very �rst, he who had not sinned began to su�er pain for us, and for our sins he bore tor-ment. Feel compassion for him . . . for perhaps he wept today . . . today his precious blood �owed. His �esh was cut with a stone knife . . . must one not pity him? . . . �e Child Jesus cries today because of the pain he felt in his so� and delicate �esh, for he had real and susceptible �esh like all other humans.50

in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! ed. Mary Dzon and �eresa M.Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 145–66. Flora, “Empathy and Performative Vision,” 172, argues that the representa-tion in the lower register refers to the three Marys, connecting the Cir-cumcision with the Resurrection.

49. �e parallel may evoke John 19:26–27, where, from the cross, Christ addresses Mary, “Woman, behold thy son,” and then says to John, “Behold thy mother.” �e reader-viewer could contemplate the moment as the invention of a new family under the cross, which medieval exegetes understood as the Christian Church, created by Christ. Ambrose interpreted Mary becoming mother to those who are at the Cruci�xion as their adoption by the Church: “May Christ also say to you, ‘Behold thy mother.’ May he also say to the Church, ‘Behold thy son’: for then you will begin to be a son of the Church, when you see Christ victorious on the Cross.” Expositio in Lucam 7.5; quoted in Amy Ne�, “�e Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (1998): 254–73, at 255n18.

50. Ragusa and Green, Meditations on the Life of Christ, 43–44, cited and discussed in Leo Steinberg, �e Sexuality of Christ in

Figure 9. Nativity and Circumcision scenes, fol. 16v, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford).




For Steinberg, this passage demonstrates the naive way that the Incarnation was conveyed to lay readers of the Meditationes, but he does not consider the complex contemplative possibili-ties prompted by the visual analogies between the images of the Circumcision and Cruci�xion.

According to a text o�en attributed to Bonaventure, enter-ing the side wound to reach the heart of Christ is the last step in a series of meditations on the seven sheddings of his blood, beginning with his Circumcision:

Finally through the open door of his spear-torn side, we should come to the most humble heart of Jesus most high. Here, in all truth, is hidden the very treasure of love, desirable and ine�able; here we discover devo-tion, and the grace of tears; here we learn benignity and patience in our a�ictions, and compassion for the

Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 57–58.

a�icted; here, above all we �nd within ourselves a heart contrite and humbled.51

Moreover, the resemblance of the three women in the Circumcision-Cruci�xion pair reinforces the association between the two wounds through the language of bridal mysticism, encouraging the Poor Clare reader to meditate on the link between her �rst, marital bond with Christ and the �nal, mystical union with his heart. �e Meditationes de-scription of how Mary performed the act and in�icted pain as the �rst sponsa Christi could stand for the nun’s marital bond with Christ.52 �is analogy is based on the metaphor in Canticles (Song of Songs) 4:9, “�ou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse,” and reinforced typologically by the �gure of Moses’s wife Zipporah, who circumcised their son and called Moses a “bloody spouse” (Exod. 4:24 –26).53 In his spiritual handbook for nuns, De perfectione vitae ad sorores, Bonaventure again uses the language of the Song of Songs to describe Christ’s side wound as a gateway to his heart. He ex-horts the reader to meditate on Christ’s Passion, not only by metaphorically touching the wounds but also by imagining herself entering into his side in a process of spiritual transfor-mation and mystical union:

�erefore, let your love lead your steps to Jesus wounded, to Jesus crowned with thorns, to Jesus fastened upon the gibbet of the cross. Not only see in his hands the print of the nails, with the Apostle �omas, not only put your �nger into the place of his nails, not only put your hand into his side, but enter with your whole being through the door of his side into Jesus’ heart it-self. �ere, transformed into Christ by your burning

51. See Vitis mystica 24.3; trans. José de Vinck, �e Works of Bonaventure: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1960), 1:203–4.

52. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 72–77.

