In our October 17, 2024, concern, Beatrice Radden Keefe takes us to the island of Reichenau, on Lake Constance within the southwest of Germany, the place 1,300 years in the past it’s mentioned that the bishop Saint Pirmin based a Benedictine monastery. In its prime, the abbey was a hotbed of inventive and mental exercise, producing illuminated manuscripts which might be right now among the most essential artifacts of the Center Ages. In honor of this anniversary, the Baden-Württemberg State Archaeological Museum in Konstanz is internet hosting an exhibition of the manuscripts, in addition to different fragments—incense burners, bells, stained glass—from the interval. “We see Reichenau as a bright center of power, privilege, and learning, with strict internal routines and far-flung networks,” writes Radden Keefe. “Donations of land from royals and nobles allowed the monastery’s reach to expand far beyond the island, and the riches extracted from these lands funded building works on Reichenau. Around 995 the monk Purchard describes an island covered with churches as the night sky is ornamented with stars.”
Radden Keefe is an artwork historian, focusing specifically on medieval manuscripts and the reception of antiquity within the medieval interval. Along with her scholarly work, which incorporates the e-book The Illustrated Afterlife of Terence’s Comedies (800–1200), she writes a e-newsletter on Substack, the place she covers topics starting from canines within the Outdated Masters’ work to glass portraits in antiquity, Wayne Thiebaud, and the books that seem in modern work.
We e-mailed this week in regards to the present false impression of “wackiness” within the Center Ages and the pleasures of museums.
Lauren Kane: What attracted you to artwork historical past, and the medieval interval specifically, as a tutorial self-discipline?
Beatrice Radden Keefe: I grew up in a home with a fading print of a web page from the seventh-century Guide of Durrow, which confirmed the Evangelist image for Matthew: a person with massive hair and a checkered cloak. As a baby I simply assumed the image of Matthew was of my mom (she wore a equally funky coat in Eighties Boston). Maybe it was this conflation greater than something that drew me to medieval artwork historical past and manuscripts specifically—though I’m undecided what it says about my innate iconographical abilities.
After shifting to Switzerland nearly a decade in the past, my very own thought of integration has been to get to know the work of its not-anonymous, post-medieval artists, from the eighteenth-century painter Caspar Wolf to the modern Caroline Bachmann.
What are among the misconceptions we now have right now in regards to the Center Ages?
There’s probably an excessive amount of emphasis on the “wackiness” of medieval life and thought. How simply we chortle on the goings-on within the margins of Gothic manuscripts, as if the pages had been meant solely to be foolish. When faraway from these borders and used for on-line laughs, the satirical medieval ape—courting or flashing or worse—loses a few of its chew. (I’d like to write down in regards to the Web’s use of this marginalia considered one of lately.) In Walafrid Strabo’s ninth-century poem Hortulus or the revenge comedy Dulcitius by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, a tenth-century poet and canoness, the writers interact with the distant previous and its canon (Virgil for Walafrid, Terence for Hrotsvit) and convey it meaningfully into their current. We would be taught from them.
What I hope my essay conveyed is how supremely well-connected powerhouses like Reichenau truly had been, regardless of all the foundations of the cloister that had been meant to maintain the world at bay.
Illuminated manuscripts are an indicator of medieval artwork. Attractive as they’re, I do discover that, particularly when exhibited all in a vitrine and brought in a single after the opposite, they will begin to really feel daunting and repetitive. Have you ever had that have? What are some entry factors via which a novice viewer might start to understand illuminated manuscripts?
I do know what you imply. Manuscripts are an actual problem to show—viewing solely two pages of a e-book could make for a considerably unsatisfying expertise. On the Reichenau exhibition, I started to envy the illustrated monks holding all these codices! Museums now typically give guests an opportunity to take a look at greater than a set double-page unfold by offering digital variations of total manuscripts. As improper as it could appear to take a look at a copy when the manuscript is there within the room with you, these parallel encounters will help to present wanted context.
