Image, Knife, and Gluepot E-Book

Kathryn M. Rudy

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In this ingenious study, Kathryn Rudy takes the reader on a journey to trace the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500. Image, Knife, and Gluepot painstakingly reconstructs the process by which this manuscript was created and discusses its significance as a text at the forefront of fifteenth-century book production, when the invention of mechanically-produced images led to the creation of new multimedia objects. Rudy then travels to the nineteenth century to examine the phenomenon of manuscript books being pillaged for their prints and drawings: she has diligently tracked down the dismembered parts of this book of hours for the first time. Image, Knife, and Gluepot also documents Rudy’s twenty-first-century research process, as she hunts through archives while grappling with the logistics and occasionally the limits of academic research. 


This is a timely volume, focusing on questions of materiality at the forefront of medieval and literary studies. Beautifully illustrated throughout, its use of original material and its striking interdisciplinary approach, combining book and art history, make it a significant academic achievement.

Image, Knife, and Gluepot is a valuable text for any scholar in the fields of medieval studies, the history of early books and publishing, cultural history or material culture. Written in Rudy’s inimitable style, it will also be rewarding for any student enrolled in a course on manuscript production, as well as non-specialists interested in the afterlives of manuscripts and prints.

 The Royal Society of Edinburgh has generously contributed to this Open Access publication.


Due to the number and quality of the images in this book, we have provided the option of a more expensive hardback edition, printed on the best quality paper available, in order to present the images as clearly and beautifully as possible. We hope this range of options — the freely available PDF, HTML and XML editions; the economically priced EPUB, MOBI and paperback editions; and the more expensively printed hardback — will satisfy everyone.

Furthermore the HTML edition allows readers to magnify the images of the manuscripts displayed in the book.

Leseprobe

Image, Knife, And Gluepot

Image, Knife, and Gluepot

Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print

Kathryn M. Rudy

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2019 Kathryn M. Rudy

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that she endorses you or your use of the work).

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Kathryn M. Rudy. Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0145

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This work was supported by The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-516-6

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-517-3

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-518-0

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-519-7

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-520-3

ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-725-2

DOI 10.11647/OBP.0145

Cover image: Folio from the beghards’ book of hours, with a pen drawing of a kneeling cleric, beneath an initial that probably once contained a print depicting St Clare. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 41338, fol. 9v

Cover design: Anna Gatti

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.

Contents

Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Bibliographical Note

xiii

A Note on Images

xv

0.

Introduction:

Hybrid Books in Flux

11

1.

Cut, Pasted, and Cut Again:

The Fate of 140 German and Netherlandish Single-Leaf Prints at the Hands of a Limburg Franciscan and a Modern Connoisseur

11

The Beghards of Maastricht and their Commercial Pursuits

25

Israhel’s Roundels

39

The Logic of Accession Numbers

47

The Knife as a Tool for Creativity

54

Silhouettes and Doubles

59

The Thin Red Line

65

Split Personalities

71

Foliation

77

A Group of Woodcuts, Possibly Netherlandish

83

Appropriating German Engravings

89

Painted Prints from the Circle of Israhel van Meckenem

91

Monogrammist A

96

Attributions

99

Recapitulation

102

Book Production

108

A Sheaf of Drawings

110

Revolutionary Upheavals and the Dispersal of the Prints

132

The Missing Images: In Paris?

140

Rothschild

148

Tross, Again

155

Holes and Patterns

159

Conclusions

162

2.

A Novel Function for the Calendar in Add. Ms. 24332

167

Calendars and the Principle of Interchangeable Parts

168

Book Technologies and Social Networks

174

A Book for Children

186

Jan van Emmerick

189

Conclusions

194

3.

The Beghards in the Sixteenth Century

197

Another Hoard of Prints From Maastricht

198

The Calendar of Add. 31002

205

Similarities Between Add. 24332 and Add. 31002

212

25 Years Later

218

Dating the Later Manuscript

223

Israhel van Meckenem

226

Conclusion: Changes Over Three Decades

239

4.

Manuscripts with Prints:

A Sticky Idea

245

Patterns

247

Hiding in Plain Sight: Prints from Another Drugulin Manuscript

253

The Dregs in Paris

263

Berlin

267

Bleeding into a Chalice

273

Manuscripts Still Intact

284

Israhel van Meckenem as a Master of Self-Promotion

293

Conclusions: Some Assembly Required

300

List of Illustrations

307

E-figures

321

Bibliography

337

General Index

349

Index of Manuscripts and Prints

355

Abbreviations

Amsterdam, UB

Amsterdam, Universiteitsbibliotheek

Berlin, KK

Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

BM P&D

London, British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings

BnF

Paris, Bibliothèque national de France

The Hague, KB

The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek — The National Library of the Netherlands

Maastricht, RHCL

Maastricht, Regionaal Historisch Centrum Limburg

L

Lehrs, Max. Geschichte und Kritischer Katalog des Deutschen, Niederländischen und Französischen Kupferstichs im XV. Jahrhundert. 9 vols. (Vienna: Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1908).

London, BL

London, British Library

London, BM

London, British Museum

P&D

Prints & Drawings

S

Schreiber, Wilhelm Ludwig. Manuel de l’Amateur de la Gravure sur Bois et sur Métal au XVe Siècle. 8 vols. (Berlin: A. Cohn, 1891-1911).

Vienna, ÖNB

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

Weert, GM

Weert, Gemeentemuseum Jacob van Horne

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without several important studies that preceded it. In addition to the great cataloguers of the nineteenth century, whose work I both loathe and cherish, my contemporaries have not only contributed to knowledge, but have also convinced me that this topic is worthy of pursuit. I am fortunate that many of those scholars have become friends: Hanno Wijsman, Ursula Weekes, James Marrow, Peter Schmidt, David Areford, Peter Parshall, Giulia Bartrum, Sheila O’Connell, Séverine Lepape, Huigen Leeflang, Erik Geleijns, Todor Petev, Eamon Duffy, Elizabeth Savage, and Ad Stijnman: thank you. I also thank Paul Taylor at the Warburg Institute for telling me where I could find the images whose photographs were neatly organised in the image library, Kathleen Doyle, Scot McKendrick, Julian Harrison, Clarck Drieshen, and Amy Jeffs at the British Library, Joris Van Grieken at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België — the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique. James Marrow, Emily Rose, and Stephanie Azzarello provided nourishing hospitality and more. Jamie Harper suggested the book’s title. And I thank Jeffrey Hamburger and Maria Theisen for inviting me to Vienna to discuss some of these ideas at a conference in 2015.