53. For this typological reading of the image and its links with female spirituality, see Flora, Devout Belief of the Imagination, 65–66, 101–15; and eadem, “Women Wielding Knives.” Relating the Circumcision to marital vows, Catherine of Siena explained that Christ marries the faithful soul with a ring, not of gold, but one cut from his foreskin. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: �e Religious Signi�cance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 174–75. Anabel Thomas connects a sixteenth-century painting at the convent of Sant’Anna in Foligno depicting the Circumcision performed by Mary to the taking of professional vows by nuns. �omas, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 160–61.

Figure 10. Mary’s collapse at the piercing of Christ’s side, fol. 139r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permis-sion of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford).




love for the Cruci�ed, pierced by the nails of the fear of God, wounded by the spear of superabounding love, trans�xed by the sword of intimate compassion, seek nothing, desire nothing, wish for no consolation, other than to be able to die with Christ on the cross.54

�e Meditationes describes the pain of Mary’s compassion beginning with the sight of her son’s Circumcision (Fig. 9):

But do you believe that while he (Christ) is crying, his mother could have held back her own tears? And so she cried too; sitting on her lap, and watching her crying, her son placed his tiny hand on her face and lips, as if by this gesture asking her not to cry. He wanted the one and most tenderly loved to stop crying; in turn, his mother, who was also terribly upset at the pain and tears of her son, was consoling him by gesture and words.55

In contrast to this emotional description, however, the upper register of the Circumcision scene shows Mary lying in a painless postpartum pose in the Nativity scene. �is also re-inforces the Circumcision-Cruci�xion comparison because it evokes another popular devotional opposition: the joys and sorrows of Mary’s motherhood.56 In the Cruci�xion image, the Virgin swoons into the arms of her two companions in an expression of overwhelming anguish under the cross (Fig. 10). Swooning, or falling back, recalls late antique and Byzantine depictions of giving birth.57 �is motif became widespread in European art in the early thirteenth century thanks to the writings of mendicant authors, who used labor imagery to de-scribe Mary’s su�ering during the Cruci�xion.58 Bonaventure,

54. Bonaventure, De perfectione vitae ad sorores 6.2; de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:239–40; and Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 73.

55. John of Caulibus, Meditations, 30–31. 56. On the writings of female mystics who contrast the pains of

the Passion with the joys of the Nativity, see Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 82–83.

57. Ne�, “Pain of Compassio,” 257–62. On the iconography of giving birth in Byzantine illuminated manuscripts, see Mati Meyer, An Obscure Portrait: Imaging Women’s Reality in Byzantine Art (London: Pindar Press, 2009), 35–75.

58. See Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, ed. Augustus Borgnet and Aemilius Borgnet (Paris: Vivès, 1898), 36:62. For the Liber Bernardi de passione Domini, also known as the Planctus beatae Mariae or the Quis dabit, see Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 52–53, 165–84, 188. For further texts and discussion, see Ne�, “Pain of Compassio,” 257n31.

for example, describes Mary’s compassion under the cross as the physical pain of labor:

Valiant and loving, the Virgin Mary paid the price [of our redemption] . . . in her loving compassion for Christ. As it is said in the Gospel of John: “A woman when she is in labor hath sorrow, because her hour is come.” . . . Mary su�ered no pains in giving birth to Christ, for she did not conceive out of sin like Eve, who was cursed; but now, under the Cross she gives birth in pain.59

MS 410’s depictions of Mary in the Circumcision and Cruci�xion images likewise allow the reader-viewer to con-template the contrast between her �rst, painless parturition and her second, anguished parting.

