“How did images produce religious truth in the later Middle Ages?” Adam Kumler’s Translating Truth is an ambitious book that tries to answer this question through an examination of visual responses to the search for religious knowledge among the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Kumler analyzes a series of exceptional manuscripts containing vernacular texts and images made for a lay clientele in France and England within the new “horizon of expectations” regarding education of the laity that emerged from the Fourth Lateran Council’s reform. Through the mediation of archbishops and bishops who supervised parochial clergy, the reformers sought to translate the council’s ideals about religious belief and practice into both reinvigorated pastoral knowledge and pastoral techniques designed to convey religious knowledge. What interests Kumler is the way in which the laity responded; the desire for new religious knowledge felt by the lay audience empowered them to commission books of vernacular pastoral literature that gave them unprecedented access to the pursuit of salvation on their own. She examines a series of manuscripts, mostly luxury compendia, whose visual complexity demands careful reading, close study of text, and concentrated viewing. Indeed, one of Kumler’s most significant goals is to show how images in these luxury manuscripts translate religious knowledge into visual form; their pictures often function independently of the texts, manifesting religious beliefs and offering visual guidance about ways that individuals might actively use vision to work toward salvation. These ambitious images extended the “pastoral syllabus” and even transformed it. The manuscripts in which they appear, all but one of which were illustrated for the first time, offer insight into the independence that pastoral reform gave the laity and the ways in which lay audiences embraced it and created new knowledge.

Kumler makes her argument in chapters that are structured thematically rather than chronologically and that track the formation of ideal lay Christians in the Reformation era through a spiritual progress “from catechesis to confession, from confession to communion, from communion to a foretaste of spiritual perfection” (12). In the earliest chapters she moves from pastoral legislation, to images and texts in Latin manuscripts that belonged to members of the clerical elite, to vernacular illuminated texts aimed at laymen and accessible in the vernacular. Her careful analysis of the manuscripts and their images reveals complex devotional ambitions.

Through the analysis of ecclesiastical legislation in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council, chapter 1 traces the development of bureaucratic structures designed to support the emerging ideal vision of the church in which the clergy were educated and lay church members were informed, active participants. Clergy were enjoined to teach what they themselves had been taught when they preached from the pulpit and heard confession. Topics in the sophisticated canon that resulted ranged from knowing the Ten Commandments and the articles of faith to understanding the sacraments and their effect on believers. The clergy’s teachings were expected to transform the laity, making them knowledgeable participants in the sacraments. As evidence for early reception of this message, Kumler examines visual messages in several commentary images in Queen Blanche of Castille’s Bible moralisée (early 1220s) that embody a more reformist visual content than their vernacular captions do. It is significant that at least one of these artists’ iconographic innovations adapted contemporary visual models to strengthen its point about the importance of lay religious formation and the lay thirst for religious education more than the French text captions required.

The richly illuminated vernacular manuscripts that are the subjects of subsequent chapters reveal traces of the deliberate appropriation of clerical ambitions by male and female members of the aristocracy. Chapter 2 examines how some images translating religious truths can be better understood through the lens of the sacrament of confession, which had been revised in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Kumler argues that the ideal practice of penance described in Latin statutes in the late thirteenth century had become highly interactive, involving priests and sinners in a dialogic relationship for the first time as they reviewed commandments, discussed the seven deadly sins, defined articles of faith, and sought to come to grips with the circumstances of sin. The confessor and penitent together shaped the resulting confession of sin as a vernacular narrative performed with proscribed phrasing and physical gestures that each perceived and responded to as the sacrament unfolded. This discursive genre produced a penitent who absorbed a canon of beliefs through active participation in the sacrament and subsequently was able to use them to produce a good confession.

After presenting evidence for the active agency of the penitent in confession, Kumler turns to manuscript images that encourage variations on the same kind of ongoing, perfecting, dialogic relationship, but that ultimately were adapted and developed for vernacular lay instruction independent of clerical supervision. She begins with an example of a monastic moralizing genre that predated clerical reform, a Speculum virginum designed for the spiritual edification of nuns. While the text, a dialogue between a monastic instructor and his female religious student, develops metaphors that encourage moral reflection, diagrammatic images mirror moral dilemmas offering antitheses with which readers could work. She discusses the Vrigiet de solas, a bilingual variation on this Speculum type, which used predominantly visual means to externalize the self-examination that was an essential preparation for confession, and then moves to a discussion of Joinville’s Romans as ymages (ca. 1287) and the allegorical sequence that prefaces the Eleanor de Quincy’s Lambeth Apocalypse (ca. 1260), both of which employ the senses to construct heroic visual imagery to offer male and female viewers models who guide their preparation for penance. The chapter ends with illuminated manuscripts that inscribe the viewer within a social context as a member of an imagined Christian community.

