Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham A few years ago I gave Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995) an enthusiastic review here. Gamble studied the actual process of the...
...His book is a model of sober scholarship and, despite the complicated subject, clearly written...
...It was not uncommon for people to donate sums for a few pages of a Bible for a monastery in memory of family members, the way that congregants today might donate the cost of a brick or a pew for the building of a church...
...Those questions and the movements associated with them came to the zealous attention of the inquisitors...
...Peter John Olivi and Ubertino da CaSaint Joseph in Italian Renaissance Art Carolyn C. Wilson Saint Joseph's University Press, $49.95,281pp...
...It does not appear in the oldest and best Greek codices, and a few place it in Luke...
...What Wilson has to say about Saint Joseph could be said about many other themes in art-think of the different messages embedded in the evolution of the crucifix, or depictions of the Last Supper...
...However, as the order grew, a whole range of practical and seemingly intractable problems arose: How did the friars who were scholars make use of their talents without books...
...Wilson examines four broad categories of paintings: the marriage of Mary and Joseph...
...A press run of twenty-five exemplars, then, used four thousand skins...
...That tardiness may also explain why no significant church bears his name in Rome...
...The question is, of course, whether the episode is authentic at all...
...With 237 illustrations and a well-written text, this volume is both a joy to read and handle, thanks to the excellent production one expects from Phaidon, and it is very reasonably priced...
...It is astonishing that there was no universal feast in his honor until 1470...
...It was Francis, after all, who "humanized" the nativity of Jesus by celebrating a Christmas Mass in a stable in Greccio in 1223...
...Popes got involved, and the issue shifted from poverty to obedience...
...Unlike the other mendicant orders founded in the thirteenth century, the Franciscans were blessed, and burdened, by having a profoundly charismatic founder...
...It was inevitable that focus would be made on the dramatis personae of that scene...
...Could friars, for instance, store grain or wine or oil not actually being used...
...For a single parchment edition, 160 animal skins were required...
...Who (the pope...
...A Gutenberg Bible sold for 100 guilders...
...That picture explains why he is often represented in art as elderly, drowsing, disengaged from the events at the birth of Jesus...
...The production of Bibles was a byproduct of liturgical need...
...Toward the century's end, the debate sharpened: Did the vow of poverty include an implicit vow not to use goods of any kind that violated the vow itself...
...In medieval plays he was often a comic figure...
...Those seriously interested in church history and historical theology, however, will find ample reward from a close reading of this judicious study...
...An important truth woven into this work: The "language" of Christian art is multilayered...
...This volume ends with a chapter on modern discoveries that affect the biblical tradition: the Qumran discoveries and the deposits of manuscripts of Gnostic materials found in Egypt...
...As I finished reading I could not but think of other, more contemporary, apocalyptic groups who saw themselves as a saving vanguard besieged by a corrupt and powerful world...
...In sum: an excellent, well-illustrated, and readable book well worth the price...
...The story of the Spirituals is not simply a chapter in the past...
...Israeli children can read the text as easily as a schoolbook when they visit the Museum of the Book in Jerusalem...
...Francis nonetheless worried about changes in that rule, which demanded that members of the order observe a severe form of religious poverty...
...the adoration of the shepherds...
...There is also a typological correlation in the iconography between Joseph as carpenter and God the Father as maker of the universe, an artisan of the cosmos who parallels the earthly father of Jesus...
...When Saint Francis died in 1226, the order he founded was already The Spiritual Franciscans David Burr Penn State Press, $45, 427 pp...
...Joseph is the sustainer of the Holy Family-he acts as a counterpart to the nursing Madonna...
...That fact alone is witness to the fidelity with which scribes have kept the sacred books in essential order...
...In the fourteenth century these groups lived in the south of France and the Marches of Italy...
...1000...
...today they have dwelt in Waco and Ruby Ridge-perennial victims of end-time fantasies...
...he has written a study of how the Bible was produced...
...Where were the friars to live, worship, or receive the people who came to them...
...Reading itself was a skill, since the typical manuscript did not punctuate or have paragraph breaks...
...De Hamel has not written a book about the meaning of the Bible or its interpretation...
...As De Hamel notes, it was not uncommon to call an entire Bible a biblio-theca-a "library...
...Indeed, the modern concept of "Bible" itself has a history: not until Saint Jerome's Vulgate can we talk about a Bible as a single entity...
...Were the popes asking them to do something that was sinful...
...The Book: A History of the Bible Christopher De Hamel Phaidon, $39.95, 352 pp...
...When the famous Isaiah scroll was found at Qumran it brought the manuscript tradition back a millennium (the oldest previously known manuscript is dated circa A.D...
...The complexity of this story makes it hard to summarize...
...In the early fourteenth century, some of the Spirituals actually went to the stake in southern France...
