Broderick Herbert Reginald - Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (London, British Library Cotton MS Claudius B.iv)

Though this be madness, yet there is method int.

Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

If thou wilt, I will go into the field, and glean the ears of corn that escape the hands of the reapers.

Ruth 2:2

Art history as a discipline could be said to be somewhat obsessed at this point in its evolution with methodology, how one goes about the task of explaining images. It is incumbent on practitioners of the craft to be more transparent about what it is they are doing. At times this can take on an overly personal, confessional tone, but, be that as it may, I shall say a few things about how I have proceeded in this endeavor.

Two extensively illustrated Old Testament manuscripts other than psalters survive from late Anglo-Saxon England: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 (formerly referred to as the Caedmon Manuscript), of about 1000 or slightly earlier, While my focus here is Claudius B.iv, it is useful to compare how the artists of both manuscripts deal with some of the same material.

Both Junius 11 and Claudius B.iv have been the subject of intense study since the late nineteenth century, and the bibliography on both manuscripts is extensive. Often the most innovative creative work, even in modern and contemporary art, has appropriated and altered to different ends earlier motifs and compositions.

In his book Bring Out Your Dead, Anthony Grafton makes the observation that in the fiercely competitive German universities and academies, in particular, those who could slaughter their intellectual ancestors stood a better chance of prospering than those who worshipped them

In terms of seeing through a glass darkly, in the context of manuscript studies, it is worth recalling the perceptive remarks of Harvey Stahl relative to the question of the role played by earlier exemplars and Weitzmannian models, that the utility of these manuscripts to any discussion of models depends upon ones ability to read the contemporary style and to discount the artists updating or mannerisms or the impact of other models.

Try as they may, none of Weitzmanns critics has thus far presented a coherent, thoroughgoing methodological substitute for the major outlines of his approach developed in his magisterial Illustrations in Roll and Codex, especially his concept of migrating imagery.

In the pursuit of tracing sources for many of the specific peculiarities of individual images in Claudius B.iv, I have found Dlgers Antike und Christentum approach of great assistance. The implications and meaning of this approach are many but might briefly be summed up by Edwin Judges assessment of Dlgers methodology as stepping beyond the traditional use of patristic writers as sources and turning instead to the vast fund of non-patristic sources that lay ready to hand in the apocryphal or Gnostic writings, in the inscriptions, papyri and monuments. but it should be kept in mind that a good deal of this Jewish exegetical material was well known to Christian writers and exegetes. As untutored as I am in it formally, I have learned perhaps the most, on my own, from the work of scholars in the field of history of religions, from whom art historians in the fields of ancient and medieval art also have a good deal to learn.

Much, of course, has changed in the past three decades in the art historical enterprise, as it must. There are now a number of new methodological strategies and trajectories: intensified interest in the social history of art and questions of gender, race, and class. Some may see a study such as the present one of iconographic sources as a bit old-fashioned, yet there is much to be learned about works of art by looking for sources of imagery where justified in order better to understand just what is unique and creative about how later artists transformed these sources to serve different expressive ends and purposes.

The whole question of the relationship of the medieval manuscript artist to models, copies, and exemplars is hampered by an essentially nineteenth-century Romantic view of artistic creativity and individualism. whether it is our eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk or a twentieth-century Picasso.

Working within a biblical concept of the fullness of time (kairos), this study of the illustrations of Claudius B.iv, and specifically the representation of Moses, has benefited greatly from important previous studies, and study aids, that have appeared in the intervening period. Paramount among a number of outstanding publications are Weitzmann and Kesslers study/reconstruction of the Cotton Genesis (1986), these two extraordinary manuscripts are now available to a potentially global audience. The time seems ripe for a broad-based, detailed, additional look at what the artists of Claudius B.iv have accomplished in terms of how they have contrived to provide suitable images for the manuscript set before them, with specific emphasis on the representation of Moses.

The literature on both Junius 11 and Claudius B.iv is quite extensive as they have been the focus of scholarly attention, at least in the case of Junius 11, since the seventeenth century. I am especially appreciative that I have the benefit of hindsight and have been able to construct my work here on a foundation of important and careful work. I am especially indebted to the pioneering work of George Henderson, whose studies of these two manuscripts have been a constant source of enlightenment even when, from time to time, I may disagree with some of his findings.

And finally, I have attempted throughout to adhere to Aby Warburgs famous guiding principle, God is in the details (Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail), while keeping in mind that it has also been said that the devil is in the details.

Any study of the illustrations in Claudius B.iv must, given the large number, be incomplete. While my main interest is the representation of Moses, a closer look at other themes in this extraordinary work may help us clarify our understanding of the origin and function of the imagery in the manuscript as a whole, as well as specifically in the case of Moses. As Henderson has devoted an in-depth study to the Joshua cycle of Claudius B.iv,

I will set about replying to the questioner who asks, What was God doing before he made heaven and earth? But I will not respond with that joke someone is said to have made: He was getting hell ready for people who inquisitively peer into deep matters.

St. Augustine, Confessions, book 11

The first image one encounters upon opening Claudius B.iv, the Fall of Lucifer and the Rebel Angels, on folio 2r (

To enhance the contrast between good and evil, the Claudius B.iv artist has contrived in a number of obvious and not so obvious ways to enhance his pictorial concept by means of multiple antithetical pairings. To begin with, he has divided his field in half horizontally, with God and his loyal angels above set against a background of wavy mauve-colored clouds and the eight rebel angels and Satan shown tumbling helter-skelter below against a pale pinkish background. Somewhat strangely, while Lucifer and his cohort are shown naked, Lucifer himself and almost all of the fallen angels show evidence of a line at the neck as if they were wearing some kind of T-shirt.

Quite striking is the diagonal trajectory of Lucifers mandorla, crashing headlong into the lower left corner of the acanthus leaf frame of the composition in clear contradistinction to the vertical, centered mandorla occupied by the Creator above. And most astonishing of all, Lucifer is shown grasping with his own hands his once-bright frame of light. or Weighing of Souls, in Last Judgment iconography.