In 2011 and 2017 this project received grants from the Neil Ker Foundation, administered by the British Academy, for which I am truly grateful. In 2011 the Foundation granted me £1000 toward the cost of travelling to Paris to use the collections in the BnF; and in 2017 they granted me £1981.45 to partially offset the costs of images. The University of St Andrew’s Open Access fund kindly contributed towards the cost of the book’s publication by Open Book Publishers; the School of Art History also made a generous donation in exchange for my putting in 175 hours of work as chair of the Athena SWAN/Equality and Diversity Committee in 2017. Andrew Demetrius of the School of Art History at St Andrews kindly prepared the digital images for publication.

I am grateful to Katharine Ridler, who read the text and suggested useful improvements, and to Emily Savage, who made perspicacious editorial suggestions. Lisa Regan helped me to find the unconventional scholarly voice in these pages, and I am deeply indebted to her insights. I thank the anonymous peer reviewers who did not pull any punches in their reports. One of them found it unsavoury that I discuss such topics as academic salaries, the costs of images, funding models, and the personal financial hardships that the academic marketplace foists upon us. However, at the risk of irritating this person further, I have not only decided to leave these sections in the final draft, but to develop them, as I believe that a more open discussion about such matters is urgent.

Bibliographical Note

Some of the ideas in this book first appeared in my previous books and articles:

Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘How to Prepare the Bedroom for the Bridegroom’, in Frauen-kloster-kunst: Neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. by Carola Jaeggi, Hedwig Roeckelein and Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 369–75.

—, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Isabelle Cochelin and Susan Boynton, Disciplina Monastica, vol. 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 175–92; and 399–410.

—, Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books (Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 86–91.

—, ‘Reconstructing the Delbecq-Schreiber Passion (as part of the St Godeleva manuscript)’, Unter Druck. Mitteleuropäische Buchmalerei im 15. Jahrhundert. Akten der Tagung, Wien, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 13.1.–17.1.2016, herausgegeben von Jeffrey F. Hamburger und Maria Theisen. Buchmalerei des 15. Jahrhunderts in Mitteleuropa Herausgeben von Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Band 15 (Petersberg: Michael Imhoff Verlag, 2018), pp. 156–67.

A Note on Images

As with Piety in Pieces (2016),1 my previous book with Open Book Publishers, I am committed to making this book free and available to all. Placing images in text is time-consuming and drives up production costs. In order to minimize expenses, my publisher and I have decided not to reproduce images that are easily available on the internet, but rather to link to them using permanent URLs. There are therefore two sets of illustrations: figures that are reproduced in the book (fig.), and linked images, which I refer to as e-figures (e-fig.). These are numbered separately in the text and listed separately at the end of the book for clarity of reference. For the most part therefore, the material from the British Museum and several items in the Netherlands will appear here as linked images. If you read this book in one of its electronic formats, you can click on these links; those using a printed version may find it convenient to scan the QR codes. Related to the connectivity that this book implies, I have decided not to burden footnotes with the bibliographies of the prints that are in the British Museum, since these details can be accessed via the links and duplicating them would therefore be redundant. Images in the digital editions of this book will also feature a ‘click to enlarge’ function that enables the reader to view them in greater detail.

In the process of my research for this book, I created an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the original composition of the manuscript, its nineteenth-century alterations, and the whereabouts of each element today (if known). As the project grew in complexity, the table grew into one containing 14 x 646 squares, including some dynamic self-generating fields which added up how many folios, lost folios, and prints the original manuscript had. It is as simple as it can be, but no simpler. I have therefore decided to make this resource available to readers as an online Appendix, which can be accessed via this link: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0145#resources

As with all Open Book Publishers books, Image, Knife and Gluepot exists in Open Access online (PDF, HTML and XML) editions, and in paperback, hardback, and digital (epub and mobi) editions.2 In view of the number and quality of the images in this book, my publishers and I have decided to provide the option of a more expensive hardback edition (the paperback version is kept at the same low price as OBP’s other paperbacks). The more expensive hardback edition is printed on the best quality paper available, in order to present the images as clearly and beautifully as possible. We hope that this range of options — the freely available PDF, HTML and XML editions; the economically priced epub, mobi and paperback editions; and the more expensively printed hardback — will satisfy all readers.

1 Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016), can be accessed freely here: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0094

2 All editions can be accessed or purchased from the book’s home page: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0145

0. Introduction: Hybrid Books in Flux

© Kathryn M. Rudy, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0145.05

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are credited with having invented Synthetic Cubism when they pasted newspaper, wallpaper, and rope to the surfaces of images. They then wrote words, or parts of words, painted, and made marks on the surfaces of their multi-media objects. Marks they made united the various layers. The scraps of newspaper were of course cheaply printed and contained black-and-white texts and images, which the artists trimmed into various shapes, thereby adjusting the meanings of the scraps. To some degree, the newsprint functioned as texture or shading. Although their Synthetic Cubism is anthologised in art history books as being avant-garde and crossing borders by introducing printed paper into a high-culture form of production, in fact these features were already present in the fifteenth century, when book makers were cutting and pasting printed images into new arrangements, applying paint and ink that would connect the various pasted layers, and creating fictive frames around physical scraps. Fifteenth-century monastics inscribed text in various styles, some of which were meant to imitate printed letters. They then stitched their creations together with threads and bound them in leather. These book makers were in effect assembling new multi-media objects, whose elements crossed boundaries between high and low.1 The new medium of print had connotations of being cheap even in the fifteenth century for, after all, some of the earliest printed objects in the West were playing cards, the ultimate secular gambling objects, flimsy adult toys.2 Just like Picasso and Braque, certain book makers brought this black-and-white mass medium together with a firmly established art form that had exclusive connotations. Whereas the Cubists combined newspaper with easel painting, the people I consider here brought the cheap print into the midst of the manuscript, a medium charged with carrying the word of God, and which was traditionally commissioned by the upper social echelons.

