Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  Figure 12. Crucifixion. Missal, Cambrai, Bibl. Mun. ms 154, fol. 98v. Photo: author.

  Figure 13. Floreffe reliquary of the True Cross (rear view). Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris.

  This arrangement causes us to look again at one of the most unusual aspects of the Cambrai manuscript: the pasted-down scenes of the Infancy of Christ on the preceding folio (see Figure 1). The page is altogether unexpected and seems at first glance to be a nineteenth-century pastiche created by cutting out miniatures from a contemporary manuscript, probably a small psalter, painted by a different artist who worked in a more purple palette and used a different set of decorative motifs. The page is indeed a pastiche, but there are several reasons why it is probably not a nineteenth-century one. It conforms to no neo-gothic conception I am aware of for a manuscript frontispiece. Moreover, the manuscript was never on the market, and it is inherently unlikely that someone after the fourteenth century would have been so successful in choosing a pictorial source from a date and region consistent with that of the rest of the book.46 In fact, pastedowns are found in medieval manuscripts from at least the twelfth century and are commonplace in Books of Hours by the fifteenth.47 Most important, there is much to suggest the page is a creation of the early fourteenth century made as a companion to the following miniature, which was itself probably a contemporary addition. The green color used for its surrounding frame matches that of the following page and the dimensions of the two frames are almost identical.48 They also occupy approximately the same position on the verso of their respective pages, so that one is literally in front of the other, the upper half of the first miniature, with the Annunciation and Nativity, corresponding approximately to the upper level of the second, with Christ and the Virgin enthroned. Moreover, a detailed examination of the four pasted-down pieces of parchment shows that they have been carefully trimmed so that their inner edges slightly overlap along the vertical median, the lateral edges fit snugly against the surrounding border, and there is space between the upper and lower edges and the border. The careful treatment of these edges may well be a way of suggesting that the pastedowns are analogous to the hinged, moveable wings of a temporarily closed reliquary. If this is the case, the Cambrai artist also took inspiration from reliquaries in order to recreate, in a codex, a similar revelatory structure of viewing. While this would be an altogether exceptional situation in manuscript painting, it is consistent with the references to metalwork on the following page and with the high level of invention seen in the rest of the manuscript.

  Whether this first miniature refers to a closed reliquary or simply functions to introduce the next one, and whether its viewer was the original patron or a later reader who turned these pages as she prepared to recite the Hours of the Virgin, these two illuminations function together as reminders of the Incarnation and Mary’s place in the history of redemption. They underscore the custodial role of the Church, the congregation of the saints who reside within it, and the future that awaits all of the blessed in the fullness of time. In this the two pages form a powerful introduction to the cycle of illumination that follows, especially to those initials that pit the female reader against the devil’s temptations and invoke Mary’s aid.49 They present the viewer with the reassuring image of the destiny she is about to seek in her prayer. Indeed, one of the prayers in her manuscript is a French poem that concludes by asking that when she dies and her soul is separated from her body, angels take her soul to the place of joy where she will “see God face to face.”50 This phrase, which customarily refers to the beatific vision, is a clear statement of her expectations immediately following death. Such longings are common in devotional books at this time and often result in innovative depictions of the deity and the “place of joy.”51 But the image she saw in her Hours was neither a literal nor a mystical depiction of the deity; rather, it was an image that holds another field of representation, that opens to a higher level of the sacred where communion with the saints and a vision of God become possible.

