Between Book and Body: Art, Language, and the Limits of Interpretation in the Manuscripts of the English Benedictine Movement

Abstract

This dissertation considers the medieval Christian illustrated book as a material expression of its limitations, a signifier of what it cannot represent. A clear sense of limitation was central to early Christian theology, for Christ took on the constraints of human form—and human vulnerability—in his Incarnation, life, and death upon the Cross. Yet, paradoxically, he embodied infinite glory within these constraints, investing the limits of his visible form with possibility. Taking Incarnational theology as an interpretive lens, this dissertation frames the book as a proxy for the transcendent, yet finite, body of Christ. In parallel, this dissertation frames the act of reading as an experiential interaction between the material form of the book and the embodied perspective of the reader. This dissertation locates these conceptual issues within the political conditions of the English Benedictine reform movement (ca. 950–1066), an initiative to reshape an English church fragmented by ongoing Viking raids. In doing so, it offers a new approach both to the study of the manuscript book and to the study of the movement. Literary historians have typically suggested that language functioned, for the Benedictines, as a means of constructing authority, for the movement defined its shape, and exerted its power, through the mastery of the written word. Yet also central to the movement was a sense of language’s intrinsic instability, for Benedictine houses popularized enigmatic literary styles that destabilized even the most advanced readers’ command of language. I argue, therefore, that the writers and artists of the movement perceived word and image not only as means of constructing authority, but also of confronting enigma: that their formal strategies pushed the boundaries of knowledge precisely to reinforce these boundaries’ presence. By pushing language—and its artistic representation—to its breaking point, the Benedictines explored what word and image could, and could not, do; what realities they could, and could not, capture. This dissertation frames the movement’s repertoire of enigmatic forms against the larger questions of identity formation that they threw into relief, recovering our sense of both how these works defy our efforts to comprehend them, and why.