This study is essentially about two media brought together: small images printed in the fifteenth century that were trimmed and then pasted to manuscript pages to adorn and embellish them. As Picasso and Braque would do in the twentieth century, book makers used the knife and gluepot as tools for creation. They probably thought of themselves not as avant-garde or edgy, but merely pragmatic. They used the new technology of printmaking to bring numerous images into the previously exclusive realm of manuscripts.3

These tools — knife and gluepot — cut metaphorically both ways, as much later they also became the tools of the archivist, who separated complicated objects into their component parts so that they would fit into the categories of the archive. In an inversion of history, the archivists of the nineteenth century used a knife to cut up manuscripts that had prints in them, and then pasted those prints onto archival mattes for protection and storage. In this way prints would be classified and sorted, arrayed like butterflies on a lepidopterist’s pin board.

However, the organisational aim of the nineteenth-century collection — to assemble and arrange every print by Albrecht Dürer, the Master ES, or other recognisable figures, to be complete — has little to do with what intrigues me about early printing; rather, I am pursuing the original functions of early print and charting the circuitous shift in technology from script to print.4 For these goals, I am at cross-purposes with my nineteenth-century predecessors. When they cut prints out of manuscripts, they removed the prints from their original contexts, and made my job much more difficult. To understand the early functions of prints (who used them? how?), I will have to undo (virtually) the actions of knife-wielding nineteenth-century collectors. My goal here is to reconstruct books in order to reconstruct their contexts.5 I am going to turn back the clock of the nineteenth century.

Terms such as ‘printing revolution’ make it sound as if the process of moving from script to print happened quickly and violently.6 Instead, the transition occurred over a period of seventy years or more and was not unidirectional: Einblattdrucke (single-leaf woodcuts, metalcuts, and engravings) often formed the models for painted miniatures, and incunables formed the exemplars for manuscripts.7 In fact, the process of adopting print over handwriting in the Gutenberg age had several false starts, failed experiments, and blind alleys. Moreover, printing words and printing images did not share the same history. Manuscripts endured well into the ‘printed age’, with many books, pamphlets, and ephemera being made with a hybrid of techniques, specifically print and manuscript.

As we live in a world with multiple medialities, manuscripts still persist today: notes on the backs of cocktail napkins, the best kinds of love letters, Quaker marriage certificates, signatures on paper cheques, marginalia in books, some lecture notes, most angry notes on mis-parked cars, and the vast majority of graffiti are handwritten. The West Reading Room in the Cambridge University Library still has a fountain pen station, where those with fine writing instruments can fill their bladders with blue-black ink. These examples are some of the last outposts of handwriting. While working on this book I renewed my car’s tax disc for the last time; by the time this book comes out, cars in Britain will no longer have to display physical, printed round cards indicating that their owners have paid the road tax, and this information will exist in electronic form only. Written culture is, once again, at the shoreline between dominant forms, with printed items growing dusty on shelves while new libraries are designed with large banks of computers, or simply larger cafés. As a result of this move away from the printed, the tangible, and the handwritten, people’s handwriting has been declining lately. The book you are currently reading was written on a computer, and you may be reading it on a screen; its existence as a paper object may have been brief or unnecessary.

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, like our own era, also entertained multiple medialities, which enjoyed shifting levels of dominance across time and in various contexts.8 The period of the handwritten codex roughly corresponds to the period of Roman Christian hegemony: the codex (as opposed to the roll) was the form of the big, bulky bible and its components. Encased as it was between two strong covers, the codex was self-protecting. Moreover, it was blatantly differentiated from the roll, which was associated with antiquity and with Judaism, although the roll persisted alongside the codex.9 The manuscript codex would prevail as the chief bearer of Christianity and its texts from the early fourth century until the mid-fifteenth. Its stepchild, the printed book, would survive another 600 years (of heterodoxy, science, and waxing atheism) before the screen would wear it down, and along with it, sustained, absorbed reading.10 This study is about early experiments in book construction, as the handwritten and illuminated book was giving way to the mechanically reproduced book, representing the beginnings of widespread reading and access to images on a personal, hand-held, and ownable scale. When the printed image met the handwritten word, the two had a brief and sultry affair on the page.

This research started with an image of St Barbara — a printed roundel pasted onto a handwritten page — which I found while I was looking for something else. Chasing down this roundel has involved a twelve-year hunt to reconnect prints with the manuscripts from which they were cut, to think about whole objects so that I can better understand their original functions. In the process, I have thought about the nature of collecting and classifying, the transformative properties of archives and the procedures of research in the humanities, the shifting meaning of value, the need to identify proper names in history. Rather than write a catalogue of manuscripts and the prints they formerly harboured, I have written a narrative about the process of discovering fragments and reuniting them with their former substrates. This is therefore a book about the institutions that collected prints in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and about the institutions that decided to keep them for posterity, and how I interacted with those institutions for a decade. The categories formed in the nineteenth century have had a great impact on how one might do research on these objects, on which institutions hold them, on how they are classified, and which institutions will fund a study to reconnect them. While fifteenth-century writing and imaging technologies form the meat of this study, it is also about how research is done in the current shifting landscape. As I go to press, a new journal called Fragmentology: A Journal for the Study of Medieval Manuscript Fragments has published its first volume. Its editors, Christoph Flüeler and William Duba (Fribourg), are ushering in a body of studies made possible by European and American digitization efforts, which have also facilitated my project, to a degree.

I have invented a methodology that is intended to cope with a particular problem: manuscripts were cut up for their contents, which were then re-catalogued in ways that made it incredibly difficult to reconstitute them; I managed to reconstruct them (virtually), because I was able to develop my own organizational systems. My work therefore mirrors some of the work of the original scribes, who were also developing organizational systems within the manuscripts themselves. For the material under consideration here, scribes and book makers invented and imposed a primary system of organisation. Museums (and along with them, dealers and markets) imposed a second organizational system on the physical material. But a third system is my own. Much as the manuscripts existed in an institutional world that shaped them — of the monastery and then the museum — I too am operating in an institutional world of the university and the library/museum and the funding system that imposes constraints as well. Our labour is shaped by institutions, and these institutions themselves impose methods. They are part of the story I want to tell.