  This intersection of painting, reliquary forms, and eschatology is not unique to the Cambrai miniatures but is found in many later, often well-known works of art. Of these one of the most interesting is Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece of 1432 (Figures 14–15). We know that some kind of framework surrounded the panels of the altarpiece and enabled it to be opened and closed. In her 1971 study, the late Lotte Brand Philip reconstructed the lost framework for the nine extant panels as a gigantic wall tabernacle combining the traditional functions of an altar reliquary with that of a rood screen (Figures 16–17).52 Although details of Philip’s reconstruction are controversial, her drawings underscore the parallels in both content and structure to the Cambrai miniatures, especially between the way the Annunciation on the exterior, painted in darker or gray tones, opens to a far larger and brilliantly colored spectacle of Christ and Mary enthroned above an all-inclusive hierarchy of saints. Reconstructions by other authors show a less elaborate structure but one still related to reliquaries.53

  The Ghent Altarpiece is a theologically complex work that cannot be fully discussed in this brief essay. Its emphasis on Christ, on sacrifice, and on the liturgical and paradisial have no direct counterpart in the Cambrai miniature. But there are some striking similarities, such as the presence of mounted saints and the emphasis on the ecclesiastical as well as general features that relate to the tradition of the works discussed above, such as the groups of male and female saints or the prominence of musical angels. The Ghent panels of Adam and Eve, so different in scale and mood from the other panels, are no more extraneous than the Cambrai roundels with Ecclesia and Synagogue; both are reminders of those rejected in the old order that this new one supplants. This new order, with its two levels, is still the essentially Augustinian one of a new heaven and a new earth enjoyed by the community of saints in the Canterbury manuscript.54 Moreover, the youthful Mary is still the sponsa: her crown is decorated with bridal flowers and the text behind her head comes from the office of the Assumption. Indeed, visitors in the first centuries after its completion understood the altarpiece in terms of the mystery of the Coronation.55

  Figure 14. Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, 1432 (closed). Cathedral of Saint Bavo, Ghent. Photo: Giraudou/Art Resource, NY.

  Figure 15. Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, 1432 (open). Cathedral of Saint Bavo, Ghent. Photo: Giraudou/Art Resource, NY.

  What is interesting in this is not the possible influence of the Cambrai Book of Hours on the van Eycks, which is unlikely,56 but that while neither the Cambrai miniatures nor the Ghent Altarpiece are connected with bodily relics, both cite reliquary forms and use the reliquary as their operative metaphor. This is not surprising because reliquaries had long been a medium for developing new visual strategies of disclosure, presence, and authority. Although these ideas may have crystallized around relics, once in place they were easily transferred to painting and to subjects in which it was particularly desirable to stress the revelatory function of the image and the temporal continuity and material authenticity of what was pictured within.

  Figure 16. Lotte Brand Philip’s reconstruction of the frame for the Ghent Altarpiece (closed). Photo: Lotte Brand Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).

  Figure 17. Lotte Brand Philip’s reconstruction of the frame for the Ghent Altarpiece (open). Photo: Lotte Brand Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).

  In the works we have seen, the afterworld—at least that place celebrating the company of saints and proximity to the deity—was not shown consistently but it did move closer to earth. After all, in principle it was accessible right after death and, in both text and pictures, it was increasingly formulated as a projection of somatic and affective qualities a person possessed in this world. By the early fourteenth century, even optics and perception had a place in the afterworld, as writers tried to descri
be the differences between ocular and imaginative vision in order to define the lumen gloriae.57 This situation must have provided a special kind of challenge for painters, for it had the double effect of promoting a naturalization of the afterworld while eliminating distinctions between experience before and after the general resurrection. We see this especially in the Ghent Altarpiece, where Eyckian realism draws so fine a line between heaven and earth and between Jerusalem and the place the saints wait. Yet for the viewer of the Cambrai Hours and for those in Vijd chapel in Ghent, reliquary imagery was still critical, for it provided both a metaphor for understanding how souls are preserved in transit to the end of time and a threshold to signal the visionary. With the work of Jan and others, these thresholds depended less and less upon an external apparatus; they could be folded into the works themselves, both into the technique of painting, with its vast potential for distinguishing levels of reality, and into their settings, which continue to refer to church interiors and exteriors. But for the Cambrai artist that apparatus was essential, for it enabled the painter to create a different kind of painting, not by painting differently but by inserting one structure of representation into another.

