Women, Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy - Review

One of Buettner's primary aims for the book is to publish the entire sequence of illustrations of the Paris manuscript. Indeed, the reproductions of the 109 illuminations will be most welcome to scholars interested in the ways visual images construct gender roles, as well as those interested in Parisian painting around 1400. But Buettner's book is not a conventional study of a manuscript. It is not an exhaustive analysis of every aspect of the physical book, as codicological practice has made common in manuscript studies. Instead, as her subtitle suggests, Buettner presents a semiotic reading of certain aspects of the manuscript.

Buettner's agenda is to privilege the visual over the textual contents of the manuscript. She argues that "images create intelligible visibilities that are only partially dependent on words" (p. 2), and that the visual forms of the manuscript instruct the reader/viewer in ways that supplement and sometimes supplant the text. Buettner critiques the approach to manuscript studies that treats miniatures in manuscripts as small easel paintings, reminding us that these miniatures are "welded to a text, each frame . . . linked to those that precede and follow it" (p. 1). Buettner's book therefore focuses on the relationships among the 109 images and the relationship of the images to the texts that they illustrate.

Given an approach that seeks to understand the relationships among various visual elements of a manuscript and the author's critique of the practice of divorcing illuminations from their manuscript contexts, Buettner's book is disconcerting. Although this manuscript is quite famous, this is the first book devoted solely to it. Yet there is no complete description of the manuscript anywhere in this study, and the bibliography does not make clear where one should go to find one. In modern manuscript studies it has become the norm to provide at least a succinct description of the textual contents and a discussion of the collation of quires, if not a complete evaluation of the physical characteristics of the book. Here, even the minimal physical information about the size of the book, the justification of the text, and the size of the illuminations is buried in a footnote in the middle of chapter 2. Equally astonishing is the decision (whether by the author or the publisher) to reproduce the 109 miniatures divorced from the page, as if they were small easel paintings! (The black-and-white reproductions are slightly smaller than lifesize, while the color reproductions seem to be close to life size, based on measurements provided by the author.) Nowhere does the book provide a glimpse of an entire page of this manuscript, as most studies of manuscript illuminations have done over the past decade.(8) While this arrangement results in reproductions that are generally very legible (especially in the case of four-color reproductions), the opportunity to assess the physical relationship between one system of signs (the verbal) and the other (the visual) is lost. One cannot determine how the miniatures guide the reader from one biography to another in the Paris manuscript, or how the rubrics negotiate between the text and the miniatures.