I have written this book in the first person because it is about my process of research as much as it is about the content of what I learned. Each step of the process demanded an innovative approach and taught me something distinct. By writing it in this way, I hope to convey something of that process and not just its outcomes. The resulting book is a methodological self-portrait; it is intended to explore how I have approached solving the problem of the gap between the manuscript as it was assembled in the fifteenth century and disassembled in the nineteenth. This is also a story of organizational systems, not only of the fifteenth-century manuscript, in all their complexity, and the nineteenth-century museum, in its hierarchies, but of the art historian who would attempt to look across this sea of raw visual and physical data and form patterns. In many ways, this methodology is sui generis — as it must be, since intuition plays an enormous role. But at the same time, in describing my own labour, I hope to reveal the contemporary institutional and organizational boundaries that continue to make it difficult to reconstruct lost books, even in the age of the digital and the database. My methodological story is personal; since it is my life it is chronological, but it is not linear. I do not present it as a fait accompli, but as a set of realizations and strategies that unfolded across the experience of the manuscripts themselves, most of which were viewed in parts and all of which were points in a vast constellation of books and images that I sifted through in pursuit of connections.

This study is intended to place art historical methods in the current moment as a third assembly of the book, one that needs to be exposed to view in order to have its institutional fault lines interrogated and its challenges discussed, and in particular, to have the art historical work that is done revealed, as that of the book maker and the curator is revealed. The copyist, the collector/curator, and the art historian are all labourers who toil within their respective institutions. And, like those earlier cultural workers, I too am facing institutional constraints. In adopting this first-person voice, I am revealing the labour of the art historian. Like that of the copyist and the curator, the (art) historian’s labour is usually is presented as a polished final product, with the errors, blind alleys, and frustrations erased. The historian is usually the hero and master of the material. Although few are in a position to disclose this art historical labour, I chose to do so at some risk, as it reveals my fumbling but also exposes the ways in which our research is affected by our personal lives (and funding). As I show in this book, that labour is the method — it is the way the work is done; and moreover, the hindrances that labour faces are themselves methodological challenges. Institutional limitations are methodological ones, for me as much as for the nineteenth-century curator. This book sets out to describe that in a way that we rarely do, an omission that obscures the true limitations of our research, and that circumscribes (secretly, invisibly) the kinds of projects we can take on unless we are willing, as here, to make vast personal sacrifices.

Chapter 1 reconstructs a manuscript by beghards in Maastricht. (Beghards were men who followed St Francis, considered themselves to be Franciscans, and who lived in community in towns and cities. They did not beg but made their living through their trade and labour.11) By reconstructing this book, I can show how the beghards learned to integrate the new technology of printed images into the making of their manuscript. That book straddles the two technological moments and sees the creators adapting midstream. A short Chapter 2 discusses the significance of the unusual calendar the beghards constructed, which goes some distance to help us understand how they thought in terms of fungible categories: these innovators in the realm of print technology were also inventing new ways of organising information. They experimented with how the book could be reordered to accommodate prints. These ideas speak to a larger concern in the era, one of reducing labour by using fungibility. What is surprising is that the beghards applied this idea to several different endeavours. This chapter will appeal to those who are interested in the history of organisational and indexing systems. I have given the subject a separate chapter because it is more technical than the other material. Chapter 3 analyses a second book that the beghards made, several decades later. The snapshot it provides reveals how the beghards changed over the turbulent early sixteenth century, how much the print market had shifted in 25 years, and how the book makers increasingly absorbed and normalised the new technology of single-leaf prints. Chapter 4 departs from the beghards to consider many other manuscripts and the prints they formerly held, and assesses the extent of this practice of pasting prints in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as the archives have destroyed most of the examples and given us a diminished sense of the importance of this development in book history.

In the nineteenth century, the collecting process split woodcuts from engravings, although they were part of the same kinds of projects in the fifteenth century. Studying them provides some insight into the degree to which fifteenth-century book makers embraced the new technology and the extent to which nineteenth-century collectors dismantled it. One quality differentiating the two main printing techniques in the fifteenth century is that copper engraving lent itself to artists’ signatures and monograms, whereas woodcuts generally did not (although Albrecht Dürer managed to sign his woodblocks). Israhel van Meckenem excelled in this realm, carving his name into hundreds of copper plates, many designs for which he co-opted from other engravers. He multiplied his name with every impression. David Landau and Peter Parshall even call Israhel an ‘entrepreneurial printmaker and pirate’.12 Whereas rulers had duplicated their images on coins for more than a millennium, Israhel was the first common person to use the mass media to grow his career, often by copying others’ designs. He was also inventing new functions for prints and doing so faster than people could consume them; they also used them in ways that had not been intended. Israhel spread his name hither and yon in the fifteenth century and became a collector’s must-have in the nineteenth: consequently, he bookends the chapters in this study.

Israhel not only visualized new ways to combine print and manuscript, but he also produced the components for scribes to realize his vision. And he not only signed his works in the fifteenth century, but he fed the market in the nineteenth century for collectors who desired objects (and complete series of objects) connected to proper names. The book-making techniques of the fifteenth century are therefore reflected in the collecting practices of the nineteenth, and in both periods, books were assembled and prints disassembled, or vice versa. Both of these activities employed sharp blades and spatulas of glue.

1 Amy Knight Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books, 2012); and Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012) further articulate other relationships between modern and medieval art/objects. The affinities between the fifteenth- and twentieth-century products do not diminish the originality of the later artists, but rather illuminate the experimentality of both eras and force us to question our periodization.

2 In the early 1990s, Sheila Edmunds invited me to her house in the Finger Lakes, where we discussed the ideas she and Anne H. van Buren had published two decades earlier in: ‘Playing Cards and Manuscripts: Some Widely Disseminated Fifteenth-Century Model Sheets’, The Art Bulletin 56:1 (1974), pp. 12–30. This ignited my interest in the topics of this study.

3 Other studies that address the marriage of print and manuscript include: Frizt Oskar Schuppisser, ‘Copper Engravings of the “Mass Production” Illustration Netherlandish Prayer Manuscripts’, in Masters and Miniatures: Proceedings of the Congress on Medieval Manuscript Illumination in the Northern Netherlands (Utrecht, 10–13 December 1989), ed. K. van der Horst and Johann-Christian Klamt, Studies and Facsimiles of Netherlandish Illuminated Manuscripts; 3 (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1991), pp. 389–400; The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. by Peter W. Parshall (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009); Hanno Wijsman, with the collaboration of Ann Kelders and Susie Speakman Sutch, eds. Books in Transition at the Time of Philip the Fair: Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century Low Countries. Burgundica, 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); Todor Petev, ‘A Group of Hybrid Books of Hours Illustrated with Woodcuts’, in Books of Hours Reconsidered, ed. Sandra Hindman and James H. Marrow (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2013), pp. 391–408; Evelien Hauwaerts, Evelien de Wilde, and Ludo Vandamme, Colard Mansion: Incunabula, Prints and Manuscripts in Medieval Bruges. Exh. Cat., Groeningemuseum, Brugge (Ghent: Snoeck Publishers, 2018). All these studies treat prints made north of the Alps. Roberto Cobianchi, ‘Printing a New Saint: Woodcut Production and the Canonization of Saints in Late Medieval Italy’, in The Saint between Manuscript and Print: Italy 1400–1600, ed. Alison Knowles Frazier (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015), pp. 73–98, has begun identifying Italian prints that were pasted into manuscripts.

