Present History: Carolingian Gospels and the Uses of Narrative
The category of "time-based media" was coined for art practices in thoroughly modern media, such as videos, slide shows, and animation. The term, however, acquires extraordinary power when applied in the pre-modern sphere, by naming temporal qualities fundamental to artworks in the Christian tradition. The notion that time itself may work as a component of artistic composition opens a particularly valuable perspective on early medieval religious art. In the eighth and ninth centuries, people crafted images and their media to define the place of the Church in time – including a vivid present tense. The ever-present cycle of liturgical time provided a foil to commemoration of the gospel history on which the Church was founded. The expectation of history's end shaped Christian eschatology. Narrative imagery – the depiction of actions in a sequential structure – represented a particularly complex form of Christian time. Called historia in contemporary sources, pictorial narrative was deemed the form that, by representing past events, could make history present again. Taking the notion of temporal presence as a formal challenge for artists, this book explores both canonical and little known examples to investigate how ninth-century pictorial narrative – especially in illuminated gospel books and on their splendid covers – harnessed the combination of sequence, depicted motion, historical subjects, and the forms of objects and spaces to define the relationship of Christian history to the present. In doing so, artists defined the function of images and their media within the Carolingian Church, forging a particular power for the presence of art itself.
Beatrice Kitzinger
Vita
Beatrice Kitzinger received her PhD from Harvard University in 2012, and held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Stanford University before joining the Princeton faculty in 2015. Her work examines intersections of artistic media, of pictorial and liturgical space, and of historical, eschatological, and ritual time primarily in manuscript illumination between the 8–10th centuries. With Profs. Kathryn Starkey and Fiona Griffiths (Stanford University), Kitzinger is a founding editor for the interdisciplinary series, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to the Middle Ages with De Gruyter press. In 2018 and 2019 she was a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation at the Kunsthistorisches Institut of the Universität zu Köln.
• The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). • Ed., with Joshua O’Driscoll, After the Carolingians: Re-defining Manuscript Illumination in the 10–11th Centuries (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).
Articles
• "Wandalgarius' Letters of the Law: Figural Initials and Book Culture in the Late Eighth Century," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (forthcoming). • "Eusebian Reading and Early Medieval Gospel Illumination," in Canones. The Art of Harmony: The Canon Tables of the Four Gospels, ed. Bruno Reudenbach, Alessandro Bausi and Hanna Wimmer. Studies in Manuscript Cultures 18 (Berlin: De Gruyter; Hamburg: Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2020), pp. 133–71. • "The Cross and the Monumental Crucifix," in Christ on the Cross and the Emergence of Medieval Monumental Sculpture, ed. Gerhard Lutz, Marietta Cambareri and Shirin Fozi. Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 391–405. • "Representing the Gospels Beyond the Carolingian Center," in Imago libri. Représentations carolingiennes du livre, ed. Charlotte Denoël, Anne-Orange Poilpré and Sumi Shimahara. Bibliologia 47 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 151–61. • "Graphic and Figural Representation in Touronian Gospel Illumination," in Graphic Devices and the Early Decorated Book, ed. Michelle P. Brown, Ildar H. Garipzanov, and Benjamin C. Tilghman. Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017), pp. 179–202. • "Judgment on Parchment: Besançon MS 579 and the Uses of Theater in Fourteenth-century France." Gesta 55/1 (spring 2016): 49–78. • "The Instrumental Cross and the Use of the Gospel Book Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale MS 960." Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 4, "Active Objects" (2014). • "Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale MS 960. Approaches to Gospel Illumination in 9–10th Century Brittany." Rivista di Storia della Miniatura 17 (2013): 29–42.
