Image, Text and Meaning in Illuminated Saints’ Lives

A Conversation with Kathryn Gerry, Summer Research Fellow, and Laura Cleaver, Senior Lecturer in Manuscript Studies

On 13 July 2023 Dr Kathryn Gerry, a visiting fellow from Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Maine, USA), and Dr Laura Cleaver, Senior Lecturer in Manuscript Studies at the University of London, met with students and staff to discuss Dr Gerry’s research and look at some of the manuscript treasures held at Senate House Library. Dr Gerry was at the IES as a Summer Resident in Manuscript and Print Studies, researching illuminated saints lives produced in England in the thirteenth century. The session included discussion of her interests in manuscripts as objects of study and some of the central tenets of her current research.

Working with a small group of manuscripts created at least in part by Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century monk at St Albans Abbey, Kathryn is exploring the connections between text and image, arguing that in some cases at least, images are not merely illustrations but constitute separate versions of the story, essentially becoming texts in their own right.

On view during the conversation was a series of pictures of the Life, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, a cycle of images presented alone on the parchment, free of any text. While these pictures were almost certainly once part of a small book used for devotional prayer, probably a Psalter, they were at some point cut out of that book and exist now as fragmentary single images. Even when they were part of a book they were not illustrating the Bible, but instead presented the story in a purely pictorial format, drawing on the four canonical gospels as well as popular medieval accounts of Christ to create a distinct version of the story.

The discussion also explored the categories into which modern researchers place medieval books. We frequently divide medieval texts and images into categories that align with our own values and social structures, for example classifying some books as historical, others and devotional, and others as scientific. One of Kathryn’s contentions in her work on illuminated saints lives is that these categories might be limiting our viewpoint, preventing us from seeing connections between books that medieval readers would have taken for granted. For example, in the case of saints’ lives, also known as hagiographies, we might prioritize the spiritual claims of the story and ignore the historical and geographical information that was also integrated into the narrative, whereas a medieval reader might have understood the life of a saint and the life of a king in similar terms.

Senate House MS 1, an account of the Life of Edward the Black Prince, offers a clear demonstration of this: in the twenty-first century, Edward is largely thought of as a secular figure notable for his role in the political and military history of fourteenth-century England and France, but the image in the manuscript presents him as a devout Christian knight, kneeling humbly below an image of the Holy Trinity. The fact that this was the only image in the book underscores the high value that medieval European audiences placed on the spiritual realm, which many at the time would have seen as simply inseparable from any other concern.

_{Manuscript images courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London}