Additionally, within the years since I started to check manuscripts, once I would get very muddled with fiddly and fuzzy microfilm, many helpful sources have appeared on-line. The Walters, the Getty, and the Morgan all have web sites that provide free entry to facsimiles of their manuscripts. And Switzerland has the great e-codices platform. Books that I talk about in my assessment, together with the Hornbach Sacramentary and manuscripts from the Stiftsbibliothek in St. Gallen, can all be checked on the market.
Clearly this isn’t the identical as dealing with a manuscript, and there’s after all nothing higher than the true factor, which struck me once more once I noticed the gleam of the Petershausen Sacramentary for the primary time in Konstanz. Nonetheless, these surrogates are a strategy to begin to get to know an entire manuscript and to maneuver via its pages wherever and everytime you like, as solely collectors would have been capable of do till lately. The British Library has began to make its digitized manuscripts obtainable once more after final yr’s cyberattack, and we’ll quickly get to see their fifteenth-century manuscript of the Commedia that the Liverpudlian newspaperman Henry Yates Thompson used to thumb via at dwelling for his “morning bit of Dante.”
I confess I’ve been devouring your Substack, which is artwork historic and freewheeling. What sparks an thought for one thing to write down about?
A number of weeks in the past I noticed A Larger Splash, the marvelous Jack Hazan movie about David Hockney and associates, which repeats the artist’s assertion: “I paint what I like, when I like, and where I like.” I suppose I wished the identical type of freedom in my writing. I began the e-newsletter as a strategy to bounce over my shadow and write about topics on which I’m very a lot not an professional and that I wish to know higher than I do. I’ve pushed myself to be a bit free within the essays, to let in anachronism and even makes an attempt at humor (nonetheless typically they could fail).
Inform us a bit about museumgoing: Do you favor to wander via the galleries or do you first make your strategy to the large exhibitions? What curatorial qualities make for a profitable exhibition?
I attempt to see all the pieces that I can, from the crowded blockbuster present to the neglected everlasting assortment. I’m within the historical past of museums, and I respect people who haven’t modified all that a lot over time—at considered one of my favorites, exterior Zurich, the one nod to the desires of contemporary guests is a self-serve espresso machine sitting quietly by the doorway.
I do discover that I get most excited by small, tightly woven exhibitions. I lately noticed a present within the Swiss metropolis of Chur specializing in only a few eerie, lambent mountainscapes painted by Otto Dix after he misplaced his professorship in Dresden in 1933 and went to dwell in “inner emigration” at Lake Constance.
But it surely needn’t even be a museum. Solely this yr I went to take a look at the ninth-century work of the Creation within the splendidly named “Crypt of Original Sin,” a cave within the Basilicata countryside. Following indicators towards “Peccato Originale” was a bit disconcerting, however we received there ultimately.
Beatrice Radden Keefe
The Church of Saint George at Reichenau Abbey, on Reichenau Island, Germany
Beatrice Radden Keefe
The shore at Reichenau Island, Lake Constance, Germany
The island of Reichenau as it’s right now sounds lush and pastoral and great, even with out the monks churning out manuscripts. Would you be capable of share some journey notes on what it was prefer to be on Reichenau? Was there something that didn’t make it into your essay that you simply want had?
Reichenau is a good looking place. In my assessment, I didn’t point out that on day there are views of the Alps to the east, and of a surprisingly humpy volcanic panorama to the west. However I hope that I didn’t make the island sound too idyllic: producing as many tons of greens as they do there requires a lot exhausting labor.
Oh, I couldn’t discover a place within the piece for a fourteenth-century wall portray within the Church of St. George—not of Christ’s miracles, however of two girls speaking in church as a demon data on a chunk of cowhide: “I will write here / of these dumb women / What blah blah is here spoken….” Although I’m not at all times superb at taking notes or preserving a journal, I do like speaking about what I’m seeing, whether or not in a museum or a cave or a church.
