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236 Reviews Like This Will Be Obvious 236 Reviews like this will be obvious. The half-flaw concerns the complexity of nomenclature for hands; as a result of Saenger's elaborations on T.J. Brown's improvements on the system originally advanced by Neil Ker, we have such terminology as a mid- twelfth-century Reading Abbey hand's being called 'proto-gothic textualis media formata' (p. 23). Is this truly progress? But no catalogue of manuscripts is perfect, and it is worth pointing out these deficiencies only in the hope that future enterprises may avoid them. Any such Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/s6-16/3/236/965982 by guest on 24 September 2021 enterprises will also do well to emulate the many excellencies of Saenger's work — above all in the painstaking identification of texts, which reaches its climax with MS 102.2, a Jerome, Epistolae, written in Ancona in 1459, where no fewer than 189 items (many, of course, not by Jerome) are identified, with incipits and explicits. If it is primarily the year of publication which links these two works, there is also an obvious connection in the nature of the libraries concerned. Enviable as their buildings and their collections are in both cases, students of medieval and Renais- sance manuscripts will find them equally enviable in these catalogues which now display their riches so amply to the world of scholarship. Oh that the British Library were anything like as well supplied! Chapel Hill RICHARD W. PFAFF Splendours of Flanders: Late Medieval Art in Cambridge Collections. By ALAIN ARNOULD and JEAN MICHEL MASSING, with contributions from PETER SPUFFORD and MARK BLACKBURN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. xiv + 240 pp.; 46 colour plates and numerous illus. in black and white. £29.95 (paperbound £17.95). ISBN 0521 44157 9; 0521 44692 9. THIS VERY HANDSOME CATALOGUE was produced to accompany an exhibition held at the Fitzwilliam Museum from July to September 1993, when items from the University Library, eight individual colleges, and the Fitzwilliam's own collections, supplemented by loans from the British Library, Holkham Hall, and from a private collection of coins, were put on display. The exhibition was the brainchild of Alain Arnould and Jean Michel Massing, both members of the university, and they are responsible for the catalogue, apart from a lively essay on the historical background by Peter Spufford and a section on the contemporary coinage of the Burgundian Netherlands provided by the same author in collaboration with Mark Blackburn. A handful of small pieces of devotional sculpture, a tapestry, and an enormous iron-bound chest on wheels were included among the exhibits to add background colour. These are illustrated in the catalogue but are not the subject of individual entries. The importance of the project was acknowledged by the government of Flanders, which named the exhibition a 'Cultural Ambassador to England', and it attracted the support of the Gemeentskrediet/Credit Communal of Belgium, jointly responsible for publication of the catalogue. Every exhibit is reproduced in black and white and there is a generous selection of colour plates of very high quality. It is sad that in virtually every case the subject chosen for colour reproduction duplicates one that already appears in black and white. While this is inevitable when dealing with panel paintings, it is an irritating waste of an opportunity where manuscripts containing a multiplicity of fine and often unfamiliar miniatures are concerned. Reviews 237 The catalogue is divided into seven sections, each preceded by a short introduc- tory essay. The first section, written by Dr Massing, covers thirteen paintings on panel and two drawings, all but one of them (from Queens' College) taken from the Fitzwilliam's own collections. All date from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and they are largely anonymous, including none by the most celebrated artists of the period. To students of manuscripts such anonymity is of course a commonplace. They are none the less a remarkable group, representing a consider- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/s6-16/3/236/965982 by guest on 24 September 2021 able range both in subject and in scale. Visitors to the exhibition itself will have been struck by the modest, often tiny size of a number of the paintings, sometimes little larger than a page of manuscript and clearly designed for intimate personal use. The bulk of the catalogue, covering some sixty items, is devoted to manuscripts and early printed books, with essays and commentaries by Dr Arnould. Among the seventeen printed exhibits were magnificent examples of the work of Caxton, Colard Mansion, Arend de Keyser, Ludovicus Ravescot, and Gerard Leeu, repre- senting the major centres of Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Antwerp. The wide spread of early presses within Flanders during the final quarter of the fifteenth century is stressed, as is the remarkable exent to which