The advent of a new millennium is an opportunity to take stock. Blackwell Publishing has begun to do just that, inaugurating several ambitious series whose aim is to map the past, present, and future of the discipline of art history. A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, one of the first volumes to appear in the series Blackwell Companions to Art History, is the middle installment of three essay collections that will treat the state of research on the art of the Christian Middle Ages. The collection covers the period ca. 1000–1300 in northern Europe, and will be bookended by a future volume on early Christian through Ottonian and Byzantine art, and one that “incorporates the later Middle Ages” (according to the preface [xxi]). As noted by its editor, Conrad Rudolph, Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of California, Riverside, and author of several important studies on Romanesque and early Gothic art, A Companion to Medieval Art is neither comprehensive in its coverage (the volume’s heft notwithstanding) nor a “systematic historiography of medieval art” (xxii). Rather, the aim of this collection, in Rudolph’s words, is to aid the scholar and the student in “understand[ing] the issues and arguments that have contributed to the formation of the current state of the field,” and to “strike a balance between the desire to have a broad and informed historiographical grasp” of the extensive, burgeoning literature on the material and “the near impossibility of achieving this” (xx).

The structure of A Companion to Medieval Art conforms to the template established by Blackwell for all of the volumes in the series. After the editor’s preface is a broad introductory essay, also authored by Rudolph, titled, “Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art.” This condensed yet highly readable account takes the reader through more than two millennia of intellectual activity. It begins with an acknowledgment of the extent to which the enduring “authority of Classical art” (2) and the historiographical paradigms established by Late Classical writing on art have shaped subsequent literature on the medieval material (2). Rudolph’s introduction then moves from the writings of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Vasari, the efforts of English antiquarians working during and after the Reformation and Civil War, the rediscovery of the Roman catacombs, and the histories of art written by Karel van Mander and Joachim von Sandrart, through to the Enlightenment’s reevaluation of Gothic architecture, the founding of the English journal Archaeologia, and the full spectrum of Romantic and “non-Romantic” (21) responses to medieval art and architecture. It surveys the contributions of seminal late nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures like Alois Riegl, Emile Mâle, Wilhelm Vöge, Josep Puig y Cadalfalch, Franz Wickhoff, Georg Dehio, Henri Focillon, Adolph Goldschmidt, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Meyer Schapiro, and contextualizes the founding of important organizations (like the International Center of Medieval Art), journals (Speculum, Cahiers de civilization médiévale, and Arte medievale, for example), “corpora” (such as the Corpus Vitrearum), and research institutions (like the Index of Christian Art). It concludes with an overview of recent work on medieval art and architecture as viewed through the lens of “the new art history.” The scholar wishing to locate her or his own research and approach in relation to the broad sweep of medieval art history would do well to begin here.

The chronological and geographic parameters of A Companion to Medieval Art were determined by the publisher. The subjects of the succeeding thirty, generously documented articles, each by a different scholar, were chosen by Rudolph himself; and it is these topics and their suggestive organization that give the reader the clearest picture of where the discipline is at present. Although the table of contents is not divided into subsections, the articles in the volume do fall into distinct groups. The first dozen essays, according to the editor, are “methodological or conceptual . . . and thematic” pieces that are “unconnected to any specific media” (xxi). The titles and their authors include “Vision” (Cynthia Hahn), “Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers” (Madeline Harrison Caviness), “Narrative” (Suzanne Lewis), “Formalism” (Linda Seidel), “Gender and Medieval Art” (Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz), “Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” (Herbert L. Kessler), “Art and Exegesis” (Christopher G. Hughes), “Whodunnit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art” (Jill Caskey), “Collecting (and Display)” (Pierre Alain Mariaux), “The Concept of Spolia” (Dale Kinney), “The Monstrous” (Thomas E. A. Dale), and “Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture” (Laura Kendrick). The succeeding ten essays, which treat established chronological and geographical sub-fields, form a second group. The titles are: “Romanesque Architecture” (Eric Fernie),”Romanesque Sculpture in Northern Europe” (Colum Hourihane), “Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture” (Robert A. Maxwell), “The Historiography of Romanesque Manuscript Illumination” (Adam S. Cohen), “The Study of Gothic Architecture” (Stephen Murray), “Gothic Sculpture from 1150 to 1250” (Martin Büchsel), “Gothic Manuscript Illustration: The Case of France” (Anne D. Hedeman), “Glazing Medieval Buildings” (Elizabeth Carson Pastan), “Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts” (Brigitte Buettner), and “East Meets West: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States” (Jaroslav Folda). A further group of five essays—“Gothic in the East: Western Architecture in Byzantine Lands” (Tassos C. Papacostas), “Architectural Layout: Design, Structure, and Construction in Northern Europe” (Marie-Thérèse Zenner), “Sculptural Programs” (Bruno Boerner), “Cistercian Architecture” (Peter Fergusson), and “Art and Pilgrimage: Mapping the Way” (Paula Gerson)—constitute investigations of what Rudolph describes as “sub-sets or groupings of the sub-fields” (xxi). The volume concludes with a pair of articles that explore modern encounters with the medieval: “‘The Scattered Limbs of the Giant’: Recollecting Medieval Architectural Revivals” (Tina Waldeier Bizzarro) and “The Modern Medieval Museum” (Michelle P. Brown). Rudolph states that he did not “impose universal standards on independent-minded scholars” (xxi), and the essays vary widely in terms of format and style. At one end of the spectrum is Zenner’s straightforward survey of the literature on architectural design, liberally sprinkled with headings and subheadings; at the other is Bizzarro’s poetically written, elegiac account of the Romanesque and Gothic revivals. The editor and authors are to be thanked for their service to the field and the profession in contributing to this volume.