  The Limits of Apocalypse

  Eschatology, Epistemology, and Textuality in the Commedia and Piers Plowman

  Claudia Rattazzi Papka

  That both Dante’s Commedia and Langland’s Piers Plowman are in some sense apocalyptic poems has been noted throughout their critical traditions, because both appropriate elements from the biblical Apocalypse, the Revelation to John, and include scathing critiques of secular and ecclesiastic powers, coupled with cryptic prophecies of millennial regeneration. While much work has carefully traced these allusions and attempted to decipher their historical and spiritual significance, less attention has been paid to the formal and narrative consequences of the use of apocalypse in these two poems.1 In order to consider these literary or “authorial” aspects of apocalypse, it is useful to understand the apocalyptic text as a “fiction of judgment”: a work that claims access to divine revelation while acknowledging its status as a human artifact, and in which visions of order and meaning are presented by the author as if from a divine perspective.2 Comparing the Commedia and Piers Plowman in light of this more specifically textual definition of apocalypse makes it clear that many of the poems’ most fascinating elements stem from the poets’ engagement with the problems engendered, at the narrative level, by the exigencies of apocalyptic textuality.

  Apocalypse claims to reveal that which only God can know, and thus constitutes, both eschatologically and epistemologically, a kind of oxymoron. The fiction of judgment furthermore claims to represent in human language what should, since it transcends the human order, be ineffable in its terms. As the apocalyptic author confronts the ends of human experience and the limits of human knowledge concerning those ends, she or he must therefore also face, at a very practical level, the limitations of linguistic representation. For the medieval Christian culture to which both Dante and Langland belong, the relationship of truth to textuality is particularly vexed: the status of the word is simultaneously highly suspect and absolutely enshrined. The serpent deceived humanity through language in the beginning, as the Antichrist will at the end; but the text in which these truths are inscribed comprises and constitutes “untouchable” language, guaranteed by the Incarnation of the Word in Christ and the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New. While the Incarnation restores the possibility of human salvation and makes glimpses of it possible, it is only the return of Christ that will restore a prelapsarian epistemology. The promise of the Apocalypse is thus in part hermeneutic, and the unveiling of the meaning of that notoriously enigmatic text itself is only to be fulfilled in conjunction with the parousia. Textuality that makes claims to revelation is thus particularly problematic, and the authorizing strategies necessitated by the apocalyptic stance are typified by the frequently occurring divine command to write what has been seen—the moment in which the visionary is sanctioned and endowed with the prophetic mission. This mission is by definition a rather dangerous one, as the apocalyptic author must transmit a transcendent vision of what ought to be to a world that decidedly falls far short of that ideal.

  Dante and Langland, in their respective visionary poems, demonstrate a profound awareness of these semiotic, rhetorical, and historical limits of apocalyptic textuality. They confront their readers with that awareness in self-reflexive moments in which they seem to grapple with the status of their own “makynges” (as Langland calls them) and with their roles as the makers of judging fictions. Both poets address the rhetorical question first, as they begin their journeys, and I discuss the profound differences in their styles of narrative authority in the first two sections of this essay. This analysis suggests the basic framework within which comparisons of Dante and Langland are generally placed: Dante’s arrogance is epic and his formal precision and schematic exactitude could not be more different from Langland’s associative, wandering modus operandi, which is coupled with a self-deprecatory narrative persona to produce the effect of a near-total lack of authorial control.3 But to consider these stylistic differences rhetorical is to suggest a profound reevaluation of the usual perception of Langland’s poetic talents as somehow inadequate by inserting the notion of an more intentional “inadequacy”—of poetic “failure” as rhetorical choice. It also implies, for Dante, the consideration of the context in which he wrote as crucially constraining his stylistic choices and visionary claims in their very rhetoric of unconstrained transgression.