Yet another departure from the Meditationes text occurs in the depiction of the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt (Fig. 11, fol. 23r). Here Mary rides an ass at the center of the com-position; her raised and outstretched palm is directed to-ward her son, who is riding on Joseph’s shoulders. �e image pre�gures the Return from Egypt, placed a few folios later (Fig. 12, fol. 28r), which likewise presents striking deviations from the Meditationes. �e text invites the reader to take the Christ child by the hand and walk with the Holy Family: “So they began to leave and Joseph went on ahead with the men, and our Lady followed at a distance with the women. But taking the boy by the hand, you go ahead in the middle, in front of his mother. For she would not let him walk behind her.”60 On fol. 28r, however, the child is riding an ass, again at the center of the composition, while Joseph walks behind. Mary stands in front of the animal, one arm extended to bend down a palm branch. �e bent palm frond echoes Mary’s out-stretched palm in the Flight image (Fig. 11), and the visual reference could be read as a pun on the Latin word palma, commonly used for both hand and tree.61 In the later Middle Ages, Mary herself was sometimes referred to as the fruitful palm. Jacobus da Voragine, for example, interpreted the palm as Christ’s nurturing mother.62

59. Bonaventure, from the chapter on Fortitude in Collationes de septem donis Spiritus Sancti, in Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae 5.487a; quoted in Ne�, “Pain of Compassio,” 257.

60. John of Caulibus, Meditations, 50.61. Amy Ne�, “Palma Dabit Palmam: Franciscan �emes in

a Devotional Manuscript,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 65 (2002): 22–66, esp. 46.

62. Jacobus da Voragine, Mariale de laudibus deiparae Virginis, ed. Rudolph Cluti (Lyons: Martin, 1688), 369–71; see also Anselm Salzer, Die Sinnbilder und Beiworte Mariens in der deutschen Literatur und lateinischen Hymnenpoesie des Mittelalters: mit




Busby deemed the detail of the bent palm branch peculiar and associated it with the miracle of the date-palm tree de-scribed in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew.63 In this episode, well known to late medieval artists, Mary was hungry on the way to Egypt, so Christ ordered the tree to bend down.64 In MS 410, however, the bent branch is depicted in the Return from Egypt, not in the Flight into Egypt, and while the illumi-nator may have been using a pictorial model originally related

Berücksichtigung der patristischen Literatur; eine literar-historische Studie (Darmstadt: Wissenscha�liche Buchgesellscha�, 1967), 182.

63. Busby, “Study of the Illustrations,” 36.64. Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 20, in �e Apo cryphal Jesus:

Legends of the Early Church, ed. J. K. Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24–25. For the in�uence of this scene on medieval art, see David R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (London: Routledge, 2001), 98–101.

to the date-palm miracle, its placement here sparks quite dif-ferent meanings. It looks ahead to an episode described later in the same passage of the Meditationes: Joseph’s fourth dream and the journey to Nazareth, which occurred a�er the Holy Family’s Return from Egypt. �ese subjects are frequently overlooked because they are treated very brie�y in the Gospel account (Matt. 2:22–23).65 �e palm branch may refer to the prophecy in Matthew 2:23, “He shall be called a Nazarene.” In an attempt to explain Christ’s designation as a Nazarene, medieval commentators understood the Hebrew word netzer (branch or �owering shoot) in messianic terms.66 �e palm branch, traditionally associated with triumph, paradise, and virtue rewarded, is also depicted in scenes of Christ’s trium-phant Entry into Jerusalem, when he is publicly recognized as the messianic king.67 MS 410 explicitly links the two im-ages of the Return from Egypt and the Entry into Jerusalem by similar compositions and visual details (Figs. 12–13). �e placement of Christ on an ass in the Return from Egypt, rather than on foot as described in the text, plainly reveals this inten-tion. In both images, Christ rides with his right hand raised in blessing, followed by a white-bearded man dressed in blue—Joseph in the �rst image, Peter in the second. Mary’s palm branch in the Return from Egypt is echoed by the branches held by the boys in the Entry into Jerusalem.

