“The venerable and pious virgin Gisela von Kerssenbrock wrote, illuminated, notated, paginated, and decorated this admirable book with golden letters and beautiful images in her memory. In the year of our Lord 1300 her soul rested in peace. Amen.”

This extraordinary inscription has given the elaborate Gradual typically referred to as the Codex Gisle a special place in the history of medieval German art and of manuscript illumination in general. The fact that it names the nun Gisela as responsible for all aspects of the making of the book has been used, in recent years, to give the manuscript a place in the early feminist project of restoring to women a place in the production of works of art. At the same time, however, the exceptionally high quality of the illuminations and other decoration have raised doubts about whether such work could really have been executed by a nun, and recent work on Nonnenarbeit, work of lower quality made by cloistered women for their own devotional use, has reinforced these doubts. Should the inscription be read in the sense of “Gisela had this book written, illuminated” and so on, making Gisela the patron rather than the producer? Similarly the date of 1300 given in the inscription for Gisela’s death, which produces a terminus ante quem for her artistic activity, has sometimes been thought too early for a work of this style, casting further suspicion on the inscription as a whole. Judith Oliver, in this subtle and convincing work, casts these doubts aside, arguing that the inscription should be taken at face value and that Gisela should finally be given the credit that is due her.

Oliver, in a text as densely woven as the tapestries made by nuns at other convents, brings together word, image, and other decorative elements, and examines them in multiple, interlocking contexts to show that the manuscript can only have been conceived and assembled by someone with an intimate knowledge of the “intense lived experience of liturgical services in women’s convents” (44). The cantrix or choirmistress, the high-ranking officeholder responsible for the performance of ritual as well as the care and production of music books, would have been ideally suited to produce such a complex object, and Oliver proposes that Gisle held this position at the Westphalian convent of Marienbrunn at Rulle. The necrologies from the Cistercian nunnery note the death of Sister Gisela von Kerssenbrock on 10 January 1300, with the single brief annotation that she “gave the most beautiful Gradual in the choir” (8). Gisela appears twice in images labeled with the diminutive of her name (Gisle) at significant points in the book—the large and particularly splendid initials for the introits on Christmas Day and on Easter Sunday. In the former she is shown at the head of a small group of nuns, whom she leads in singing with her finger pointing out the words in an open manuscript.

Oliver’s exceedingly close observation of the manuscript allows her to show that Gisela’s book both prompted and reflected the “thoroughly liturgical consciousness” (211) of the nuns in their annual rotation of chants. This consciousness is reflected here in subtle trios of decorative hierarchies: different colors of musical staves and notes, versal initials picking out “words of special liturgical or meditative resonance” (4), painted initials in different sizes, and letter forms of historiated initials were all treated in one of three ways according to the importance of the text passage and/or feast. The texts of chants are set up on the page so that important words occur near the historiated initials. The subjects of these initials were chosen sometimes according to tradition, but other times reflected liturgical drama, Gospel readings of the day and alleluia versicles, or scenes considered to be more appropriate or appealing to an audience of nuns. Iconographic details too were chosen for their relevance to the nuns: the emphasis on Christ’s wounds, for example, recalled the unusual “crown” with the five red crosses worn by the nuns in the images and their living models at Rulle. The sermons of St. Bernard also provided iconographic motifs, no surprise since copies were often held in nunneries of his order. Text scrolls, old-fashioned at this date, record incipits of chants from both the mass and office, cited roughly from memory, and remind of other related feasts.

Indeed, in Oliver’s deft weaving of these many strands one gets the impression of an elaborate series of cross-references, where every element functions in its own right at the same time that it draws attention to the chants, devotions, readings, plays, and visual imagery associated with other times of the year. According to Oliver, the complexity of this multi-layered system argues for the choirmistress Gisela herself laying out the entire book and executing all its images; she reserved the writing of the text of the two most important parts—the gatherings containing the Christmas season at the beginning of the book and the quires with the unusually profusely illustrated Easter week and the feasts through Pentecost—for herself, turning over the bulk of the scribal work to an associate.