  In order to address these questions, the third, fourth, and fifth sections of the essay consider the apocalyptic culminations of the Commedia (in the Earthly Paradise cantos with which the Purgatorio concludes) and of Piers Plowman (in the last four passūs of the Vita). Here both poets engage the three-pronged issue of fallen language, biblical textuality, and incarnate Word, and thus provide the basis for a semiotic comparison that demonstrates a rather different relationship between the poets than their narrative rhetoric suggests. Here I argue that Langland’s audacity actually in many ways outstrips Dante’s, for while Dante’s apocalypse, with all its build-up, finally reveals only allegories, Langland actually shows us Christ and lets him speak—in Midlands Middle English, no less—providing a moment of “unmediated” perception of the divinity, not only for the visionary, but also for his audience. In the final section of the essay, I continue my consideration of Langland’s apocalypse into the final passus of Piers Plowman, where revelation gets clouded over again as history reasserts itself in all its unglory. Here I trace the imagery of plague in the poem in order to suggest what may be one of the differences in context that leads to the difference in apocalyptic style between Dante and Langland, at the two ends of the fourteenth century. I conclude that the repercussions of the eschatological trauma of the plague can be seen in Piers Plowman to include an epistemological aftershock that shakes the foundations of apocalyptic textuality represented by Dante’s generic apotheosis. Finally, I suggest that Dante’s text is itself conditioned by a rather different historical nexus of death and apocalypse, the pressure of which is marked, however, by its absence in the Commedia.

  “A te convien tenere altro viaggio . . . ” (Inf. 1: 91)

  “It behooves you to go by another way if you would escape from this wild place,”4 the shade of Virgil tells Dante, coming to his spiritual and poetic rescue in the “selva oscura” where the action of the Commedia begins. In that dark wood, Dante has strayed from the true path—“la verace via” (Inf. 1: 12)—and found himself confronted by three feral and allegorical beasts, the last of which, a hungry wolf, has blocked his progress completely. Virgil proposes a radical, eschatological detour whose first turn is into prophecy, as he predicts the arrival of a “veltro,” a greyhound that will save Italy from the avaricious clutches of the wolf. Virgil guides the poem across an epistemological threshold with the cryptic language of that-which-shall-be-fulfilled and then links th
e path to that fulfillment with the “viaggio” on which he proposes to take Dante:

  Ond ’io per lo tuo me’ penso e discerno

  che tu mi segui, e io sarò tua guida,

  e trarrotti di qui per loco etterno . . . (Inf. 1: 112–14)

  Therefore I think and deem it best that you should follow me, and I will be your guide and lead you hence through an eternal place . . .

  Dante will be led on a tour of the eternal fires of hell and the temporary ones of purgatory, and then, with another guide, he will ascend among the blessed in heaven. In the one hundred cantos that follow this introductory précis, Dante sustains a supreme fiction, “recording” the disposition of the damned and the saved with a precision of biographical and taxonomical detail that allowed the identification of the souls of and by Dante’s contemporaries, and the legacy of which was a late medieval otherworld that often looked remarkably like the poet’s own.5

  The authority claimed by and granted to Dante is extraordinary, as is his audacity, for the poet repeatedly transgresses the limits inscribed by the biblical apocalypse tradition. In this tradition, Paul “knows not” the details of his revelatory raptus and cannot repeat in human speech the arcana verba he has heard (2 Cor. 12: 1–4). John witnesses the parousia and the raising of the dead, but when the books of judgment are opened he does not tell us what was written therein (Apoc. 20: 11–15). Dante, however, describes precisely the mechanisms of his bodily passage through the realms of the still disembodied souls, as well as the divine initiation and justification of his journey. And if, for example, when Beatrice tells him that he must write exactly what he has seen and heard for the sake of the world that lives badly (Purg. 32: 103: “in pro del mondo che mal vive”), part of what he records is a dark narration (Purg. 33:46: “narrazion buia”) he claims not to understand, nevertheless these arcana verba are (at least putatively) inscribed verbatim in his poem. And while John cannot tell us the judgments recorded in the apocalyptic books, Dante actually claims that divine judgment is inscribed in his book.6