A notable effect of the organization of A Companion to Medieval Art is the almost complete absence of the word “style” from virtually the entire first half of the book: only Rudolph’s introduction and Seidel’s dense, insightful account of Formalism, which Seidel characterizes as “more a way of thinking about the nature of art than a comprehensive methodology” (107), treat the issues of style and stylistic analysis. Had this volume been conceived two decades ago, it is likely that the media- and period-based articles, in which style is a fundamental concern, would have preceded any methodological or conceptual essays. The organization of the volume should not be interpreted as a sign that questions of the origins, influence, and meaning of style are now deemed unimportant, however. Rather, the arrangement of the essays signals the sustained interest of scholars working today in addressing the issues of style (and meaning and agency) with a greater self-consciousness regarding their methods and motivations, and in recalibrating traditional approaches in light of what can be speculated about how medieval audiences perceived, viewed, used, and valued the images, artifacts, and monuments that are the objects of modern inquiry. The sentiment that, “one wants to be clear about how modern critical discourses correspond—or do not—to medieval concepts” (173), as Hughes aptly puts it in his essay, is a thread that runs through many of the articles in A Companion to Medieval Art.

As Rudolph notes, several essays “pull the literature together in a way not done before, contributing to a dimension of additional analysis and so take the subject further than before” (xxi). For example, Hahn’s article synthesizes a diverse corpus of medieval religious, philosophical, and scientific writings and an extensive body of secondary literature from a broad range of disciplines to provide a wide-ranging account of the physiological, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of vision as conceived and constructed in the Middle Ages. Among the most thought-provoking portions of Lewis’s article is her critical comparison of Erwin Panofsky’s essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1934), in which Panofsky made frequent reference to the pictorial strategies of medieval narrative art, and the writings of Otto Pächt on medieval image-making and pictorial narrative (90–1). Brown skillfully interweaves discussion of the creation, dispersal, and destruction of medieval collections and architectural structures with an overview of the formation of modern collections and recent restoration and heritage efforts, making a compelling case for the need for professional collaboration so that scholars, institutions, and the public can benefit from both new technologies and enhanced opportunities for “close encounters” with actual artifacts.

Many of the essays in A Companion to Medieval Art can be read productively as pairs or in groups. Some of the concerns of Kurmann-Schwarz’s article on gender resonate suggestively with those of Caskey’s nuanced survey of past and present trends in the study of what she calls “the widening patronal field” (204). Mariaux’s overview of medieval practices of collecting and display, a topic “that has only rarely been the subject of sustained research” (213), as he points out, can be paired with Kinney’s engagingly written survey of spolia studies, formerly an “obscure antiquarian subject” but currently a very “hot” art-historical topic, according to the author (233). In their essays on the Gregorian dicta and art and exegesis, Kessler and Hughes deftly steer their narratives between discussions of medieval theory and analyses of well-chosen objects that put theory “into practice.” Moreover, there are many points of convergence between Dale’s essay—which ranges thoughtfully over formalist, psychological, and apotropaic theories of the monstrous in Romanesque and Gothic art and considers the monstrous as a locus of ideology and a stimulus for the work of memory and the imagination—and Kendrick’s article on the images in the literal and figurative margins of Romanesque and Gothic manuscripts, religious architecture, and church furniture. Dale’s concerns also overlap significantly with those of Hahn, Seidel, and Caviness. One admires the willingness of many authors to push the material in unexpected directions and to express opinions that complicate their treatment of their subjects. For instance, it is to Kendrick’s credit that she includes in her coverage of “marginalized” manuscript imagery both initial letters and figurative initials. Although some readers will object to Kurmann-Schwarz’s equation of “gender” with “women” as implied in the topics covered in her essay—in the sections “Women Artists,” “Hildegard of Bingen and Herrad of Hohenbourg,” “Women Patrons,” “The Role of Women in the Use of Devotional Images,” “Monastic Architecture for Women,” and “The Female Image in Romanesque and Gothic Art”—others will be sympathetic to her statement that “both men and women perceived themselves primarily as members of a certain social class, and only in second place as representatives of their gender” (137).

