As any serious student of the Middle Ages is well aware, an encounter with an illuminated manuscript can be both rewarding and confounding. The variety and complexity of material found within a single codex—or even on a single folio—can defy the expertise of even the most experienced scholar. The contours of current disciplinary guilds fail to encompass the range of interests, knowledge, and abilities of the makers and users of books in the Middle Ages. Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John the Evangelist at the Dominican Convent of Paradies bei Soest centers on two folios that serve as a case in point. Confronted with leaves like these, a traditional art historian might quickly find herself or himself at a loss for words. Both surfaces of the two leaves are covered with an array of decorative motifs, textual inscriptions, musical notations, and a handful of charming but seemingly unsophisticated figural motifs—in short, they might look at first glance like the folios of a great many other liturgical books of the Middle Ages, lovingly adorned by artists who may have been ardent in their devotion but whose artistic ambitions appear modest when judged by the ruthless eye of the post-medieval connoisseur.

Such a rash judgment would be foolish. The leaves in question are in fact marvels of theological complexity and visual sophistication, dense with reference and burgeoning with implications for an understanding of late medieval devotion, gender history, and pre-modern understandings of selfhood. Because fully shedding light on this complexity ultimately lies beyond the capacities of any single scholar, Jeffrey Hamburger assembled a crack team of specialists to undertake a comprehensive study of the leaves. The results are impressive, and they offer important, if daunting, hints for how one might proceed with future studies of this sort of material.

The pair of leaves at the center of the project was recently acquired by Harvard’s Houghton Library. They originated in a Gradual produced in Westphalia in the later fourteenth century, as Susan Marti demonstrates in the opening essay in the volume, and were most likely excised from that volume in the early nineteenth century. Along with a third folio (today in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich), they recorded a “sequence”—a portion of the Mass lying between the alleluia and the Gospel lessons—known by its opening words, Verbum dei deo natum. (Because the entirety of the sequence is thus dispersed between Munich and Cambridge, and because the first lines of the sequence are in Munich, I will henceforth refer to the folios as the “Munich/Cambridge leaves.”) The manuscript from which they came was produced by nuns at the convent of Paradies, certainly for their own use. As Hamburger notes in his brief introduction, the meticulous study of such works promises to enrich the scholarship on the lives of nuns, the liturgy, and the roles played by words and images in shaping devotion in the late Middle Ages.

In constructing a convincing and detailed argument for the time and place of the leaves’ origins, Marti’s essay provides a broad overview of the production of manuscripts at Paradies in the later Middle Ages. She moreover examines the roles that the nuns themselves played in their creation and decoration. The nuns’ contributions are particularly interesting, as they appear to have incorporated considerable references to their own identities: the penwork flourishes that adorn the margins are often inhabited by diminutive sketches of nuns at prayer, and several of those figures feature tiny initials that Marti reasonably interprets as self-identifying marks placed by the nuns who drew them. While “self-portraiture” is a freighted concept, Marti’s consideration of these images as such is astute, as she notes that “names (or, in this instance, initials), rather than physiognomic likeness, express the identity of each person” (42). In addition, the penwork filigrees also frame several varieties of micrography—almost impossibly small letters and lines that are perhaps most familiar to scholars of Hebrew manuscripts. This leads Marti into a fascinating discussion of the manner in which the images—the self-images of the nuns, as well as other small depictions of holy figures—and texts function. The micrographic inscriptions signify in several ways: some are akin to the exclamations of the devout, simply proclaiming the name of a saint or Jesus or offering up a terse prayer, while others are brief distillations of liturgical texts or commentaries. In short, she sees these peripheral additions to the page as performing a critical function, drawing together the words of the sequence with a vast commentary tradition, devotion to the saints (especially St. John), and the individual nuns who made and used the manuscripts. Marti hints at a possible rationale for why micrography and minute penwork self-representations might have appealed to the nuns of Paradies: she notes that the use of words written on an almost imperceptibly modest scale allowed the nuns to dedicate themselves to the meticulous decoration of these sacred books and to provide their central words with a rich framework of reference and allusion without recourse to more elaborate images that might invite the censorious attention of less iconophilic authorities.