�e three images—Flight into Egypt, Return from Egypt, and Entry into Jerusalem—thus o�er a web of intricate as-sociations (Figs. 11–13). In addition to inviting the reader-viewer to share the hardships of the Holy Family’s journey to and from Egypt, they invite meditation on the nurturing Virgin and the triumphant Christ. Many of the images that depart from the text repeat compositions, details, or colors to connect certain scenes from Christ’s childhood with others from his Passion. �is link is central to Franciscan thought and iconography and serves the main goal of the Meditationes text: to enable the Poor Clare reader to contemplate Christ’s Incarnation and use the dramatic accounts of his life to attain

65. Isa Ragusa and Ruth Wilkins Sullivan, “On Duccio’s Cycle of the Infancy of Christ: �e Flight and the Return,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 4 (1987): 646–49. In MS ital. 115 they are illustrated as two separate subjects. �e fourth dream shows the angel appearing to Joseph, asleep beside the Christ child. �e journey to Nazareth, which follows, moves from le� to right to distinguish it from the Return from Egypt, which moves in the opposite direction.

66. Ibid., 648. 67. For the rich symbolism of the palm tree, see Penelope Mayo,

“�e Crusaders under the Palm: Allegorical Plants and Cosmic Kingship in the Liber Floridus,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 27 (1973): 29–67; and Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 35–42, 47–49, 66, 92, 94–97.

Figure 11. �e Flight into Egypt, fol. 23r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




knowledge of his divinity.68 By deviating more or less sig-ni�cantly from the text, these representations allow the reader-viewer to approach these themes “inventively” and from an angle di�erent from that of the emotionally charged

68. See Lawrence F. Hundersmarck, “Reforming Life by Conforming It to the Life of Christ: Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditaciones vite Christi,” in Reform and Renewal in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Louis Pascoe, S.J., ed. Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 93–112. �is connection is also essential for understanding the Meditationes. McNamer, “Origins,” argues that the �rst version may have contained only these sections, into which the long moralizations, citations from past authorities, the ministry of Christ, and the extended discussion of the active and contemplative lives were interpolated by a later Franciscan author.

nar rative. �ey evoke a wider range of devotional connota -tions, resulting in a richer understanding of the theological lessons embedded in their visual cues and compositional analogies.

“Vice cannot be known, save by comparison with virtue”

�e Meditationes text is more than a vita Christi. It o�en elaborates the biblical narrative to provide the Poor Clare reader with explicit exempla that teach her about the life of prayer and the virtues of poverty and humility. Such moral lessons are o�en illustrated in MS ital. 115, whose reader-viewer could see Mary as a model for charity by watching her give the Magi’s gi�s to the poor or meditate on the pov-erty of the Holy Family by observing the image of the Christ

Figure 12. �e Return from Egypt, fol. 28r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

Figure 13. �e Entry into Jerusalem, fol. 114r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




child collecting money for the Return from Egypt.69 In MS 410, by contrast, events extraneous to the Gospel accounts are seldom illustrated. Instead, some less explicit moral les-sons about poverty and humility can be gleaned by studying contrasting Gospel scenes and their details. One theme in particular was used to teach the reader about humility and poverty: the feast. �e Meditationes is rich in descriptions of food and feasts, be�tting a female audience whose spirituality was o�en associated with the representation of food and was best exempli�ed by the �gures of Mary and Martha, meta-phors, respectively, for the contemplative and active life.70 �e section in MS 410 dealing with Christ’s ministry includes six images of �gures at a table, and four of them may be regarded as visual oppositions.71