The essays treating individual media are, in general, strongly focused on producing critical accounts of the scholarship of the more distant past, and many of them devote relatively little (or even no) attention to more recent methodological developments. The complementary contributions on Romanesque sculpture by Hourihane and Maxwell provide excellent overviews and analyses of the methodological and nationalistic biases of the scholarship of the eighteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, one wishes that there had been room in A Companion to Medieval Art for more in-depth coverage of the literature on Romanesque sculpture produced over the last three decades, including ongoing research on the cloister, interdisciplinary monographs on individual monuments and groups of monuments, and studies of pictorial narrative, all of which have helped make Romanesque sculpture one of the most exciting sub-fields of medieval art history. Historiographic discussion of narrative in Romanesque sculpture would have enhanced Lewis’s article, which treats only two-dimensional monuments and media (the Bayeux Embroidery, manuscripts, monumental painting, and stained glass), as well as Boerner’s essay on Romanesque and Gothic sculptural programs. Büchsel’s essay includes suggestive observations on the nature of realism in Gothic sculpture, but one wishes, too, that his consideration of the material had ranged beyond the major French portals.

Other essays bring their subjects up to the minute, and beyond. In his insightful survey of the study of Romanesque manuscript illumination, Cohen takes the reader into the digital age by making the thread that unites the sections of his essay the well-known manuscript of the Life of St. Edmund in the Pierpont Morgan Library, images of which are available online. A plethora of recent and current approaches are listed in staccato fashion in the last third of Murray’s wide-ranging overview of the historiography of Gothic architecture. The first half of Hedeman’s study of French Gothic manuscript illumination is divided into sections entitled “Style,” “Codicology,” and “Interdisciplinary Approaches and the Emerging Study of Secular Illustration,” although approaches informed by semiotics and critical theory receive relatively little explicit treatment in the last of these sections. In a final subsection, “Blurred Literary Genres and the Study of Imagery,” Hedeman identifies “the interpenetration of sacred and profane texts and images” (427) as a potentially important area for further research, and her prediction has proven to be a prescient one, both in relation to the study of French illumination particularly and in respect to medieval art generally. As Boerner’s essay illustrates, the possibility of achieving anything approaching historiographical comprehensiveness is dependent on our definition of our terms: whereas past attempts to elucidate the program(s) of sculptural monuments focused on the “intention” of their authors, about whom “the sources provide only very rare and vague information” (557), much current work considers the experience of medieval audiences as contributing fundamentally to the meaning of sculptural ensembles. Pastan’s article on stained glass and Buettner’s on the sumptuous arts are models of historiographical writing. Thoughtfully crafted, full of insight, and written with verve and flair, these essays move with seeming effortlessness between bird’s-eye views of their subjects and more in-depth analyses of individual works, personalities, scholarly studies, and methodological trends, ably conveying both the difficulties and the intellectual excitement of the work in their sub-fields.

The subtitle of A Companion to Medieval Art might have been, more accurately, “The High Middle Ages in Northern Europe” rather than “Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe,” because, as noted earlier, coverage of the Gothic period will be split between two volumes. This division does not reflect how Gothic art is taught at the undergraduate level at most colleges and universities, including my own. Given the vast amount of material covered in the present volume, the publisher’s decision to bifurcate the Gothic period is understandable, if not optimal, and a few authors in A Companion to Medieval Art do carry their analyses into the fourteenth century and beyond. One hopes that the next installment in the series will treat issues like literacy, reading practices, and visual imagery; non-royal lay patronage; devotional art; and textiles and tapestry. Indeed, because it presumably will present the fourteenth century as a beginning rather than an ending, this future collection of historiographical essays has the potential to enhance appreciation of the vitality and creativity of the late Middle Ages and to dispel definitively any vestiges of the notion of late medieval “decline” and “vulgarization.” One assumes Gothic Italy will be treated in another volume in Blackwell Companions to Art History; one wonders where (and whether) Romanesque Italy and medieval Scandinavia will receive coverage. As a result of the focus of the present volume on northern Europe, and in contrast to this region’s importance in the history of Romanesque art, Spain figures only fleetingly in A Companion to Medieval Art. The exception in this regard is Gerson’s essay on art and pilgrimage, which cleverly moves from the “macro” to the “micro” by beginning with discussion of the pilgrimage routes themselves and then treating architecture, sculpture, shrines, saints’ tombs, reliquaries, and pilgrimage badges and souvenirs. Fernie, too, stretches the geographical limits imposed on this essay collection to provide an overview of Romanesque architecture as both a regional and a truly “international” European phenomenon.