...Devotion to Saint Joseph, if one judges from the number of communities, parishes, and religious institutions under his patronage, is widespread...
...It was suggested some decades ago that theological discussions about the status of the ir-reformability of papal teaching in this period constitute the roots from which the debate on papal infallibility developed...
...Some early codices of biblical commentaries put rubrics to the words of Scripture, but not always uniformly...
...At times his rugged demeanor indicates his role as protector and leader...
...In the course of his survey, De Hamel pays attention to the transmission of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin biblical tradition and the move to vernacular editions, and there is a fine chapter on missionary attempts to translate the Bible into various languages...
...Only close observation shows us just how dense iconography is...
...When the mendicant friars arose in the thirteenth century, there was a need for more portable books, to accompany the wandering preachers in their work...
...The theological meaning of vows, central to this debate, would come to the fore in the early sixteenth century at the time of the Reformation...
...De Hamel pays careful attention to manuscript copying...
...What one finds when paying attention to Christian iconography is that it contains a hidden history of reflection, contemplation, and remembrance...
...If there is one thing I learned from a leisurely reading of this book, it is that I will never again look at Christmas cards or Christmas creches in quite the same way...
...David Burr has so thoroughly mastered the complex literature on this topic that he is able to offer us the first full account of the Spiritual Franciscans in English...
...Students in medieval universities also required books-of a different sort from those needed in religious communities...
...was the promised Antichrist...
...A careful reader (and observer-there are nearly eighty plates) can see that Joseph's role goes beyond the idea of spouse...
...The Spirituals soon began to wonder about the status of the papacy itself...
...Using movable type he printed them on paper (oddly, De Hamel never discusses when paper became common in this process) and on animal skin parchment...
...Did these true believers and their sympathizers constitute the saving remnant called to resist the powers of the institutional church...
...Some pictures have him holding a book (a wonderful Joos van Cleve of 1520 has him wearing iron spectacles at a lectern) indicating his role as heir of the Davidic line as foretold in the Scriptures...
...The most notable exception to the generally minor problems, however, is the episode of the woman taken in adultery found in John's Gospel...
...After the death of Francis, factions within the order vigorously debated the solutions to those problems, and from these seemingly petty divisions a fascinating phenomenon arose...
...Gamble studied the actual process of the production of books-especially, biblical texts-in early Christianity...
...And there was an increasing fascination with apocalyptic thinking: Was Saint Francis the angel of the sixth seal who would usher in the age of the Spirit...
...the flight into Egypt...
...In a fascinating appendix he profiles some Beguine women who had associations with the Spirituals, and throughout the text he warns against a tendency to see every upholder of evangelical poverty as either a heretic or even a Spiritual...
...By contrast, the 1522 press run of Martin Luther's New Testament was three thousand paper copies...
...Burr has read the pertinent writings of those who were at the center of the controversy, and takes us through the concerns of the popes and councils in question...
...large and had a rule that had received papal approval in 1224...
...Monasteries might possess one or even two, but the funds needed for production were significant...
...Ancient communities might have possessed a codex of the New Testament, a Psalter, or a collection of Paul's writings, but to possess the entire book was rare...
...sale figure prominently in Burr's book...
...This lavishly illustrated and highly informative work by the librarian of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University, Christopher De Hamel, is a continuation of Gamble's work...
...For two generations after the death of Francis the debate centered on the meaning of evangelical poverty...
...His friars were not to have possessions, property, or money, nor were they to accept privileges from either the papacy or the local hierarchy...
...Neither chapter nor verse appears in the early codices, but the use of a diple (like a sideways letter "v") indicated breaks in the manuscript...
...It was only in 1870 that Joseph was named the universal patron of the church, and more recently was honored on May 1 as the patron of workers (a move to counter the Communist May Day celebrations in Europe...
...When Francis had but a few like-minded companions, this understanding of poverty was plausible...
...Wilson's thesis is that an examination of Renaissance painting indicates that this older stereotype will not do...
...The apocryphal gospels uniformly insisted that Joseph was an old widower who was not Mary's husband, but her "guardian...
...Copying inevitably brought errors into the text, although generally the errors were minor...
...Lovers of Saint Francis and things Franciscan will find little to edify them in this work...
...and scenes in which the Holy Family rests while on that flight...
...To get some sense of what went into book production, consider the Bibles first printed by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century...
...That they did so reminds us of how powerful the Franciscan influence was in orienting medieval piety to a consideration of the earthly Jesus...
...Luther's New Testament sold for .5 to 1.5 guilders...
...They also have a place in Wilson's study of Saint Joseph in Italian Renaissance painting, because both men wrote on the significance of Saint Joseph in Christian piety...
...Printing was one factor in the rapid spread of the new ideas coming from the Reformers...
Vol. 129 • September 2002 • No. 16
