Medieval Death - Review

Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996. 224 pp.; 11 color ills., 89 b/w. $39.95

The universal phenomenon of death would seem to have no history, but we have learned better. Since the 1919 publication of Johan Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages (recently reissued in a new and full translation by the University of Chicago Press), "The Vision of Death" has come to be associated quite closely with late medieval culture of the 14th and 15th centuries, shadowed by the outbreak of the Black Death in Europe. The two books under consideration here build knowledgeably for the same period upon the foundations of Huizinga and others, including the fuller history of death in the West by Philippe Aries, Hour of Our Death (1981). Perhaps in our own fin-de-siecle era of the AIDS pandemic we are better poised to appreciate the specter of unexplained, sometimes sudden, premature death within society.

Camille's book (which begins with a quotation and a general historiographic assessment of Huizinga in an attempt to reverse the inherited autumnal imagery and see "the carrying back of death into life") offers a case study, "the lifeless art of Pierre Remiet, illuminator." It forms a fitting instance of the ongoing studies by this leading younger scholar of medieval life and culture through manuscripts and their visual signs. Camille, professor at the University of Chicago, has already considered medieval visual imagery in his Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989) and Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (1992). His subject here is a single (and single-minded), previously unknown Parisian illuminator of the late 14th century who specialized in the macabre.

Remiet offers a postmodern version of microhistory, an imbedded and contingent biography for a single figure, a mere illustrator emphatically from the artisan class rather than the elite, who emerges out of anonymity in a period that also first saw the "early modern" emergence of the individual, albeit usually from the stratum de viris illustribus. As with other postmodern appreciations of reference and mechanical reproduction, Camille sympathizes with the repetitive, unoriginal quality of Remiet's often copied output as a hallmark of its embeddedness in late medieval work and culture. Along the way he adds a critique to the traditional methodology of previous manuscript scholarship (and bookselling), which places emphasis on individual style ("hands") and group activity ("workshops"), even as he makes his own (self-conscious, almost ironic) distinctions of individuation for Remiet, a follower of the anonymous Master of the Boqueteaux, as the necessary precondition of this study. This instance, the author declares, offers art of premodern image makers before the age of art. It posits the work of art as document, as trace, rather than as monument.

One overly intrusive touch is the author's ongoing, fictional, empathetic account of his protagonist's thoughts on the eve of his own death in a Paris garret, which begins each chapter in turn. This strategy, already advanced by Simon Schama and Linda Schele in other works intended to blur the boundaries between story and history, has the effect of reminding the reader that all of the past is a reconstruction drawn from the needs and the concerns of the present. However, in the end it seems an overly sentimental tribute to (identification with? empathy for?) the subject under study.

The circumstances of this obscure miniaturist are limned in the first chapter. Remiet was a small-scale illuminator, whose early libraire superior, a scribe, was ennobled by King Charles V in 1371. Another, a neighbor who was one of four great librarians for the university, was also a book dealer who included the occupying English among his clients. Remiet worked quite literally at the margins of many books, often making border ornament, but he also produced elaborate frontispieces for an allegorical text on the subject of human life - the manuscript of Guillaume de Deguileville, Pelerinage de vie humaine (Paris, Bibl. Nat. ft. 823). His habitat was the Parisian street of illuminators in that early moment when professional illustration passed from the monastery to the urban guild. Newcomers to the social history of late medieval artists will enjoy this chapter's section on book producers, including a map of Paris with the university quarter (plus a turn-of-the-century Atget photograph); This sphere of activity is made vivid because Camille focuses on one illuminator on a typical day in the workshop apprenticeship system before the 1370s. He uses the anonymous "Boqueteaux Master," an old-fashioned designation for the important, if anonymous, illuminator now more generally known as the "Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy," who produced the celebrated frontispieces to the collected works of Guillaume de Machaut, among other "key" monuments. Connections to his own leading patrons, chiefly Louis d'Orleans, tie Remiet to the manuscript world surveyed by Millard Meiss a generation ago, though this kind of larger social history is largely confined to citations with references. Throughout, the emphasis claims to focus on the repetitive nature of the pictorial assignments, where illuminators are copyists, akin to the late medieval compilators of texts by earlier authors, or even more to their own supervisors, the scribes.