Chapter 3 employs the Eucharist, the sacrament involving sight, taste, and ritual display—but also an unseeable transformation (transubstantiation) that had to be believed—to explore ways in which the laity used images to express their relationship to the mystery. After examining illuminated examples of Latin canon law and liturgical books that provide insight into the importance to clerics of the standardized moment of the host’s elevation, Kumler turns to Latin Books of hours and illuminated vernacular manuscripts that used the visual and the vernacular to represent and perfect lay spiritual excellence. One of her most compelling vernacular examples, a fragmentary compendium preserved in Paris and Oxford, contains a paraliturgical text, Ce que vous devez faire et penser a chacun point de la messe. The illuminations of Ce que vous devez faire reveal the ways in which the pastoral concern with ritual and the correct response of the faithful to it were appropriated to exhibit lay spiritual excellence through vision and meditation—to enable lay participants in the mass to use their experience of ritual moments to infuse the liturgy with allegorical and exegetical significance. The visual cycle culminates in the dual images of the elevation that were reworked by the artist to make Christ’s bleeding body visible on the altar, thereby collapsing the distance between the laity and the divine and making their spiritual vision visible, and in a sequence of three communion images that take the laity’s spiritual encounters to another level, implicating the reader-viewer of the image in the devotees’ spiritual encounter with another mystery—the Trinity—and offering models for catalyzed lay vision.

Chapter 4 examines ways in which imagery translates the model of the ideal cloister into architectural metaphors for the construction of individual conscience and spiritual improvement. In this chapter the Latin antecedent texts include ordos for church dedication, liturgical commentary on church architecture, and, most notably, twelfth-century cloister allegories. While these allegories were written for those who lived a cloistered life surrounded by the actual architecture that is glossed, the vernacular adaptations of the genre for non-cloistered consumption translated the genre for non-cloistered laity and in the process changed its goal. Kumler’s focus in this chapter is a compendium now split into two manuscripts in London that juxtaposed the Somme le roi, a mirror of princes, with the Sainte abbaïe and other texts for spiritual instruction. Her discussion of the original compilation is distinctive on several levels. She suggests that consideration of the reintegrated book casts doubt on the assumption in prior literature that the Sainte abbaïe had been made for an audience of nuns. Given the likely lay audience for the manuscript, the three claustral images might be less an indication of intended audience than a means to establish an allegorical space for spiritual improvement. In her reading, the Somme manuscript’s representation of virtues and vices offers an opportunity to extrapolate considerations about moral conduct from the often textually independent representations of practitioners of the vices and virtues given in the lower zone of the Somme miniatures. These virtues and vices had close analogies in the moralizing visualizations of vices and virtues on the west facade of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris with which they share some formal devices that extend relationships and contrasts between the personifications and their exempla. The Somme text employs architectural allegories sparingly, but tellingly, to describe the construction of a moral interior, described in multiple ways: as the castle of the heart and body, the house, of the heart, and a cloister. The remaining texts in the original compendium, including the Sainte abbaïe, extend this message in an ambitious way, employing architectural metaphors of construction of a convent’s buildings by virtue and by Confession, Preaching, and Prayer; its dedication by the three persons of the Trinity; and its population with virtues that are capable of fighting off persistent incursions by evil. Kumler pinpoints the originality of the Sainte abbaïe by comparing its structuring devices to those employed within prior Latin expositions written for monks and members of the clergy. Its non-cloistered female audience would read the abbey described in its text and didactic images as both a goal toward which one travels and as a permeable space which required active maintenance and periodic reorientation. Images in subsequent tracts following the Sainte abbaïe invite comparison between the abbey and the church. They also put visual emphasis on the viewer-reader’s sacramental experiences that result in heightened devotion and spiritual ascent.

This beautifully produced, highly original, and dense book has genuine strengths: it offers insight into lay action, which is difficult to get at through traditional contextual approaches such as patronage studies; its codicological awareness of compendia that have since been subdivided offers fresh insight into well-studied books; and its thoughtful engagement with the sacraments as an avenue of focus offers a useful model for ways to slip between analysis of the production and consumption of manuscripts. Kumler’s assumption that the visual images interwoven within these manuscripts were the product of individual artists working within a “larger system of visual production” allows her to sidestep the often-thorny question of authorship of visual programs. Her focus on masterpieces made for people for whom money was no object allowed her to analyze well-constructed and sophisticated visual programs with spectacular results. Now that this rich work is published, it will doubtless stimulate other avenues of research into vernacular pastoralia. I would welcome one that would play off against this elite group less luxurious illuminated vernacular texts, hopefully well thumbed and containing written marginal responses.