4 In this approach, I am inspired by Suzanne Kathleen Karr Schmidt and Kimberly Nichols, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2011).

5 This study joins others that have endeavoured to reconstruct manuscripts broken up in the nineteenth century. See, for example, Judith Oliver, ‘Medieval Alphabet Soup: Reconstruction of a Mosan Psalter-Hours in Philadelphia and Oxford and the Cult of St. Catherine’, Gesta 24:2 (1985), pp. 129–40; and Aden Kumler, ‘Canonizing a Catastrophe: The Curious Case of the Carmelite Missal’, lecture at the conference Canons & Contingence: Art Histories of the Book in England and America, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2017 (unpublished). The missal Kumler discussed was clipped, disassembled, and its parts pasted into scrapbooks, now London, BL, Add. Mss 29704 & 29705.

6 The term comes from Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See the response by Herman Pleij, ‘Printing as a Long-Term Revolution’, in Books in Transition at the Time of Philip the Fair: Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century Low Countries, ed. by Hanno Wijsman, with the collaboration of Ann Kelders and Susie Speakman Sutch. Burgundica, 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 287–307.

7 Sandra Hindman, and James Douglas Farquhar, Pen to Press: Illustrated Manuscripts and Printed Books in the First Century of Printing (College Park: Art Dept., University of Maryland, 1977); James Marrow, ‘A Book of Hours from the Circle of the Master of the Berlin Passion: Notes on the Relationship between Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination and Printmaking in the Rhenish Lowlands’, The Art Bulletin 60:4 (1978), pp. 590–616; and Klara Broekhuijsen, ‘The Bezborodko Masters and the use of prints’, in Masters and Miniatures: Proceedings of the Congress on Medieval Manuscript Illumination in the Northern Netherlands (Utrecht, 10–13 December 1989),ed. Koert van der Horst and Johann-Christian Klamt (Studies and Facsimiles of Netherlandish Illuminated Manuscripts, 3: Doornspijk, 1991), pp. 403–12.

8 Those interested in pursuing further theoretical aspects of multiple modalities will benefit from Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, eds., Comparative Textual Media. Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

9 As J. P. Gumbert writes in ‘Fifty Years of Codicology’, Archiv für Diplomatik: Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 50 (2004), pp. 505–26, at p. 519, ‘rolls are not oddities, they are a valid and normal Medieval book type’. Rolls were ideal for certain functions, including providing supports for amulets, genealogical tables and other diagrammatic forms. Their poor survival rates reflect the fact that modern and early-modern storage systems privileged the codex.

10 Of course, the printed book and the manuscript codex and the manuscript roll all coexisted into the modern period, so these divisions were by no means absolute. The recent and vast literature addressing how reading on screens affects cognition changes constantly and is beyond the scope of this project.

11 On Franciscans in the Netherlands, see Hildo van Engen, De derde orde van Sint-Franciscus in het middeleeuwse bisdom Utrecht (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006); and three studies by Bert Roest: A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1210–1517)(Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2000); Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission c. 1220–1650: Cum Scientia Sit Donum Dei, Armatura ad Defendendam Sanctam Fidem Catholicam (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

12 David Landau and Peter W. Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 56–65.

1. Cut, Pasted, and Cut Again: The Fate of 140 German and Netherlandish Single-Leaf Prints at the Hands of a Limburg Franciscan and a Modern Connoisseur

© Kathryn M. Rudy, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0145.01

This chapter is about beghards in Maastricht who, around 1500, collected more than 150 single-leaf woodcut prints and engravings and glued them into an elaborate book of hours, the hulk of which is now in London, British Library Add. Ms. 24332. This is also the story of a curator who, in 1861, cut the prints out of the manuscript in order to mount them, according to their style or ‘school’, thereby giving them a completely different function. It is a case study of a larger group of books that straddled the old and new technologies, books made the old-fashioned way (by writing by hand) that nevertheless used the new technology (of printmaking) to introduce images. These books were waypoints along the transition from the handwritten to the printed book, a transition that was anything but smooth.1 Finally, it is a study is about innovation, new organisational systems, failed experiments, and about individuals responding to new technologies and integrating multiple fields of craft production. By telling this story in this first person, I am revealing my own organisational systems, failed experiments, and stumbling forays into integrating fields of craft.

Exploratory innovation took place with the book in the fifteenth century: mills sprang up to produce paper to feed the cottage industries that produced copper engravings, woodcut prints, blockbooks, handwritten and printed books, and all the hybrids and halflings in between. Transitioning from the handwritten book to the printed one was not swift, but involved bumps and false starts and abandoned experiments, resulting in books that had one foot in the old manual camp and the other in the new mechanical camp.2 Important recent studies by Peter Schmidt, David Areford, and Ursula Weekes have investigated these transitions by analysing the social function of prints in the manuscript era.3 They have rightly pointed out that prints can travel long distances before ending up in particular books. Furthermore, they have emphasized the functions of the prints over their style and have considered their afterlives, and they have asked how various early prints have acted in hybrids. The current study likewise concerns itself with one of those hybrids, containing handwritten text and mechanically reproduced images, all pasted together into a unity. With an estimated 156 prints originally pasted into it, the beghards’ first manuscript contains (or rather, contained) more early prints than any other surviving manuscript, and as such, deserves a concentrated study. Unlike the objects of study of other recent analyses of such hybrids, my object was divided and dispersed, meaning that tracing its parts forms the first operation. This in turn necessitates analysing habits of nineteenth-century collecting, which precipitated the dispersal in the first place. What had started as an attempt to illustrate a manuscript book of hours without having to master draughtsmanship soon became a nearly obsessional project in integrating the many prints flowing through Maastricht. Other chapters in this book each address other manuscripts with their original prints, although most of those prints have now been cut out and stored separately.

