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Romantic Geography and the Crusades: British Library Royal Ms Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture Volume 2 Issue 3 53-76 2009 Romantic Geography and the Crusades: British Library Royal ms. 19 D I Maureen Quigley Saint Louis University Follow this and additional works at: https://digital.kenyon.edu/perejournal Part of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons Recommended Citation Quigley, Maureen. "Romantic Geography and the Crusades: British Library Royal ms. 19 D I." Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 2, 3 (2009): 53-76. https://digital.kenyon.edu/ perejournal/vol2/iss3/3 This Feature Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art History at Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture by an authorized editor of Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Quigley Romantic Geography and the Crusades: British Library Royal ms. 19 D I By Maureen Quigley, Saint Louis University It is not unusual in the shorthand of manuscript illumination of the first half of the fourteenth century to simplify place and emphasize action when presenting a scene of historical interest. Miniatures in chronicles and romances are often filled with events, such as battle scenes or historical meetings that take place in front of a blank or geometrically patterned background – perhaps a rather generic building may be depicted or a lonely tree may appear -- but rarely is there any indication that the action takes place in a recognizable location. This is true for miniatures in books produced in France during the reign of King Philip VI of Valois (1328- 1350), which, while conforming to the highest level of artistic fashion at the Parisian court, rarely incorporated the developing illusionistic techniques for placing a scene’s protagonists within an architectural or environmental space favored by earlier illuminators such as Jean Pucelle or the contemporary Italian painters working for the Papal Court in Avignon like Simone 1 Martini. 1 The number of manuscripts created in Paris in the reign of Philip VI is larger than I will include here, but the following books should be considered for their stylistic relevance: Vincent of Beauvais, Miroir Historial (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. fr. 3160; the Book of Hours of Jeanne de Navarre (Paris, BNF, ms. n.a.l. 3145); Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, Vie et miracles de Saint Louis (Paris, BNF, ms. fr. 5716); and the Process of Robert d’Artois (Paris, BNF, ms. fr. 18437). Crusades manuscripts produced during the 1330s will be listed below. For contemporary stylistic comparisons in which the technical interest in illusionistic space or rather, the lack thereof, in manuscripts of the 1330s and earlier is immediately apparent see the still relevant François Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France: The Fourteenth Century (1310-1380), (New York, and London, 1978); and the newer survey in Colette Beaune, Le miroir du pouvoir: Les manuscrits des rois de France au moyen âge, (Paris, 1997); and for an Italian alternative to the French miniatures under discussion, see Simone Martini’s title 53 Published by Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange, 2009 Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, Vol. 2, Iss. 3 [2009] In this moment just before – or even as – manuscript illumination and painting in general became focused on increasingly realistic representations of illusionistic space, I suggest that the Parisian court artists were not actually unconcerned with where the action being depicted took place; rather, they conformed to a definition of place that relied on human experience and action more strongly than on topographic distinction.2 In this essay, I focus on the artistic emphasis on action over location in a single manuscript whose raison d’être seems to be the identification of specific far-off lands for the purpose of travel and battle, yet whose representation of those places remains generic. The manuscript is known rather blandly as the Crusading Miscellany (London, British Library, Royal ms. 19 D I – hereafter abbreviated to Royal 19 D I).3 In this manuscript, most likely created at the behest of a member of Philip VI’s court, scenes of crusade and foreign adventure occur in locations identified with great specificity in the text, yet the miniatures rarely include even a single topographic element allowing identification of an individual site; instead the action of the protagonists is highlighted.4 This striking imbalance of place and action creates what I prefer to think of as an “experiential geography” in which page to Petrarch’s Virgil of c. 1336, available online at www.wga.hu/frames- e.html?/html/s/simone/7last/4virgil.html. 2 Interest in the style of late medieval illumination often focuses on the question of “realistic” versus “not-so- realistic” questions. Regarding the introduction of perspective and increasingly complicated composition in the background of manuscript miniatures, see the many volumes of Millard Meiss’s monumental study, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: I. The Late Fourteenth Century and the Patronage of the Duke (London, 1967); II. The Boucicaut Master (London, 1968); III. The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries (London, 1974). For a more recent contribution, see Christine Geisler Andrews, “The Boucicaut Masters,” Gesta 41/1 (2002), 29-38. 3 Research for this project was carried out under the auspices of a grant from the American Trust for the British Library, enabling a three-month internship in the Manuscripts Department at the British Library, and a Mellon Faculty Development Grant from Saint Louis University. I would like to thank these authorities and the directors and staff of the British Library for their invaluable aid, especially Kathleen Doyle, Peter Kidd, and Scot McKendrick. 4 For example, the city of Campision is described in the body of the text both according to its location and the actions and nature of its inhabitants. The rubrics above the miniature, however, is almost as simple as the scene itself, reading only “de la cite de capisio.” See figure 10 below. 54 https://digital.kenyon.edu/perejournal/vol2/iss3/3 Quigley personal experience is emphasized over location – even when that location is known, is identified clearly, and is, on many levels, the point of the manuscript. 5 In1332, when Philip VI of Valois declared an overseas crusade only a few years after his accession to the throne of France, few people actually knew the physical location of the Holy Land; it was, rather vaguely, “overseas.”6 Outremer was, simply, that land across the Mediterranean where Christ once lived. Generations of Christian merchants, pilgrims and crusaders had visited, making the Holy Land of the fourteenth century a knowable, if not necessarily a personally experienced, place to a European audience. Since the fall of Jerusalem in 1291 to the Mamluks, European leaders had planned the military recovery of the Holy Land. This was especially true of the French, who had the recent crusading example of St. Louis IX.7 In a well-established practice, Philip VI, the first king of the newly established Valois dynasty, emphasized a relationship to the most important members of his bloodline as a means of acknowledging his authority – St. Louis being the most important Capetian relative for this 5 Many of my thoughts on this topic were inspired by ideas relatively common in the study of cultural geography, but less prevalent (at least to this point) in the realm of art history. Influential to a formulation of an “experiential geography” as it relates to medieval manuscript painting, although not specifically dealing with the medium, are Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, (Chicago, 2004); Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, (Minneapolis, 1977); and the numerous late antique and medieval authors represented in Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, (Philadelphia, 2002), especially Hugh of St. Victor and his “memory aids.” Likewise, Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, (Cambridge, 1990), and Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, (Chicago, 1966), prove essential reading in their approaches to the idea of the difference between personally experienced remembrance and artificially constructed knowledge. 6 Although the bibliography of crusader scholarship is vast, it is possible to note a few important sources for Philip VI’s unsuccessful program. See Raymond Cazelles, La Societé politique et la crise de la royauté sous Philippe de Valois, (Paris, 1958); Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From Lyons to Alcazar, (Oxford and New York, 1992); Antony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land, The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000); Christopher Tyerman, “Philip VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land,” The English Historical Review, 100/394, (1985), 25-52; and Jules Viard, “Les projets de croisade de Philippe VI de Valois,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 97 (1936), 305-316. 7 For royal participation in the cult of St. Louis, see especially Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, ed. Frederic L. Cheyette, trans. Susan Ross Huston, (Berkeley, 1991); Elizabeth A.R. Brown,
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