Abstract
This chapter examines the eighth-century Codex Amiatinus, a manuscript whose text of the Bible is accompanied by a series of complex miniatures. Focusing in particular on its elaborate representation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, Meg Boulton argues that, by depicting a variety of architectures considered to house God, the pages of the Codex represent the earthly and structural guises of the Church that prefigure Jerusalem, and thus contain within them a representation of all Christian time. Boulton presents built space as something that is most fully experienced through the reader’s imagination in the act of engaging with the words and images on a printed or manuscript page.
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Notes
- 1.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, 2nd edn (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 8.
- 2.
Much of the discussion below relies on the understanding that the Old Testament structures of Tabernacle and Temple and the New Testament structure of the Church (and individual churches) were viewed as being typological ‘houses of God’: places where God dwelt amongst his people in a physical space. For ways in which the Tabernacle may have been understood in Anglo-Saxon England see Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Flora Spiegel, ‘The Tabernacula of Gregory the Great and the Conversion of Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, 36 (2007), 1–13.
- 3.
Important readings of the Codex Amiatinus include R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, The Art of the Codex Amiatinus (London: British Archaeological Association, 1967); J. J. G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century (London: Harvey Miller, 1978), pp. 32–35; Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Library of Scripture: Views from Vivarium and Wearmouth-Jarrow’, in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson, ed. by Paul Binski and William Noel (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), pp. 3–39, and ‘“All That Peter Stands For”: The Romanitas of the Codex Amiatinus Reconsidered’, in Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations Before the Vikings, ed. by James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan (Oxford: British Academy, 2009), pp. 367–95; Celia Chazelle, ‘Ceolfrid’s Gift to St. Peter: The First Quire of the Codex Amiatinus and the Evidence of Its Roman Destination’, Early Medieval Europe, 12 (2003), 129–57; Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. 54–95; Conor O’Brien, Bede’s Temple: An Image and Its Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and ‘Tabernacle, Temple or Something in Between? Architectural Representation in Codex Amiatinus, fols. IIv–IIIr’, Leeds Studies in English, 48 (2017/2018), 7–20; see also the forthcoming volume All Roads Lead to Rome: The Codex Amiatinus in Context, ed. by Jane Hawkes and Meg Boulton (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019). Although the manuscript itself has not been available for general scholarly consultation for some years, the recent production of excellent facsimiles (both the CD-ROM and the physical version by La Meta Editore) now allow for close and detailed study of its pages.
- 4.
This diagram has received much scholarly attention, with scholars divided between those who identify it solely as an architectural replica or plan of the historic structure of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and those who consider it to be a multivalent composite of several ecclesiastical structures and Old Testament spaces that represents a layered amalgam of Tabernacle, Temple, Church, and the Heavenly City yet to come. For the former, see for example O’Brien, Bede’s Temple. For the latter, see O’Reilly, ‘The Library of Scripture’; Bianca Kühnel, ‘Jewish Symbolism of the Temple and the Tabernacle and Christian Symbolism of the Holy Sepulchre and the Heavenly Tabernacle’, Jewish Art, 12–13 (1986–1987), 147–68, and From the Earthly to the Heavenly Jerusalem: Representations of the Holy City in Christian Art of the First Millennium (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1987). In the reading of the Tabernacle Diagram given here, I follow the work of O’Reilly. Thus, the bifolium is understood to function as a representation of the Universal Church in all its earthly temporal guises and geographical places, also recalling and representing the Heavenly Jerusalem to come.
- 5.
See Exodus 25.
- 6.
For the wider iconographic issues surrounding these miniatures, see Meg Boulton, ‘From Cover to Cover: (Re)Presentations of Ecclesia and Eschatology in the Codex Amiatinus’, in All Roads Lead to Rome, ed. by Hawkes and Boulton.
- 7.
It is important to note, however, that this mapping of a hypothetical, phenomenological viewpoint onto medieval material is intended as a framework: a suggestion of one possible approach to such imagery, rather than a direct template for understanding all such images and objects. For selected reading around this type of phenomenological approach see E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. by J. N. Findlay, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995); Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012); and Dan Zahavi, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 8.
See further Meg Boulton, ‘“The End of the World as We Know It”: The Eschatology of Symbolic Space/s in Insular Art’, in Making Histories: Proceedings of the Sixth International Insular Arts Conference, ed. by Jane Hawkes (Donington: Shaun Tyas Publishing, 2013), pp. 279–90; ‘(Re)Viewing “Iuxta Morem Romanorum”: Considering Perception, Phenomenology and Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Architecture’, in Sensory Perception in the Medieval West: Manuscripts, Texts, and Other Material Matters, ed. by Simon Thomson and Michael D. J. Bintley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 206–26, and ‘Art History in the Dark Ages: (Re)Considering Space, Stasis and Modern Viewing Practices in Relation to Anglo-Saxon Imagery’, in Stasis in the Medieval West? Questioning Change and Continuity, ed. by Michael D. J. Bintley, Martin Locker, Victoria Symons, and Mary Wellesley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 69–86.