The next two essays, written by Nancy Van Deusen and Felix Heinzer, respectively, provide the reader with an understanding of the principle text found on the Munich/Cambridge leaves: the sequence known to scholars as the Verbum dei. Van Deusen’s essay adopts a broad scope, introducing the genre of the sequence. She notes that it appeared in the Mass at a critical liturgical moment, between the alleluia (which is based on Psalm verses) and the Gospel Lessons. This placed it at a conceptual juncture between the Old and New Testaments, offering an opportunity to reflect on the theological connections between the two. Moreover, Van Deusen notes that, “the sequence expresses the importance of community” (64). In this way, it would have strongly invited the sort of commentary and self-involvement witnessed in various forms on the Munich/Cambridge leaves. Heinzer’s elegantly written essay takes a more focused view, examining the Verbum dei version of the sequence itself. He buttresses previous scholars’ arguments for the location of the origins of the Verbum dei in the region of Salzburg in the twelfth century. The bulk of his essay discusses themes invoked in the Verbum dei, showing that they endowed it with an especially strong appeal for those interested in the forms of affective piety that were emerging in the fourteenth century. In other words, it would have been particularly attractive to nuns like those in the Dominican convent of Paradies.

With Erika Kihlman’s essay, the collection then turns to consider the texts that accompanied the Verbum dei sequence in the various manuscripts that contain it: lengthy commentaries or shorter inscriptions referencing that commentary tradition. Kihlman describes the existence of several distinct forms of commentaries, each designed to align the text of the sequence with the needs and interests of a particular audience. In the end, though, she notes that the manuscripts containing lengthy textual commentaries appear to spring from different settings than the Munich/Cambridge leaves. While she does not dwell explicitly on the point, this offers further confirmation that the form of textual and visual additions appearing in manuscripts by and for the nuns from Paradies constitutes a distinct mode of interacting with the sequence text. A further enticing hint of that particularity emerges from the next essay, written by Lori Kruckenberg. She discusses the music appearing on the Munich/Cambridge leaves, noting that it is insistently traditional, to the point of seeming actively to avoid innovation and virtuosic experimentation. Kruckenberg plausibly suggests that this may reflect the particular needs of the female makers and audience of the leaves, at a moment when certain reformers had begun to critique musical innovation in strenuous, and often gendered, terms. Kruckenberg thus posits that the conservative nature of the music on these leaves might have worked to avoid potential criticism. This in turn suggests a further possibility: that innovation and experimentation was channeled elsewhere on the leaves, through their elaborate and complex textual and visual adornment.

That possibility is further pursued in the final essay, in which Hamburger considers the interconnections between all of the forms of decoration appearing on the leaves. Hamburger’s essay develops in interesting and productive ways several of the issues explored at much greater length in his 2002 book-length study of images of St. John the Evangelist (Jeffrey Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). But the bulk of this portion of the book is comprised of a consideration of the sources used by the nuns in developing the peripheral epithets found in the Munich/Cambridge leaves and other related manuscripts. In many cases, those sources are visual, as several of the additions Hamburger discusses include combinations of brief texts and schematic narrative or iconic images. Hamburger demonstrates that these epithets and images betray a considerable visual and theological sophistication on the part of their creators, derived from a wide variety of sources (in many cases including, he plausibly suggests, florilegia and a variety of liturgical material rather than original, centuries-old primary sources).

The essays assembled in Leaves from Paradise are, in short, admirable in many ways. Each represents a substantial piece of scholarship in its own field. Taken together, they provide a complex, multifaceted picture of a noteworthy vestige of late medieval culture, shedding light on the lives, interests, and passions of its makers and viewers. They add further depth to important work already conducted in several fields; for art history, they obviously complement and build upon work on the visual culture of medieval nuns pioneered by scholars as diverse as Judith Oliver (Judith Oliver, Singing with Angels: Liturgy, Music, and Art in the Gradual of Gisela von Kersenbroeck, Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), Madeleine Caviness (Madeline H. Caviness, “Anchoress, Abbess, and Queen: Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons?” in June Hall McCash, ed., The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996, 105–53; and “Hildegard as Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works,” in Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke, eds., Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art, London: Warburg Institute, 1998, 29–63. More generally, see Caviness’s Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), Hamburger himself (Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; and Jeffrey Hamburger and Susan Marti, eds., Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and others. On its own, then, this volume offers a compelling ideal that other studies of such material might strive to emulate. That ideal may be intimidating, as opportunities to study, discuss, and publish so fully on material such as this seem to be growing fewer and farther between; one wonders whether a consortium of research libraries might be formed for the purposes of supporting a series of targeted, similarly exhaustive studies of other categories of manuscripts. At the same time, one imagines ways in which future scholars might build upon the foundation established in this study. For instance, while Leaves from Paradise provides substantial information about the visual culture and artistic production of late medieval nuns, it does not extensively concern itself with the sorts of questions posed in recent scholarship on gender as a category of human experience;¹ with its rich interplay of self-representation and implied vocalization, the words and images found in this manuscript would appear to be promising material for such an analysis. In short, the authors of Leaves from Paradise are to be congratulated for their own impressive contribution to knowledge, and are owed our gratitude for the further work they might inspire.