printers from the Low Countries exported their skills to other parts of Europe, including Spain, France, and England. The geographical situation of the region, encouraging its develop- ment as Europe's leading marketplace, made it a natural focus for the development of this new, exciting, and indeed revolutionary technique and for its rapid disse- mination. Arnould is at pains to underline the close connection of such early printers as Mansion with the contemporary trade in manuscript books. The exhibits included some very striking illuminated printed pages as well as a number of fine early woodcut illustrations. It is unclear to me why the early family resemblances between the design and execution of a printed library book and its manuscript predecessor should so regularly inspire comments about 'imitation'. When printing first appeared, the manuscript book offered the only available model. Only after the new method of production had found its own level was an independent approach to design, illustration, and even letter forms to be expected. Five sections of the catalogue are devoted to illuminated manuscripts and will have a lasting value as a point of first reference for some of the most beautiful and interesting works in the Cambridge libraries. It comes as no surprise to find that some forty percent of the entries describe Books of Hours. An attempt is made to provide a brief definition of this popular type of devotional book, though this is unfortunately marred both by some factual errors (there are eight, not seven, parts to the Hours of the Virgin and it is the suffrages of the saints, not the litany, that attracts a series of illustrations) and by misleading emphases. By the time most of these examples were made, the Book of Hours had been a fashionable accessory for the better part of two centuries, so the illuminators of Flanders were in fact following schemes of illustration that had been devised as early as the middle of the thirteenth century. Ten of the Home are of Sarum use, made for the English market largely during the first half of the fifteenth century. These are typically not of the highest quality, though each is a solid example of this particular class of manuscript. A dozen further specimens somewhat later in date include books with miniatures by Simon Marmion and Simon Bening, and one entire volume in the style associated with the anonymous Master of the Prayerbooks of c. 1500. 238 Reviews Several further liturgical books join these in representing the very finest work of the late Flemish ateliers. Bening reappears in an unusual volume of ceremonies made for the personal use of Robert de Clercq, who was abbot of the Cistercian house of Ter Duinen in Bruges from 1519 until 1557, and in two detached miniatures from a Rosary Psalter, apparently designed for the Spanish market. Also perhaps intended for a Spanish patron are four loose miniatures, part of a set from which eleven examples have so far been identified, the purpose of which is unclear. Blank on the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/s6-16/3/236/965982 by guest on 24 September 2021 reverse and enclosed in symmetrical border decoration not apparently designed for inclusion in a bound volume, they could possibly have been intended for mounting as a small altarpiece. They are of excellent quality, painted in the early years of the sixteenth century, and had previously attracted very little attention. One at least could with advantage have been included among the colour plates. In the catalogue as a whole, three books stand head and shoulders above all the rest. One is the Breviary of Margaret of York, lent from St John's College, and the others are the two outstanding secular volumes from the library at Holkham Hall. The Breviary, of Sarum use, was made at some point between Margaret's marriage to Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1468 and his death early in 1477. Their joint initials appear frequently within the marginal decoration. Although now far from complete (some cuttings apparently taken from this manuscript are in the Cotton collection in the British Library, though they are not mentioned here), this book is of the first importance as a closely dated work associated with the Master of Mary of Burgundy. The catalogue entry assigns it to c. 1470 but a date closer to 1477 seems more probable, as the border decoration incorporates elements of the new illusionistic style alongside the more traditional sprays and acanthus leaves with their plain vellum ground. The first of the Holkham manuscripts also once belonged to Duchess Margaret and was apparently commissioned for her by her stepdaughter, Charles's daughter Mary of Burgundy. It is dated 1477. Its superb miniatures, executed in grisaille delicately heightened with a little colour, are attributable to the so-called Master of the First Prayerbook of Maximilian I (widely held to be Alexander Bening, father of Simon) and may be grouped with a number of other examples of his work around 1480.
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