The length and structure of A Companion to Medieval Art ensures that the contributions of many important medievalists of past generations—Paul Deschamps, Camille Enlart, Focillon, Paul Frankl, Goldschmidt, Louis Grodecki, Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Robert de Lasteyrie, Mâle, Pächt, Panofsky, Arthur Kingsley Porter, Schapiro, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, and Warburg—are treated in more than one essay, a feature that permits the reader to construct, with the help of the index, an abbreviated tutorial on these figures. In view of the fact that most researchers working today confine their labors to relatively small patches of the landscape of medieval art, one cannot but admire the breadth of these earlier scholars, even if the methods of some of them have come under critical fire in recent years. One is frequently reminded of the impact on both the monuments and their study of war, politics, and other destructive—and creative—human activities. As Folda notes, the Crimean War (1853–6) “intensified” French interest in the history of the Crusades and spurred the “beginning of modern research into the art and architecture of the Crusaders in the Holy Land” (489). Papacostas outlines the ways in which the founding of an independent Cyprus in 1960 stimulated scholarly interest in the island’s Gothic (as well as pre-Classical and Byzantine) architecture and archeology, though research was halted during the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Whereas, as Pastan observes, the extensive destruction of medieval glazing programs during World War II led to rigorous preservation efforts and to the establishment of glass studies as a flourishing disciplinary sub-field, the same cataclysm brought about the almost complete abandonment of Romanesque sculptural studies in Germany, in part because so many important scholars fled the country but also as a result of what Hourihane identifies as the lingering “pre-war nationalistic associations” (327) of the material. Furthermore, as Fergusson observes, the “rise of women’s studies in the 1970s” was the catalyst for the study of “architecture constructed by Cistercian women religious” (589), a topic that had barely piqued scholars’ interest in the previous three decades.

Not surprisingly, certain canonical monuments—the reliquary statue of Ste. Foi from Conques, the Bayeux Embroidery, the Life of St. Edmund manuscript, the Psalter of Christina of Markyate, the sculpted capitals in the cloister of St. Pierre, Moissac, the architecture and stained glass of the Abbey of St. Denis, the sculpture of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Chartres, the thirteenth-century manuscripts of the bible moralisée—are treated by more than one author. However, it is refreshing to see reproduced and discussed many lesser-known works, some of which—like the striking Beatific Vision miniature from James le Palmer’s illustrated encyclopedia, Omne Bonum (third quarter of the fourteenth century), and the equally arresting image of Christ’s side wound and the instruments of the Passion from the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg (before 1349)—although technically outside the chronological limits of the present volume, may soon assume a fixed place in a future, more expansive canon of medieval art. Many major monuments are glossed over, including, most surprisingly, the Abbey of SS Peter and Paul, Cluny, whose architecture and visual culture were the focus of intensive inquiry in the 1980s and for many decades previously.

Historiography, like scholarship itself, is the product of its time and place. Were this volume to be conceived twenty or even ten years from now, how might it be shaped, whether in terms of its chronological and geographical limits or the selection of themes treated? Would the art and architecture of Gothic England and German-speaking regions receive more extensive treatment or even a discrete set of essays? Would it be fruitful to consider from a broad historiographical perspective the important topic of the relationships among art, architecture, and liturgy? Would there be an interest in examining how the discipline has imagined the medieval artist? Would the project be produced in an electronic format and therefore be infinitely updateable, as well as offering the possibility of web links to works cited in the notes and bibliography?

Where will the discipline itself be ten or twenty years from now? Caviness’s essay on reception may provide a hint in this regard. Caviness takes an expansive view of her subject, listing as potential sources for medieval reception not only the usual classes of textual/verbal material like medieval writings about art, theological and philosophical texts, and sermons, but also evidence grounded in the monuments themselves: examples of architectural imitation or of the copying of manuscripts or images; instances of medieval iconoclasm and the editing or erasure of images; and evidence concerning the manufacture, use, and reuse of medieval objects. Many of these types of evidence are of equal value in theorizing about the intentions of medieval artists, patrons, or clients: intention could even be seen as a subset of reception. If the essays by Caviness and many of the volume’s other authors are any indication, then medieval art history has entered a phase in which monuments and artifacts are viewed as material bearers of meaning in an unprecedentedly broad sense of that term; and intensive, open-minded interrogation of the visual and material evidence itself, a tool too often neglected in the rush to embrace new methodologies, has reasserted a central place in our investigative endeavors. Maybe, too, scholars will redouble their efforts to study not just canonical artifacts but also the ones that have been relegated to the margins of medieval art history by virtue of their perceived stylistic inferiority or alleged lack of conceptual complexity. For medievalists working today and in future generations, A Companion to Medieval Art will be a valuable reference tool, and, indeed, an inspiration.