One pair is formed by Christ healing Simeon’s mother-in-law on fol. 52r and the feast of Herod on fol. 56v (Figs. 14–15). Described brie�y in each of the synoptic Gospels, the heal-ing of Simeon’s mother-in-law is one of the lesser-known miracles.72 During his stay in Capernaum Christ touched her hand, and the sick woman immediately rose to minister to him and his disciples. �e Meditationes author uses the in-cident as an example of Christ’s love of poverty, describing the meal as crude and quickly prepared, and of his humil-ity, pointing out that he proceeded to serve the guests along with the risen woman. MS 410 depicts only the service of the mother-in-law, making her an exemplum of faith and humil-ity (Fig. 14). A long table divides the image into two registers. At the upper le�, Christ extends his hand to bless the woman who, “gripped by a raging fever,” lies at the lower right in a blue dress, hands raised toward her Savior.73 At lower le�, a woman o�ers a dish to the disciples seated above; although she is now wearing orange, this woman appears to be a second depiction of the same mother-in-law, who “immediately got up and waited upon him and his disciples.”74 �e text goes on to describe the simple food o�ered to the men, visualized here as animal heads and a �sh.75

A strikingly similar composition, against an identical pink-diapered background, is used to depict the feast of Herod (Fig. 15). It is again divided by a long table, and there

69. Flora, Devout Belief of the Imagination, 197–220.70. Hundersmarck, “Reforming Life,” 105–7. See also Dominique

Rigaux, “�e Franciscan Tertiaries at the Convent of Sant’Anna at Foligno,” Gesta 31, no. 2 (1992): 92–98. For the correlation between female spirituality and food, see Bynum, Holy Feast.

71. �e other two are the Wedding at Cana (fol. 47r) and Christ with Mary and Martha (fol. 76r).

72. Matt. 8:14–17; Mark 1:21–34; Luke 4:31–43.73. John of Caulibus, Meditations, 94.74. Ibid., citing Matt. 8:14–15; Mark 1:30–31; Luke 4:38–39.75. Flora, Devout Belief of the Imagination, 166.

is no architectural framing. Two events occupy the lower half of the picture and similarly invite the reader-viewer to move from right to le�, from the beheading of John the Baptist to Salome serving the head to Herod. �e depiction deviates from the text, which describes how the Baptist was beheaded while in prison, as he is in MS ital. 115. �e MS 410 designer relocates this detail in favor of the two-register composition and suggestive analogies to the modest feast with Simeon’s mother-in-law. �e images create an opposition that surely was intended to urge the reader-viewer to meditate on the correct way to serve Christ and on the serving of Christ in the Eucharist.76 In both lower registers women are shown serving men, with the �sh o�ered by Simeon’s mother-in-law ech-oed in the severed head of the Baptist. �e mother-in-law’s humble plate of �sh, an early Christian metaphor for Christ, has Eucharistic overtones, and her raised hands call to mind the priest’s elevation of the host.77 �e simplicity of this meal is emphasized: the �sh lies on a plain brown plate supported by the bare hands of the server, while the shimmering gold surrounding John’s head is both splendid platter and halo, o�ered by hands covered with a cloth. Since Late Antiquity, veiled hands, manus velatae, were an aspect of courtly ritual signifying the presence of an emperor.78

As in other pairings in the manuscript, the illuminator used color to draw the viewer’s attention to the women in the two feast scenes. Whereas the sick mother-in-law wears blue, the healed one wears orange with white trim, like the stand-ing �gure of Salome. �e contrast between the two women is emphasized by other features of their dress and especially by their decorum, or lack thereof. Salome’s eyes are open and in-appropriately directed toward the sovereign whom she serves, while the upright mother-in-law faces away from Christ and

76. For a discussion of these aspects of the text, see ibid., 143–67; and eadem, “�e Charity of the Virgin Mary in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Ms. Ital. 115,” Studies in Iconography 29 (2008): 55–89. On women’s access to the host, see Je�rey F. Hamburger, �e Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 89–100, 414–15.

77. On the gesture of elevation, see V. L. Kennedy, “�e Moment of Consecration and the Elevation of the Host,” Medieval Studies 6 (1944): 121–50; on its visual representation, see Moshe Barasch, “ ‘Elevatio’: �e Depiction of a Ritual Gesture,” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 43–56; and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: �e Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131–34.