How the prints came to be loosed from their manuscripts is a nineteenth-century story. If the decades flanking 1500 can be characterised by experiments in book making, the mid-nineteenth century was the era for categorising and cataloguing: the great catalogues raisonnés were written then. In the field of the history of printing, Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber (1855–1932) and Max Lehrs (1855–1938) separated woodcuts from engravings and built the great corpus of fifteenth-century woodcuts and engravings that form the basis for modern understanding of the subject.4 Creating knowledge depended on classifying the physical objects, but the modern pastimes of organising, labelling, and collecting came at a price. According to the Cartesian plan of the nineteenth-century museum, prints belonged to one department and manuscripts to another. Because a manuscript with prints did not fit this scheme, the Cartesians had to separate the prints from the manuscripts.5 This scene recalls the story of Procrustes, the son of Poseidon from Greek mythology. A smith with an iron bed, Procrustes invited every passerby to spend the night in his cruel lodge. He would stretch the guests who were too short for his bed, and sever the legs of those who were too tall. Likewise, print curators of the nineteenth century wrenched items out of books and into print collections, which demanded flat objects attached to mattes and stored in standard-sized boxes. Like Procrustes’ long-legged guests, large prints were trimmed (or folded) to fit the mattes. For small prints that would have been dwarfed by the matte, curators pasted on several related examples, usually in elaborate symmetrical arrangements. These cataloguing activities of harvesting prints from manuscripts occurred all over Europe and America, to make the prints fit into the conceptual and physical category of ‘individual printed sheets of paper’. At the moment of museum accession, all record of the original home of the prints was usually lost, and they became self-sufficient objects. And since, as I will show, prints and manuscripts might have widely different geographic origins, there was no obvious way to reconnect them even if one wanted to, which, until recently, no one did.

Reversing the work of the nineteenth-century curators meant employing their Cartesian methods beyond anything they had deemed possible: I made an Excel spreadsheet, which started as a simple grid. As the project grew in complexity, the table grew into one containing 14 x 646 squares, including some dynamic self-generating fields which added up how many folios, lost folios, and prints the original manuscript had. The Appendix is as simple as it can be, but no simpler.6 The spreadsheet allowed me to conclude that London, British Library Add. Ms. 24332, a manuscript book of hours and prayerbook, originally contained more than 541 paper folios, 2 parchment folios, and at least 156 prints and a handful of drawings in several styles.7 At least two scribes at the monastery of beghards dedicated to St Matthew and St Bartholomew in Maastricht wrote this manuscript around 1500 (more about that date later). One of the scribes was Jan van Emmerick, who was probably the corrector, and probably furnished the manuscript with a table of contents and foliated it, thereby experimenting with new media and new ways of organising ideas.

Add. 24332 contained an enormous collection of prints made before 1500. These prints originated from several sources, and not just from one geographical region but from the Middle Rhine as well as from Dutch-speaking lands. Moreover, the prints were hand-painted in a variety of styles, a fact that reveals aspects of the colouring of prints and their distribution. Assembling all the prints, the leaves on which they are pasted, and the gutted hulk of the manuscript from which they were taken (Add. 24332 as the mothership) allows a multiplication of individual observations, which lends the entire project a historical context. Only by ‘reassembling’ the manuscript, at least in a spreadsheet and through electronic images, can one answer basic questions about it: what did the finished work look like? To what purpose was it put? Who used it? The task of reconstructing the manuscript was linked to the question of how the beghards assembled the book, and with what component parts. Did those parts come pre-assembled (painted and trimmed)? What, exactly, did the beghards have to do in order to get these components into shape to use them in Add. 24332? But let me tell the story in the order that the clues revealed themselves to me.

I began putting the pieces together in the 2005–2006 academic year while I was the Kress Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. Looking for images representing the martyrdom of St Barbara in a landscape with a continuous narrative for a new hypothesis I was developing, I marched up to the vast photograph archive at the Warburg and began digging around to gather ideas.8 There I encountered an image of the saint that was not relevant to my project but nevertheless caught my attention (fig. 1). It had a number of provocative features. First of all, the photograph captured an entire manuscript leaf, on which there was an image depicting St Barbara, but not a miniature. Rather, the image was an engraved roundel, which had later been trimmed and pasted into the leaf of a prayerbook. This roundel was recognisable as one printed by Israhel van Meckenem, a prodigious Rhineland engraver active from ca. 1465–1500.

Fig. 1 Manuscript leaf written in Middle Dutch, with an engraved roundel by Israhel van Meckenem representing St Barbara, standing with her attribute. Unlabelled documentary photograph housed at the Warburg Institute, London.

Secondly, I noted that the manuscript leaf was not copied in a German dialect of the Lower/Middle Rhine, but rather in Middle Dutch, which meant that the print had travelled some distance westward before landing in a Dutch manuscript. Thirdly, the script was ornate. Written in a florid style, the letters have ascenders on the top line, and the descenders on the bottom line had been extended into festive curlicues. These features made the leaf memorable. Its most remarkable feature, however, was the number at the top, the Roman numeral cccc lxxij, written in a fifteenth-century hand. This was, in other words, original foliation, which is highly unusual for a prayerbook. Since the foliation had reached the number 472, I was apparently looking at a leaf from a very thick prayerbook. Unfortunately, the photograph gave no indication of what manuscript the folio belonged to or where the object was housed: the source of the photograph was not given on its reverse. In those days I lugged an A4-sized flatbed scanner around with me, so I scanned the photograph. I filed away these observations and carried on with my task of finding narrative images depicting St Barbara.

Meanwhile, since 2002 I had been working through all the Middle Dutch manuscripts in the British Library, looking at one or two manuscripts each time I had a few spare hours in London. On 6 April 2006 I called up Add. 24332 for the first time. This manuscript is a Netherlandish book of hours written on paper and preserved in its original binding (although its spine had been repaired, a detail that later proved important) (fig. 2). Its unusual script with the exuberant but amateurish ascenders was familiar from the photograph I had seen. I turned to folio cccc lxxij, expecting to find the image of St Barbara from the photograph, but that folio was not there. Instead, the manuscript had a blank leaf, a dummy, made of modern paper of the same weight and pale yellow colour as the inscribed leaves. It was now clear that the unlabelled Warburg photograph documented a detached leaf, one that had gone astray but was captured in a picture: a frustratingly unlabelled, untraceable documentary photograph.

