Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the Ashburnham Pentateuch

"So this is an early Christian manuscript, one of the earlier Christian illuminated manuscripts, and it contains scenes from the Hebrew Bible: the old Testament. And Dorothy Verkerk is also someone who thinks differently. It had been previously thought that when one read a sequence of iconographical narrative interventions, one read them because they were linked with a text that—say the Hebrew Bible—in the order in which they appear in the text. Verkerk’s brilliant analysis, which does many many other things, says that one can read across the page chiasmically, like an ‘X’. Or one can skip and go back. In other words, it seems that the reading of images is not necessarily linear, sequential and chronological. The reason she concludes this—and here again the written text intervenes—is the fact that sermons for catechumens, that is people converting to Christianity, very often jumped in ways that the iconography of this manuscript jumped: in order to make particular Christian didactic points and connections. Here’s a technique being employed in visual culture that’s also being employed in the sermons and the conversionary material of Christian literary and homiletic culture. She’s not arguing that these texts illustrate sermons and homilies, rather she is saying that these texts require the same method in reading or understanding that homilies and sermons require. That’s what I got out of that book, the idea that one could read across the page. One of the things that’s interesting to think about with it is the uses to which the Hebrew Bible is put. That is, in a Jewish context an illustration of the Tabernacle in the wilderness may mean one thing. In a Christian context it comes to mean another thing. It’s the same basis but it gains a sort of polyvalency. What that says about the relationship between the two cultures is difficult to say, because we don’t have that much information about the backdrop of this particular manuscript."