78. For the meaning of the manus velatae, see Günther W. Morath, Die Maximianskathedra in Ravenna: ein Meisterwerk christlich-antiker Reliefkunst (Freiburg: Herder, 1940), 48; and Franz Cumont, “L’Adoration des Mages et l’art triomphal de Rome,” Memorie della Ponti�cia Accademia romana di archeologia, ser. 3, 3 (1932–33): 81–105.




applies herself to the act of serving, implying her humility.79

Her hair is covered by a veil, while the bareheaded Salome shows o� an elaborate coi�ure and wears a high-waisted, open-necked dress as she serves her sinful trophy to the earthly ruler.

Another visual opposition allies two otherwise unrelated text sections: the Magdalen washing Christ’s feet and drying them with her hair (Fig. 16, fol. 54v) and Christ casting out the merchants from the Temple (Fig. 17, fol. 73v). �ese im-ages share a composition and background that do not occur

79. Salome as a negative model for the cloistered has been studied by Linda Seidel, “Salome and the Canons,” in “Women in the Middle Ages,” special issue, Women’s Studies 11, nos. 1–2 (1984): 29–66. �e nine images illustrating the chapter on John’s death in MS ital. 115 are similarly suggestive and relate to the illustrations of the feast of Cana, opposing Mary as a devotional model to Salome. See Flora, Devout Belief of the Imagination, 164–65.

anywhere else in the manuscript. Both picture two arches, a table occupied by two �gures, and Christ on the le� wearing an orange tunic and purple cloak. �is pairing of scenes was probably intended to stimulate the reader-viewer to contem-plate her worldly possessions or, more precisely, the need to cast them aside.

�roughout the Meditationes the author warns the reader never to involve herself in worldly things. An eloquent exam-ple is the Temple scene, where he urges:

Watch him [Christ] closely, and pity him, for he is �lled with the anguish of compassion. At the same time, be fearful: for if we, who have been assigned to the very temple of God by his great and special grace, should entangle ourselves in worldly business just as they were doing, when we ought to be intent on praising God at all times, rightly then, we can and ought to fear his in-dignation and expulsion. �erefore, if you do not want to be troubled by this fear, under no circumstance

Figure 15. Herod’s feast, fol. 56v, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford).

Figure 14. Simeon’s feast, fol. 52r, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford).




should you dare involve yourself in worldly concerns or dealings.80

Christ’s reproach of the tradesmen is opposed to his accep -tance of the Magdalen’s penance and casting away of her earthly possessions; the cords of the whip visually echo but in meaning strongly contrast with the locks of her hair wip-ing Christ’s feet (Fig. 16). �e Meditationes relates that the Magdalen used her hair because she had nothing more pre-cious with her and she wished to suppress her vanity and convert her beauty to a humble and useful purpose. Readers would recall St. Clare’s renunciation of worldly goods in the symbolic act of cutting o� her golden locks. Wiping her own tears with her hair made the Magdalen an exemplum of perfect


penitentie. Her preconversion life is represented as wallowing in sin; she is the living embodiment of worldly vanity and lu-xuria. Purveyors of vanities embraced her as their protector; she was the patron saint of perfumers, glovers, hairdressers, cosmetic makers, and the like.81 Yet her feast day, 22 July, was associated with casting away worldly goods. In 1290 a sump-tuary law issued in the kingdom of Naples regulated the use of luxury goods on the day of the Magdalen’s commemoration.82

81. Katherine Ludwig Jansen, �e Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 250. She notes that in Bologna the Magdalen was the patron saint of the drapers’ guild.