Figs. 2a and 2b Manuscript binding, binding front and back, blind stamped leather over boards, made by the beghards of Maastricht c. 1500 (rebacked after 1861). London, British Library, Add. Ms. 24332.

Further inspection of the manuscript revealed not just one but many missing folios. This was immediately obvious because of the many gaps in the manuscript’s original foliation and the many inserted modern blanks. In some cases an entire leaf had been removed and in others a leaf had patches of discolouration, indicating that something had been glued down and later re-lifted. Folio ccc xlv (modern foliation 312, fig. 3), for example, has an area of discolouration in an oval form. What had been lifted must have been a print, for areas at the top and left remained adhered to the page. I could make out the jagged crenulations often found around images depicting the Virgin of the Sun, which was probably the print originally glued to this leaf. A print of that subject would have enhanced the devotions written on that folio, since the print would have fallen on the same folio with a prayer to be read in front of ‘an image of the Virgin in the sun’ (‘voer onser vrouwen bielde inder sonnen’), according to the accompanying rubric.

Fig. 3 Opening from the beghards’ book of hours, Maastricht, c. 1500. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 24332, fols 311v–312r (modern foliation) or ccc xlv (original foliation).

Moreover, on the previous folio, opposite the leaf with the shadowy remains of the Virgin of the Sun, was a rectangular hole in the lower border where someone had cut out a section, presumably because it had contained a print. With the object excised completely, it was difficult to determine what its subject would have been. This was also the case for folio 283, where another rectangular hole pointed to a cut-out print (fig. 4). This time, however, the knife-bearer had cut straight through another image, the top part of it still glued to the verso side of the folio. That fragmentary image is a woodcut representing the Annunciation, carefully hand-coloured in washes of warm tones. Whatever the image on the reverse of this sheet was, it must have been even more spectacular than the woodcut, which was sacrificed in the process of removing it.

Fig. 4 Folio from the beghards’ book of hours with part of a hand-painted woodcut depicting the Annunciation, Maastricht, c. 1500. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 24332, fol. 283v (modern foliation).

Besides the fragment of the Annunciation, only two other prints were left in the manuscript: a printed flower pasted into an initial on folio 254r (fig. 5), and an engraving representing St John supporting the swooning Mary on folio 307v (fig. 6). After it had been painted with delicate washes on the Virgin’s halo and John’s hair, the engraving had then been cut out, or ‘silhouetted’, and pasted near the gutter so that the figures would face the text. Script flowed around the contours of the Virgin’s body, suggesting that the print had been pasted down before the time of writing and was not a later afterthought.9

Fig. 5 Folio from the beghards’ book of hours with a printed rosette pasted into the initial. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 24332, fol. 254r (modern foliation).

Fig. 6 Folio from the beghards’ book of hours with a silhouetted engraving depicting Mary and John, Maastricht, c. 1500. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 24332, fol. 307v (modern foliation).

I spent the rest of the afternoon at the British Library listing all the missing folios in Add. 24332 and transcribing its calendar, which enabled me to localise the manuscript. Feasts in red included St Servatius (13 May; fig. 7), the Translation of St Servatius (7 June), and St Hubert (3 November). St Hubert’s pilgrimage shrine is in his eponymous town in the Ardennes, and his presence therefore pointed to the Diocese of Luik (Liège), where the Ardennes are located. That St Servatius, the patron of the church in Maastricht, had two feast days in red not only confirmed that the manuscript was made in the diocese of Liège, but further suggested that it might have come from Maastricht, the site of the imposing Romanesque church housing the relics of and dedicated to St Servatius.

Fig. 7 Calendar page for the first half of May. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 24332, fol. 5r (modern foliation).

The many Franciscan saints strongly suggested that the manuscript was made in a Franciscan milieu. Their feasts included those of St Francis (4 October), St Anthony (17 January), the Translation of St Francis (25 May), and the Five Wounds of St Francis (17 September). Moreover, Francis was listed first among the confessors in the litany, and the names ‘Jhesus, Maria, Anna, Franciscus, Clara’ are used as a space filler after one of the rubrics that ends near the bottom of the page (fig. 8). Because of the masculine pronouns in the manuscript, as well as some particularities about a list of indulgences that I shall discuss later, I suspected that the manuscript came from a men’s Franciscan monastery, even though the related vernacular devotional books embellished with prints, as shown in Ursula Weekes’s important book, Early Engravers and their Public,were made in women’s monasteries.10 It appears that men were doing it, too.

Fig. 8 Rubric revealing Franciscan affinities. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 24332, fol. 250r (modern foliation).

Other saints in the calendar further helped to narrow the provenance to a particular monastery in Maastricht. It included entries in red for St Bartholomew (24 August), as well as for the translation of his relics on 25 October, whereas most other calendars list the martyrs Crispin and Crispiaen on that day. In the litany, the Archangel Michael is underlined in red (folio 118v). These details made it possible to pin the manuscript to a particular monastery. In the early 2000s, while working on the Koninklijke Bibliotheek’s website Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections,11 my friend Saskia van Bergen had assembled a list of every monastic and semi-monastic institution in the Dutch-speaking areas of what is now Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. They are organised by town, dedicatory saint(s), gender, and confession. According to this list, only one monastery fitted the particular saints in Add. 24332: the house of beghards in Maastricht, dedicated to St Bartholomew and St Michael. Because St Bartholomew was an apostle, and St Michael an archangel, their feast days are written in red in many calendars, but the fact that the translation of St Bartholomew’s relics is also given in red in Add. 24332 signals the extra attention that the users gave this saint. These features also suggest that the manuscript was made for the beghards’ own use. This attribution concurred with that listed in Karl Stooker and Theo Verbeij’s monumental study of manuscripts from the Low Countries with a monastic provenance.12 Furthermore, the great historian of Netherlandish manuscripts, Jan Deschamps, had identified one of the three scribes who wrote 24332 as Jan van Emmerick, who was a beghard in Maastricht.13

Not only did the calendar confirm that the manuscript had come from the beghards in Maastricht, but it also helped with dating. A note in the calendar entered for 5 May provides a date (folio 5): ‘dusent ccccc ende i des avonts omtrent .9. verssterf on. moe. o. i. go. da. Vigili’ (1501 in the evening around nine o’clock ‘on. moe. o. i. go. da.’ died).14 This note gives the date and time of death of someone important, but the exact identity of that someone remains a mystery, as it is obscured in a highly personal abbreviation. What is clear, however, is that this note was written in the same hand as one of those in the calendar, which suggests that the whole book was completed in or shortly before 1501. Other highly unusual aspects of the calendar, however, formed puzzles that I eventually cracked, and that gave me insight into the makers’ minds. In short, they turned the calendar into a table of contents (which I will discuss in Chapter 2).

