The exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination was planned, together with a number of other events, to coincide with the Diamond Jubilee year of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and was opened by her at the British Library on November 10, 2011. As the BBC website put it at the time, one of the main selling points of the exhibition was that: “All the manuscripts on display were once held and used by medieval royals.” Even if not quite true, the statement suggests the way in which an exhibition devoted to illuminated manuscripts could be sold to the public and the British Library’s own marketing teams through the good will generated by the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. With an attendance of 68,000, the exhibition just missed entering the top ten in the Art Newspaper’s annual list of medieval shows, as it was slightly outdrawn by the British Museum’s Treasures from Heaven. Yet it is by the considerable amount of cross-disciplinary research that went in to the creation of the exhibition and its scholarship that the exhibition should be judged. In fact, it took at least three years to prepare, benefited from a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and represents the cutting edge of research into illuminated manuscripts in the United Kingdom.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue is split into two distinct parts: the general essays and the catalogue. Of the essays written by John Lowden, Scot McKendrick, and Kathleen Doyle, Lowden’s stands out for its theoretical grounding. Drawing on his article “The Image and Self-image of the Medieval Ruler,” he uses a model that generates meaning through the contextualization of books made for rulers within the key personal and wider interactions of the office of kingship (John Lowden, “The Image and Self-image of the Medieval Ruler,” in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, Ann Duggan, ed., London: King’s College, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1993, 213–40). Lowden’s essay explains how a book can be commissioned by or for royalty, or be acquired by royalty, or be recycled as part of the personal or public office of the ruler. The use of books owned by rulers or made for and on behalf of rulers as vehicles for the dissemination of ideas provides Lowden with one of the key answers to his question: why did “royal” books became important? The act of gift giving and the association with the power of the ruler gave authority to the book. This is particularly true in the earlier periods where the authority of the Bible itself was enhanced by its promulgation in codex form (bound in the form of a modern book rather than in a set of rolls) by the Roman emperor himself and those working on his behalf. Lowden’s essay might have included additional reference to female aristocratic and regal patrons; female patronage as an éminence grise in the history of book production needs further discussion, especially as many of the books exhibited were made for or used by women.

The essays by McKendrick and Doyle use the evidence of the Old Royal Libraries as a mirror with which to look back into the development of English cultural history—the reversed image this implies is an appropriate metaphor for the distortions of time and the misunderstandings of the evidence that can take place. The preponderance of French and Flemish works in the libraries acquired from abroad by war or through commerce and diplomatic exchange by Henry V and Edward IV seem to tell one story, but McKendrick points to an ever-present exchange of ideas that suggests a melding through familial and (increasingly) state rivalry played out in an almost relentless cultural game first between England and France and then with Burgundy and Flanders from the fourteenth century onward, particularly after the arrival of Philippa of Hainault as Edward III’s Queen. Doyle makes full use of the pioneering work of Jenny Stratford on the Royal Library before the reign of Edward IV to demonstrate the functional differences between the English Royal Library during the period before Edward IV and that after it—luxury books were collected and exchanged as gifts with royal patrons in Europe, but the impression given is one where the idea of a library on the scale of that planned for Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan at Pavia or the Duke de Berry was unthinkable in England until Edward IV’s attempt to create something on a large and inclusive scale similar to the great European libraries (Jenny Stratford, “The Early Royal Collections and the Royal Library to 1461,” in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, Nicholas Rogers, ed., Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1994, 187–97; Stratford’s most recent study is “Clerks Forfeiture and Books: Richard of Bury and Thomas of Woodstock,” in Contexts of Medieval Art: Images, Object, Ideas: Tributes to Nigel Morgan, J. M. Luxford and M. A. Michael, eds., London: Harvey Miller, 2010, 163–74). The story of the British Library begins here as much as that of the Old Royal Libraries. There is something brutally modern about Henry VIII’s centralization of the best books from the libraries of the great monasteries of England after the dissolution, but he also commissioned and acquired new volumes and inherited them through his father so that many of his books still form part of the Royal Collection in the British Library.

The team brought together to catalogue the manuscripts is made up of both younger and older scholars who have succeeded in producing sensitive and detailed commentaries. The entry for the Beaufort/Beauchamp Hours epitomizes the attention to detail and generous acknowledgement of earlier scholarship that runs through the whole catalogue. Earlier scholars, often working without the support of modern research tools, particularly the digitization and detailed codicological investigation now available through imaging technologies, have sometimes struggled to make sense of a manuscript such as this. Its core was probably produced in London, but sections of miniatures were added from another manuscript identified in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rennes, and interpolations and additions were made by various owners. Add to this the Flemish origin of the so-called “Master of the Beaufort Saints,” as well as the disputed attribution of the illuminators of the “English” parts of the book (J. J. G. Alexander’s attribution to William Abell is now largely rejected by most scholars although still referred to in the entry), and some sense of the challenges that have to be met to describe this work can be better understood (see Kathleen L. Scott, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490, no. 37, London: Harvey Miller, 1996, 130). Occasionally problems arise when less detailed and largely unsupported statements are made about manuscripts such as the Walter of Milemete Treatise (Oxford, Christ Church MS 92), a sister manuscript to the exhibited pseudo-Artistotelian Secretum Secretorum (British Library, Additional MS 47680), made as a book of instruction for Edward III during his minority. The statement, “the series of full-page under drawings at the end of the Oxford volume is a later addition” (229), fails to take into account that the manuscript is in its original binding with later added chemise and that the drawings are not unfinished but were probably always intended to be uncolored. What is striking about this most royal of manuscripts is that it shows evidence of use and that its sumptuous voided velvet and silver-gilt brocaded chemise is similar to those used for Henry VII, and so may have formed part of a royal library up until the sixteenth century.

Many of the older staff (and researchers) who used to work in the old “Manuscript Students’ Room” of the British Library lament the divorce of the pre-Reformation illuminated materials from their place beside the material culture of the Middle Ages in the British Museum. If the Royal Manuscripts exhibition has a weakness it is in this loss of context which is never fully answered by the scholarship around the idea of the “royal” book. A better way of understanding this problem may have been to use a Barthesian analysis of the myth of the “royal book”; even in Lowden’s attempt to construct a model of interpretation, his use of Latin terminology and paternalistic imagery (Rex almost as a male God rather than the Office of the Crown) suggests an exclusive construct rather than a model for developing further understanding. In a sense there is a decontextualization of the materials as “royal” and “illuminated,” which in turn removes them from their natural home as part of the objects constituting the psyche of the Middle Ages. As the researchers led by McKendrick must have known from the outset, these illuminated manuscripts tell more than a story about rich patrons and beautiful miniature paintings: the manuscripts displayed in the exhibition amount to a visual history of everyday life from all parts of society, and therefore have much to say about art as religion, literature, science, and history. Emphasizing their association with royalty can diminish rather than enhance their importance as repositories of cultural history. In many cases the “royal” label forms its own historical discourse, but only in that it represents the wealth of the patron or recipient of an illuminated manuscript book and their use of it as a social and political tool. To assume a precise knowledge of the political and social meanings of these objects because of a greater awareness of the facts surrounding their immediate patronage and production could well be a mistake because they are primarily works of art. Although the catalogue essays in Royal Manuscripts certainly touch on the complexities of these issues, it still remains for illuminated manuscripts to be properly treated as such in the modern literature, i.e., not as demonstrations of individual connoisseurial prowess, but as bearers of meaning.