The second half of the book illustrates Oliver’s thick reading image by image, season by season. Chapter 4 looks at the rich imagery of the Christmas season, which concentrates on the Virgin to whom the cloister was dedicated. Chapter 5 considers the period from Lent to Holy Week, and chapter 6 the lavishly illuminated Easter feast. The season from Easter through Pentecost and Trinity Sunday is treated in chapter 7, while the illustrations of the Sanctorale are the subject of chapter 8. A single example rendered in brief can give an idea of the complexity of this “liturgical synaesthesia” (211). The third page on which the nuns of Rulle appear illustrates the introit for the third Sunday after Easter with an innovative image that Oliver entitles the “Tree of Life: Christ as Lord of the Universe Worshipped by Creation.” This five-stave initial occupies about half the height of the page, its vertical format leaving ample room for text to its right. The green tree rises from exposed roots in which are tucked, at the left, a deer and doe and, at the right, two lions. Similarly paired on the left and right of the tree at the next level are two nuns and two clerics. At the next level, two angels play a harp and a vielle under the seated image of the blessing Christ at the top of the tree. At the literal level, the image illustrates the text it introduces: “Shout with joy to God all the earth” (Ps. 65:1). The text passage that opens with a golden initial near the figure of Christ reads, “I am the good shepherd”; “alleluia” appears just below the angels, and “terra” between the human figures and the animals. Christ holds a text scroll bearing a passage from the book of Matthew that was read at the Gospel lesson and the communion chant on Easter Friday: “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth.” The repetition of the word “omne/omnis” on the scroll held by one of the nuns and the one waved by one of the clerics accentuates Christ’s omnipotence, but the men’s text also refers backwards in the liturgical year to Epiphany. The populated tree makes reference to the Tree of Jesse, also an appropriate allusion for the Epiphany season. The reading of the Book of Revelations was begun on the third Sunday after Easter; thus, the seated Christ bearing his wounds also evokes the judging Christ of the Second Coming. Oliver relates the presence of the nuns here to this last reading of the image: they thus appear at the Nativity, the Resurrection, and the Second Coming, at which they hope to be numbered among the elect.

Oliver’s book builds on her wide-ranging and long experience with both medieval manuscripts and the modern scholarship about them. This stately volume presents her fine work in handsome form: all the figural initials are illustrated in color, many in full-page shots. Details from Gisela’s manuscript and ample illustrations of comparative material appear in black-and-white figures set within the text. Well-designed charts make easily visible the division of scribal hands, the hierarchy of decoration, the placements and subjects of the historiated initials, and the sources of the texts on the unusual speech scrolls as well as the mass pericopes and the alleluia versicles for the Easter season, both of which served as sources for the subjects of images in this part of the book. Finally, a series of appendices rounds out the book: a codicological description of the manuscript; lists of saints commemorated in the sanctorale and elsewhere; incipits for the hymns, kyries, and sequences; and a useful catalogue, which the author admits is incomplete, of forty other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century illuminated graduals, with lists of their illuminations.

Oliver twice (68 and 214) attributes the opening inscription to Gisela’s collaborator on the codex, the second scribe who ruled and wrote quires 3 through 8 and 11 through 19, and thus would have been in a position to know not only the multifarious tasks necessary to assemble such a book, but of Gisela’s masterful role in executing them. This anonymous nun, who, Oliver argues, may also have been Gisela’s assistant as succentrix, notes that Gisela’s goal—or one of them—in this undertaking was a memorial one: the nuns who saw her work and the “portraits” inscribed with her name should pray for the fate of her soul, and the making and donation of such a book served as a credential on the path toward heaven. Oliver’s book, which restores this amazing achievement to Gisela as scribe and artist, also serves the nun’s memory admirably, if in a way more typical of our secular age.