Dear Liz,
In general, I think we lack and need tools for thinking about lay devotional
books/objects that are less exclusively dependent on concepts native to the
formation and edification of vowed religious. My Wittgenstein is rusty (to say
the least!), and--like everybody on the list, I'm sure--I am under the gun to
grade stacks of papers, as the semester here is rushing to a conclusion. But I
would like to make a try at replying to your question because the project of
thinking "outside the box" about plural and sometimes paradoxical meanings in
iconography is so difficult, and I know that many members of this list are
struggling with it. I hope they'll chime in.
What I meant was this: (1) The image of the Tree of Jesse comes into being and
wide use, both public and private, in settings--twelfth century--where
monarchical ideologies are being developed by emerging dynasties, and the
terms of monarchical practice, notably its relations with religious power and
its mechanics for succession, are being contested.
(2) In terms of simple visual speech, Mary is out of place in the Tree of
Jesse because it is not she who is "of the house and lineage of David," but her
husband Joseph. Mary doesn't belong in the Tree of Jesse, unless succession
through the female is recognized. (Matthew's Gospel does recognize female
connections in the line, specifically Tamar, Rahab, Ruth--and Mary.)
(3) It is not always the case that the female contribution will be recognized,
and in fact, through the entire twelfth century, when the image has its most
active public life, policy on female success is, shall we say, developing.
Often violently. The important early Trees in English psalters, for example,
in BL MS Lansdowne 383, the "Shaftesbury Psalter", and in the "Winchester
Psalter" (BL MS Cotton Nero C.iv) may both have been made (one early, one late)
during the civil war contesting Matilda's succession to the throne of her
father Henry I. And there are others, like Urraca of Leon-Castille, and
Melisende of Jerusalem. John Carmi Parsons is mater of this material, and has
generously made it accessible in ways that it was not when the classic
iconographic studies of the Tree of Jesse and the Coronation of the Virgin were
done.
I believe that this important image is deployed deliberately, not from habit or
custom but intentionally ('motivated'), and that its meaning in a specific
object or site cannot be understood apart from the visual language games and
situational frames in which it is being employed. In the Psalter of Queen
Ingeborg, for example, I find it impossible to consider the appearance of that
Jesse Tree independent of its iconographic frame (in the pictorial preface to
the psalms, immediately following the Wilderness scene of the Golden Calf and
Moses breaking the Tablets of the Law, and facing a three-part miniature of the
Annunciation, Visitation, and Nativity--the association with Moses is
interesting and unusual and provokes comparison to the Winchester Psalter
series) and its situation in the life of Ingeborg, spurned by her husband
Philip Augustus. The visual argument, about idolatry, divine law, and the
model of Mary's divinely ordained royal motherhood, rhymes with Ingeborg's own
view of the legitimacy of her claims and her high doctrine of the office of
queen. (For a useful, concise roundup of this literature, see George Conklin's
"Ingeborg of Denmark, Queen of France, 1193-1223," pp. 39-52, in Queens and
Queenship in Medieval Europe, edited by Anne Duggan, Boydell Press, 1997.)
In some cases, Mary's presence in Jesse's dynastic tree may argue for the
domestication of the Queen (she's there by virtue of her husband) or it may be
a polemic for the possibility of full female participation in the making of a
dynasty. After all, for Incarnation the female contribution was actually
essential. Or was it just necessary?
An issue for theologians, still mulled in Rome, is whether and how Incarnation
was essentially gendered. It seems likely to me (4) that the visual Tree of
Jesse image itself is always gendered in its motivation. The visual centrality
of a Queen in the paradigmatic dynastic model is a charged image, to be used
with care. I suspect that's why the Tree of Jesse never achieves the ubiquity
or endurance of the Coronation of the Virgin, which after all happens safely in
heaven after the Queen is dead.
But I digress from the matter on which I would most like the views of others,
and that is how interpretive motivations can be 'read' in lay-sponsored
objects. I'm not comfortable with inserting an imaginary theological advisor
everytime, to adequate 'secular' phenomena to religious texts and meanings.
What makes me even more nervous about doing that is that in the Huntingfield
Psalter, for example, where this part of the list's discussion began, the
likely patron is a rebel baron from Suffolk, one of the 25 barons named to
enforce Magna Carta in 1215 and excommunicated by name among them. His Tree of
Jesse/Coronation of the Virgin concludes a pictorial psalter preface that
dwells in unparalleled proportion on the founding narrative of monarchical
legitimacy, Samuel (Kings) I and II. Again, it's a lay book, the early
possession and likely project of a person actively engaged in testing the
ideology--in this case probably monarchical legitimacy--that its pictures
explore.
This is the tip of an iceberg--for discussion--and all those papers are
waiting. But I would like to add that two appearances of the Tree reinforce my
suspicion that gender counts in the deployment of its image, and suggest that
the gendered character of the image sometimes became too obvious, and was
disturbing or provoked a visual response: the Imola Psalter, of the turn into
the thirteenth century, to which I referred last time, and the early fourteenth
century Queen Mary Psalter (BL MS Royal 2.B.VII. in both a full page Tree of
Jesse faces a full page lineage of Mary. In the latter manuscript, the
inhabitants of Jesse's Tree are all male (no Mary); on the facing page, all the
figures are female.
Now, Liz, I would like to know more about your observation, that "a case has
been
made for fifteenth-century representations of the Tree of Jesse as a very
early working out of an Immaculist program in Spanish art." And I'll go back
to work!
Cheers,
Nell
Nell Gifford Martin
elizabeth lehfeldt wrote:
> I would like to follow up on a comment made by Nell Gifford Martin about
> the "language game" at work in the association between the Tree of Jesse
> and the Coronation. Would you be willing to expand on the examples you
> cited of this being not just a religious matter, but one involving other
> issues as well? I think I may have some similar things at work in these
> types of representations in late-15th and early-16th century Spain and
> would like to hear more of your thoughts on this. Isabel of Castile was a
> big patron of devotion to the Immaculate Conception and a case has been
> made for fifteenth-century representations of the Tree of Jesse as a very
> early working out of an Immaculist program in Spanish art. Beyond that,
> Isabel was a monarch very concerned with consolidating her power amidst
> civil war and an open hostility to female rule. I've argued elsewhere that
> the concept of the Immaculate Conception is a part of how she consolidates
> her power, but the Tree of Jesse/Coronation association could add an
> additional nuance.
>
> Also, if it's not too little too late, Suzanne Stratton's _The Immaculate
> Conception in Spanish Art_ mentions several instances of the convergence of
> these images from the twelfth century onward and attributes the one at
> Silos to French prototypes (p. 13).
>
> Liz Lehfeldt
> History Department, Cleveland State University
