Lucy Freeman Sandler is a preeminent member of a generation of scholars that transformed illuminated manuscript research from a niche discipline into a vibrant and expansive field within the study of Medieval art. To trace Sandler’s achievements is to map a chronology of major critical and methodological developments in the field. Earlier monographs on devotional manuscripts like the fourteenth-century Psalter of Robert de Lisle and the Peterborough Psalter are exemplary studies of iconography and style that remain the authoritative sources on these subjects. Later works, such as a monograph on the production of a manuscript of the clerk James le Palmer’s illustrated encyclopedia, herald the arrival of a powerful new interdisciplinary art history. To say that Sandler’s name is synonymous with the study of English Gothic manuscript illumination is no exaggeration. An entire generation of graduate students and scholars owes her a debt for her catalogue Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385, the fifth volume in A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles (London: Harvey Miller, 1986). The present festschrift volume is a fitting tribute to a scholar who not only reshaped her field but generously facilitated and fostered the work of numerous others.

Published as part of Harvey Miller’s new Tributes series conceived in honor of important historians of the illuminated book and edited by Kathryn A. Smith and Carol H. Krinsky, the festschrift assembles twenty-five offerings from former students, colleagues, and curators, including many leading figures in the field of manuscript illumination. Among the contributors are Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Nigel Morgan, and Kathleen L. Scott, fellow authors of Survey catalogues and recent honorees of the Tribute series. They are joined by well-known authorities like Adelaide Bennett, Walter Cahn, Madeline H. Caviness, Richard K. Emmerson, C. M. Kauffmann, Margaret M. Manion, Lilian M. C. Randall, Alison Stones, and Roger S. Wieck, to name but a few. The volume is beautifully produced; and although it does not include any color illustrations, all of the essays are amply illustrated and there is a great deal of unpublished visual material.

A majority of the contributions are case studies of single leaves, manuscripts, or small groups of manuscripts related by textual contents. Most deal with English and French Gothic subjects. As Smith acknowledges, the collection embodies a “thematic range and methodological variety,” but such criteria are not used to organize or divide the essays. Rather, the editors arrange the contributions chronologically according to the dates of works discussed. References to predominant subjects or themes that Sandler touched upon in her research or the use of related methodologies constitute the thread that more or less runs through and unites the contributions. In the first offering, for example, Jane E. Rosenthal positions the Crucifixion iconography in the Anglo-Saxon Gospel Book of Judith of Flanders as an early expression of a distinctly English devotional sentimentality, a parallel manifestation of which she locates in the Gothic Gorleston Psalter treated by Sandler in her volume of the Survey. Excellent contextual readings of single leaves illustrated with unusual iconography are likewise offered by Cahn and Alexander. Other offerings, including those of Erik Inglis, Kauffmann, Morgan, and Stones, rely on comparative iconographic study to arrive at more nuanced models of patronage and/or production of popular texts in specific geographic areas. Still others, like Randall, Scott, and Wieck, localize unpublished leaves or manuscripts by way of stylistic analysis.

Thematic divisions or methodological distinctions might have supported alternative arrangements of the essays and increased the accessibility and value of the festschrift for non-specialists, particularly since the volume lacks a general subject index. Studies of marginalia, for instance, an area of inquiry closely associated with Sandler, are of course thoroughly represented and might have comprised one such thematic grouping. Among these essays, Margot and David Nishimura’s argument that the many rabbit warren motifs in the Gorleston Psalter are actually verbal puns on the name of the book’s patron, the Earl of Warrene, is a fitting homage to Sandler’s famous article on the Ormesby Psalter and her subsequent treatment of imagines verborum in the Luttrell Psalter. Bennett’s recontextualization of a group of dispersed antiphonary leaves demonstrates how “worldly” marginal vignettes might structure use of a liturgical manuscript. In a welcome discussion of the role of marginalia in a manuscript made for more practical purposes, Elizabeth Sears shows how successive generations of clerks “littered the margins” of Etienne Boileau’s Livre des métiers de la ville de Paris in order to illustrate or articulate modifications of Parisian guild regulations.

As far as the specialist is concerned, the volume’s indices of manuscripts, artists, scribes, and owners are useful tools. And certainly a benefit of the chronological ordering of the essays emerges where there is significant subject or thematic overlap between adjacent offerings. M. A. Michael, for instance, turns to preliminary drawings associated by Sandler with the De Lisle Psalter’s “Madonna Master” in order to advocate for a new “semiology of style.” Michael’s contribution is followed by that of Emmerson, who employs the same master’s image of the Three Living and the Three Dead in the De Lisle Psalter as a starting point for a discussion of the semantic properties of Middle English texts in manuscript illustration. Together, the Michael and Emmerson essays constitute a focused and provocative primer on potential applications of semiotic frameworks to medieval art.

Along similar lines, some of the more interdisciplinary offerings, particularly those that deal with matters of readership and reception, are likely to attract a broader range of academics. Gerald B. Guest’s describes how the lengthy prefatory cycle of Old Testament miniatures in the Psalter of St. Louis constructed its royal recipient as an “accumulation of multiple subject positions” to include the populace itself. Guest’s argument, inspired in part by models of film spectatorship (in particular the work of Stephen Heath), provides much-needed nuance to a debate often characterized by over-determined biographical or programmatic readings.

In a study of two nearly identical miniatures of the personification of Fortune in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s famous Roman de Fauvel manuscript, Nancy Freeman Regalado describes how repetitious arrangements of image, punctuation, and music rhythmically reinforce the moralizing message of the text. The following essay, Caviness’s examination of marginal motifs in the Psalter of Louis X “Le Hutin,” draws upon Sandler’s models of allusion and wordplay in addition to postmodern frameworks of power in order to demonstrate how marginalia might participate in the construction and ethical regulation of an intended recipient. In keeping with her earlier work, Caviness views the often-vulgar sexual imagery of the margins as part of a hegemonic system of moralizing imperatives, in this case directed at the king by the Psalter’s Flemish makers. The thematic dialogue between the adjacent Regalado and Caviness essays is perhaps more successful than any other pairing in the festschrift. The authors arrive at their conclusions by different means, but ultimately both contribute to an important discussion of the substantive role manuscript illumination played in a larger, pervasive critique of royal conduct in the early decades of the fourteenth century.

Behavioral expectations, particularly in respect to gender, are likewise the focus of Claire Richter Sherman’s essay on illuminated translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics. In a study of those miniatures that illustrate passages on the management of the household, Sherman demonstrates how scenes of peasant life are supplanted with images of the bourgeois family in which the wife gradually loses equality and control, a function of the re-editing of the text and its consumption by new aristocratic audiences. If the changing imagery of the Economics testifies to a general pattern of female disempowerment in the context of marriage, Susan L’Engle’s discussion of the disparate functions of images of naked bodies in canon law manuscripts illustrates a rare circumstance in which the opposite might hold true. An unusual historiated initial in a manuscript of Gratian’s Decretals visualizes the legal recourse available to a wife who seeks divorce on account of her husband’s impotence. The unexpected image suggests that in order to prove her case the husband might be submitted to examination by a team of experienced matrons and his unhappy condition displayed before a court.

Many other provocative and valuable offerings to the study of manuscript illumination are found in this volume. The thematic and methodological variety of the essays is worthy testimony to Sandler’s rich and wide-ranging scholarship. Certainly the variety of subjects and general excellence of the contributions will insure the book’s regular consultation in the future. In short, this is a handsome and admirable tribute to an eminent scholar.