The Beghards of Maastricht and their Commercial Pursuits

Evidence in the calendar, as well as the identification of one of the scribes in the manuscript as Jan van Emmerick, revealed that the manuscript was written and constructed by the beghards of Maastricht around 1500. Why were these beghards so experimental in their use of prints and indexing systems? One answer is perhaps that they ran a binding operation, so they saw many kinds of new books in their studio and therefore were exposed to all the latest developments in book making. The unusual calendar and the pasted print are new technologies that they could have seen this way. A brief history of their house reveals a group of extraordinary men who were at the forefront of teaching, book making, weaving, trade, and commerce.

Franciscan spirituality came quite early to the Netherlands. St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was declared a saint two years after his death. Born into a rich family, Francis shed his possessions and preached extreme poverty. Along with the Dominicans, the Franciscans formed the mendicant preaching orders, and their rise also follows the formation of urbanisation in Europe. Unlike earlier orders, such as the Benedictines, the Franciscans did not seek remote, secluded terrain, but lived in the new cities and preached to their inhabitants. Franciscan preaching focussed on the Passion. For the many followers whom he attracted during his life, Francis wrote a Rule, which was approved orally in 1210 by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), then ratified in a signed document in 1223 by Pope Honorius III (1216–1227). Although founded in Italy, the Franciscan movement spread quickly across the Alps. Within the Custody of Brabant, Franciscan male houses were founded in the following places:

St Truiden (Sanctus Trudo): established in 1226–1231Tienen (Tenis): established as early as 1226; definitive buildings from 1266 onwardsDiest (Deriste): established in 1228Leuven (Lovania): established in 1228Brussels (Bruxella): established c. 1228/31Mechelen (Machilinia): established in 1231Maastricht (Trajectum super Mosam): established in 1234

With a Franciscan presence established in the Netherlands immediately after St Francis died, the areas quickly had numerous Franciscan installations. Of these foundations, the earliest were built in St Truiden and in Tienen by 1226. St Truiden was therefore an important saint for Netherlandish Franciscans, and his feast day on 24 November and the translation of his relics on 11 August are listed in the calendar of Add. 24332. In Maastricht a monastery for the Minderbroeders, or Friars Minor, was built on St Pieterstraat, following its approval in 1234.

How did the beghards differ from other Franciscans who lived in Maastricht at the same time? Answering this meant delving into the voluminous literature written about the monasteries of the amateur scholars of Maastricht in the late nineteenth century. In the publications of the archives of Limburg, they mentioned the beghards’ school, loom room, and bindery. Unlike other branches of Franciscans, the beghards did not beg for alms: instead, their various business activities — weaving, binding, and teaching — supported them financially. It is difficult to assess just how wealthy the beghards were in the fifteenth century. Although their spiritual ideal was poverty, they owned expensive things. One of their most precious objects was an image of Christ carved in ivory, which disappeared during the Napoleonic takeover of the monasteries.15 An ivory image suggests that they were not utterly impoverished. Drawings made in 1746 also paint a lavish picture of the beghards’ possessions: the brotherhood of the Trinity, which was formed in 1646 when the Turks released Christian prisoners, celebrated its hundredth anniversary at the altar of the beghards in Maastricht, on which occasion three drawings were made. They show a richly decorated baroque altar, and ample, well-appointed rooms.16 Even in the fifteenth century the brothers were well off. Far from the Franciscan ideal of begging for their meals, these brothers engaged in several commercial pursuits.

It is difficult to know how lucrative their bindery was, but it is clear from examining their extant bindings that they exercised their trade with a practiced degree of craft using high-quality materials. For example, they bound a manuscript for the female Franciscans in Maastricht with blind-stamped leather over oak boards (Maastricht, Regionaal Historisch Centrum Limburg, 22.001A Handschriften GAM, inv. no. 462; fig. 9). Into the leather they stamped an image of St Servatius under a gothic canopy. Flanked by two angels, Servatius holds a bishop’s staff in one hand and an enormous key in the other, which suggests that he has the ‘keys’ to the city of Maastricht. Underfoot are two flailing beasts, which represent the Jews he converted. (In this way, his iconography is connected to that of St Lambert.) His name, Servatius, appears in gothic script in the frame above and below the saint. In other words, the beghards used stamping technology to brand their wares, and to connect the book with a particular place. Inside is an experiment in that the book contains a design that had probably been imported from Delft and then worked into the calendar (fig. 10). That design is a clock face, with the finger of God as the ticker and the numbers 1–12 in Roman numerals sliding around the dial.

Fig. 9 Manuscript binding, blind stamped leather over boards, made by the beghards of Maastricht c. 1500. Maastricht, Regionaal Historisch Centrum Limburg, 22.001A Handschriften GAM, inv.nr. 462.

Fig. 10 Clock folio, facing January calendar page. Opening folios in a prayerbook made in Maastricht c. 1500. Maastricht, Regionaal Historisch Centrum Limburg, 22.001A Handschriften GAM, inv.nr. 462.

To spend some time in Maastricht was a logical next step, but it was not until 2008 that I had the opportunity to go there while working on the website Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections. Joan Blaeu’s map from 1650 (e-fig. 1), one of the Netherlandish city views he made when not mapping Scotland or the Far East, shows the city and its intimate relationship with the river Maas (Meuse).

Joan Blaeu’s map (e-fig. 1)

Joan Blaeu, Map of Maastricht, from the Toonneel der Steeden (Views of Netherlandish Cities), 1650.

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12434/6f08104e

The medieval city walls lie within the bounds of the expanded seventeenth-century ramparts. Among the medieval buildings depicted is the lakenhal, or cloth hall, the centre for trade among the city’s weavers (including the beghards). Nowadays, aside from the occasional bus that comes barrelling across the square, the old centre is mostly a pedestrian zone. The Church of Our Lady greets the viewer with a Westwerk like a fortified castle, which protects a fourteenth-century wooden painted pietà inside. Men in suits now visit her during their lunch hours and rub their pain into the surface, burnished by thousands of hands.17

Maastricht’s major