82. Giuseppe Del Giudice, Una legge suntuaria inedita del 1290: memoria letta all’Accademia pontaniana nelle tornate del 16 marzo e 20 aprile 1884 (Naples: Regia Università, 1887). �e biographer of Diana d’Andalò (d. 1236), a Bolognese noblewoman and founder of

Figure 16. Mary Magdalen wiping Christ’s feet, fol. 54v, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permission of �e President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

Figure 17. Christ casting out the merchants from the Temple, fol. 73v, ca. 1350, Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410 (photo: by permis-sion of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




�ese examples demonstrate that formal repetitions were employed in MS 410 to attract the reader-viewer’s attention to thematic oppositions intended to teach her proper moral conduct. �e rhetoric of oppositio was a popular educational device among the Franciscans. As the friar Salimbene de Adam explains in the section of his Chronicle that he calls the “Book of the Prelate,” desirable behavior may be learned by observing not only the faults of evil prelates but also the proper qualities of good ones. He notes, quoting Jerome, that “Vice cannot be known, save by comparison with virtue.”83

�is approach can also be found in texts composed for Poor Clares, such as the Meditationes, where the author urges his reader to use the biblical events to distinguish vice from vir-tue: “It is unnecessary to bring into your meditation the moral points and references I have interpolated in this work for your instruction, unless such should occur to you of itself as an immediate means of acquiring some virtue or detesting some vice.”84 Placed a few folios apart, the Gospel scenes discussed here invite the reader-viewer to collate and associate, recom-bining the biblical events to learn about virtue by compar-ing it to vice. Linked by repeated compositions, details, and colors, they could serve as an “immediate means” to facilitate moral insights.

Conclusion

Like the images of its better-known contemporary, MS ital. 115, the pictorial program of MS 410 was used to pro mote

one of the �rst Dominican convents in Italy, connects her conversion to the Magdalen’s feast day. Obliged to live according to her family’s aristocratic station, Diana draped herself in purple silk and gold, silver, and precious stones until, “One day, on the feast of Saint Mary Magdalen, she announced that she wanted to visit the monastery called Ronzano. So she went to the house there with immense pomp and honor, with a great throng of ladies attending her. When she arrived there, she went alone into the sisters’ dormitory, and suddenly asked for the habit and was given it.” See Jansen, Making of the Magdalen, 250.

83. Joseph L. Baird, Giuseppe Baglivi, and John Robert Kane, eds., The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), 149; and Jerome, Commentary on Matthew 1.9, in Migne, PL 26 (1845): col. 60.


the text’s female Franciscan ideals about earthly and spiri-tual wealth, chastity, and humility and Christ’s humanity and divinity. Unlike the Paris manuscript, the images in Oxford frequently employ repetition and opposition in accord with popular rhetorical devices of storytelling. What do these image-based devices tell us about the particular reading modality and agency of MS 410’s likely Poor Clare reader? Unfortunately, we cannot know with certainty how she would have used her lavishly illustrated book; the manuscript does not show signs of wear indicating how and how much it was handled. Its pictorial rhetoric, however, would allow MS 410’s reader-viewer to imprint the scenes of Christ’s life on her heart and mind and, through their formal repetitions or mental hooks, invite her to collate, compare, and associate—in other words, to actively interpret the text with each new reading. Formal repetitions would lead her back and forth in the book to meditate on the meaning of similar or contrasting images. Although not resulting in particularly complex com-parisons, these visual cues and associations nonetheless en-courage a deeper understanding of the embedded moral and theological lessons and would probably sustain the reader’s interest in the long and detailed text read day a�er day.

�e Meditationes was one of the most in�uential late me-dieval devotional texts. Art historians have long related its detailed visualization of the emotionally charged narrative with the rise of a�ective religious representations, and schol-ars have also connected its use of empathetic strategies with female readership.85 Study of MS 410’s unusual pictorial pro-gram suggests that it facilitated more than the reader’s de-tailed visualization of the devotional drama. Like monastic reading, which is o�en described as associative, it encouraged simultaneous recollections. As visual analogy or opposition, repeated compositions or parts of compositions invited the medieval reader-viewer to interrupt the linear progression of the narrative and, by moving from one visual cue to another, to invent the Meditationes anew throughout her life.

85. An association recently articulated by Sarah McNamer, A�ective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).



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