Synopses & Reviews
The twelfth-century manuscript of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job, lavishly written and illuminated at the Cistercian monastery of Cîteaux in 1111, contains images of seemingly gratuitous violence and daily life that are famous but have a significance that has eluded most modern viewers. These images range anywhere from monstrous beasts that devour and hack at each other with swords to monks harvesting grain and felling trees. They have been called by some scholars the products of "unbridled, often irrational fantasy," entirely independent of the text and of any specific meaning. In this book, Conrad Rudolph argues that beyond the face value of these illuminations, there lies an undercurrent of thematic consistency. Like obscure events from Scripture, he maintains, the images may lead to another level of meaning yet to be discovered.
Rudolph focuses on the ways spirituality and politics operate in the artistic process that produced this particular manuscript. By exploring these interactions, we can understand how the form of spirituality embodied in this manuscript legitimized a very intimate attitude on the part of the artist toward the subject. The images are in fact the product of Gregory's demand that one "become" what one reads: some reflect the ideal monk crafting a holy place out of the wilderness, others the Cistercian notion of spiritual advancement as a violent struggle. In this way, the Cîteaux Moralia in Job conveys an exuberance and creativity rarely found in manuscript illumination before or since.
Review
"In this study Conrad Rudolph examines the meaning of the historiated initials of the famous Citeaux
Moralia in Job completed around 1111. . . . By successfully addressing the issues of production, audience, and iconography through this framework of exegetical method, Rudolph's argument provides a major contribution to our understanding of this important example of Romanesque monastic manuscript illumination and a major methodological contribution to the study of medieval monastic art in general."
--Speculum--A Journal of Medieval Studies
Synopsis
"The Citeaux Moralia in Job is an important manuscript that has always received short shrift because viewers have ignored the text in studying the images. As a result, prior discussions have featured individual images, but not looked at patterns revealed in the whole book. Here Conrad Rudolph offers a wonderful reading of the images. He is singularly qualified to undertake the project because of his immersion in the writings of the Cistercians and his awareness of the specific historical and intellectual moment within which the manuscript was created. This book will interest readers from a variety of fields, including art history, history, and religious studies."--Anne D. Hedeman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [127]-137) and index.
Table of Contents
| Preface | |
| Introduction | 3 |
1 | Technical Aspects | 15 |
| The Hands, Layout, and Format of the Citeaux Moralia | |
| The Uniqueness of the Citeaux Moralia | |
2 | Traditional Luxury: The Illuminations of the Prefatory Matter and Books One through Three | 26 |
3 | Simple Symbolism: The Illuminations of Books Four through Seven | 29 |
4 | The Visual Vocabulary of Violence and Daily Life: The Illuminations of Books Eight through Thirty-five and the Frontispiece | 34 |
| The Breaking Away from the Conventional | |
| Violence | |
| Daily Life | |
| Conclusion: To Become What One Reads: The Exegetical Spiritualization of the First Generation Cistercian Experience | 84 |
| Notes | 97 |
| Bibliography | 127 |
| List of Illustrations | 139 |
| Index | 143 |
| Illustrations | 147 |