- 9.
The loan of the Codex to the British Library for the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition, 19 October 2018–19 February 2019, did, however, offer unprecedented access to the Codex.
- 10.
See further Boulton, ‘Art History in the Dark Ages’.
- 11.
See further Boulton, ‘The End of the World as We Know It’, ‘(Re)Viewing “Iuxta Morem Romanorum”’, and ‘Bejewelling Jerusalem: Architectural Adornment and Symbolic Significance in the Early Church in the Christian West’, in Islands in a Global Context: Proceedings of the Seventh International Insular Arts Conference, ed. by Conor Newman, Mags Mannion, and Fiona Gavin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), pp. 15–23.
- 12.
Boulton, ‘End of the World’.
- 13.
Bruce-Mitford, Art of the Codex Amiatinus, 2.
- 14.
Jane Hawkes, ‘Stones of the North: Sculpture in Northumbria in the “Age of Bede”’, in Newcastle and Northumberland: Roman and Medieval Architecture and Art, ed. by Jeremy Ashbee and Julian Luxford (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 2013), pp. 34–53, and ‘The Transformative Nature of Stone: Early Medieval Sculpture of the Insular World and the “Graven Image”’, in Islands in a Global Context, ed. by C. Newman, M. Mannion, and F. Gavin, pp. 104–10 (pp. 106–7); Peter Darby, ‘The Codex Amiatinus Maiestas Domini and the Gospel Prefaces of Jerome’, Speculum, 92 (2017), 343–71 (p. 344).
- 15.
See further O’Reilly, ‘The Library of Scripture’; Chazelle, ‘Ceolfrid’s Gift to St. Peter’, 149–56. The portrait can be identified as Ezra due to the verses just outside the frame of the image, which refer directly to him: CODICIBVS SACRIS HOSTILI CLADE PERVSTIS / ESDRA D[E]O FERVENS HOC REPARAVIT OPVS. See further Paul Meyvaert, ‘Bede, Cassiodorus and the Codex Amiatinus’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 827–83 (pp. 877–81); Ian N. Wood, The Most Holy Abbot Ceolfrid (Jarrow: Parish of Jarrow, 1995).
- 16.
See John 1:1 for a scriptural paratext to this reading of Logos.
- 17.
O’Reilly, ‘Library of Scripture’ and ‘All that Peter Stands For’; Janina Ramirez, ‘Sub culmine gazas: The Iconography of the Armarium on the Ezra Page of the Codex Amiatinus’, Gesta, 48 (2009), 1–18.
- 18.
For recent discussions of this page, see Celia Chazelle, The Codex Amiatinus and Its ‘Sister’ Bibles: Scripture, Liturgy, and Art in the Milieu of the Venerable Bede (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Darby, ‘The Codex Amiatinus Maiestas Domini’, and ‘Sacred Geometry and the Five Books of the Codex Amiatinus Maiestas Domini’, in Islands in a Global Context, ed. by C. Newman, M. Mannion, and F. Gavin, pp. 34–40. See also Per Jonas Nordhagen, The Codex Amiatinus and the Byzantine Element in the Northumbrian Renaissance (Jarrow: Rector of Jarrow, 1977); O’Reilly, ‘Library of Scripture’, 11–13; Bianca Kühnel, The End of Time in the Order of Things: Science and Eschatology in Early Medieval Art (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2003), pp. 41–45, 48–52; and Bruce-Mitford, Art of the Codex Amiatinus, pp. 11–18.
- 19.
For further discussion see Boulton, ‘End of the World as We Know It’, ‘(Re)Viewing “Iuxta Morem Romanorum”’, and ‘Bejewelling Jerusalem’.
- 20.
See Revelation 4:6, 9; Ezekiel 10.
- 21.
See, for example Sarah Kay, ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading’, Postmedieval, 2 (2011), 13–32, and Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
- 22.
See further Boulton, ‘From Cover to Cover’.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr. Nick Baker, Jenna Ross, Dr. Pete Sandberg and Dr. Carolyn Twomey for their comments on this chapter. Their insights were appreciated, and any errors that remain are my own.
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Boulton, M. (2020). Behold the House of the Lord: Encountering Architecture in the Codex Amiatinus. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_5
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