Cynthia Hahn’s new study of illustrated saints’ Lives offers its readers a penetrating account of a highly important category of medieval imagery, as well as a thoughtful treatment of topics of interest to scholars working in a wide range of fields within art history. On its most basic level, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century lucidly describes how the concept invoked by its title—the belief that visual images are “portrayed on the heart” as a result of their viewers’ devout attention—underlay the importance assigned to narrative imagery within monastic communities. Focusing primarily on manuscripts but with occasional references to works in other media, Hahn surveys the period of the most prolific production of illustrated Lives, commencing with works created in the tenth century and concluding with thirteenth-century developments within the genre. In doing so, she deals with broader issues, most notably questions concerning the ways that images can signify narrative content.

Hahn organizes her study according to categories suggested by the medieval liturgy itself, beginning with Lives of Martyrs and moving through accounts of Confessors’ deeds, breaking each of these down into subgenres (for example, Bishops as a subgenre of Confessors) while remaining attentive to ways that these divisions are complicated or interconnected. She lays a groundwork for her discussion with a pair of preliminary chapters, the first of which describes methods used in the early Middle Ages to establish a saint’s holiness. Here the author offers brief but useful summaries of scholarship (including her own), analyzing ways that ecclesiastical authorities used manuscripts, relics, and the liturgy to shape worshippers’ understandings of the qualities of particular saints, a process that she appropriately terms “the construction of sanctity.”

The second chapter offers a lengthy, subtle consideration of the ability of images to perform narrative functions—how they served as what Hahn refers to as “pictorial hagiography.” This chapter profitably engages with recent scholarship concerning medieval conceptions of the distinctions (or lack thereof) between words and images, as well as the place of the visual in theoretically informed understandings of narrative. In a handful of passages, however, Hahn sets up a “straw man” to argue against. For instance, at one point she uses the passive voice to claim that “[i]t is often assumed that pictures merely illustrate their texts” (45), with the subsequent endnote apparently crediting this decidedly retrograde opinion to an article published three decades ago by André Grabar. In fact, much of Hahn’s text constitutes a substantial refinement, rather than an absolute refutation, of earlier studies of medieval visual narratives (for instance, Otto Pächt’s brief but ambitious study of The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England [Oxford: Clarendon, 1962]). Nonetheless, this chapter and her later observations reveal Hahn’s sensitivity to the ways that pictures produce narrative effects that are distinct from, and at times more versatile than, the possibilities inherent in writing.

In the chapters after this introductory material, Hahn describes how illustrated saints’ Lives generate these effects. Employing the concept of a “horizon of expectations” derived from reception theory, she focuses on how particular manuscripts (or, in a handful of cases, individual reliquaries) rely upon their readers’ familiarity with hagiographic conventions, gauging the degree to which their texts and images conform to or deviate from established topoi. Hahn demonstrates that the designers of hagiographic cycles could provoke powerful emotional and spiritual responses in their audiences by carefully manipulating a genre’s conventions.

This consideration of specific categories of pictorial hagiography begins in Chapter 3, which examines the concerns that structured accounts of Martyrs’ Lives by taking the Passion of St. Romanus of Antioch (appearing in a manuscript from ca. 900) as a case study. Hahn demonstrates that the images transform the saint’s physical torments into spiritual triumph, encouraging an affective and imitative audience response. Chapter 4 considers the Passion of St. Lucy (contained in a ca. 1130 manuscript) to explore Lives of Virgin Martyrs, a problematic subset of the category discussed in the preceding chapter. Whereas other scholars have suggested compelling reasons to view these Lives as sublimated representations of an all-too-real sadism, Hahn urges us instead to consider the possibility that this material may have been spiritually significant to both male and female audiences. She points to ways that women could have viewed these Lives as models extolling virtuous behavior, while monks may have understood them more abstractly as exemplars of bodily and sensory purification. The next two chapters examine the Lives of Confessors, either Bishops (Chapter 5, focusing primarily on a Life of Kilian of Würzburg appearing in a manuscript of ca. 970) or Monks (Chapter 6, which draws upon several different Lives). In contrast to the imitation encouraged by Martyrs’ Lives, pictures and texts presented these Confessors as more remote figures, thereby serving to cement their audience’s understanding of spiritual and political hierarchies. Chapter 7 addresses thirteenth-century narratives recounting the deeds of canonized nobles. Here the focus is the Life of St. Edmund from the monastery of St. Albans (ca. 1130) and Matthew Paris’s Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei (1250). Hahn shows that these Lives were intended as models for a royal readership to emulate, constituting an attempt by ecclesiastical authorities to impose limits on the emerging power of the aristocracy (for instance, through a critique of violence). As the fourth chapter describes gendered exceptions to the cases of Martyrs, Chapter 8 uses the Lives of Sts. Radegund of Poitiers (from a manuscript of the second half of the eleventh century) and Elisabeth of Hungary (as represented on a thirteenth-century reliquary) to investigate differences between accounts concerning female Confessors and those describing their male counterparts. Hahn demonstrates that these saintly queens and nuns presented role models for a female audience by framing their subjects’ saintly behavior in distinctly gendered terms.

Chapter 9 uses Matthew Paris’s Lives of Sts. Alban and Amphibalus (ca. 1240s) to explore the transformations wrought in hagiography, as the designers of pictorial cycles confronted the profound social changes of the thirteenth century. According to Hahn, Matthew essentially invented a new, chivalric form of hagiography designed to appeal to a courtly audience and to conform to new ideas concerning the evidence required for canonization. Finally, an epilogue discusses what Hahn describes as Matthew’s legacy: his introduction of new methods of conveying narrative content through imagery. Part of her goal here is to offer an alternative to Wolfgang Kemp’s thesis in The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) that the complex physical structure of stained-glass windows enabled the creation of increasingly sophisticated visual narratives, thereby generating the narrative innovations witnessed in the thirteenth century. While Hahn initially seems to present Matthew as the “genius” inventor of these new narrative strategies, she ultimately (and wisely) notes that it may be more accurate to understand him as taking part in broader cultural trends.

The degree to which Portrayed on the Heart may be profitably read in conjunction with Kemp’s stimulating book indicates Hahn’s extensive engagement with, and contribution to, issues that have received considerable attention in recent scholarship. Her attentiveness to spiritual concerns allows the reader to approach her work as an intriguing counterpoint to Barbara Abou-El Haj’s more sharply political and economic interpretations of some of these same manuscripts. Hahn’s description of the different modes of access afforded to male and female audiences complements themes that emerge in Jeffrey Hamburger’s studies of women’s spirituality during the later Middle Ages. Her discussion of the hagiographic works of Matthew deepens the view of that intriguing artist developed by Suzanne Lewis’s study of his Chronica Majora. Hahn’s elucidation of ways that Lives could manipulate prescribed gender roles heightens our awareness of the gender inversions found in late medieval pictorial hagiography, such as the cycles depicting the Life of St. Louis, investigated by art historians such as Joan Holladay.

In short, Hahn’s volume greatly augments our understanding of current central issues in medieval art history, while prompting additional questions in the minds of its readers. One wonders, for instance, about how thirteenth-century developments in the conception of history and the narration of past events (researched, for instance, by such historians as Gabrielle Spiegel) may have intersected with the concurrent shifts charted by Hahn in hagiographic techniques. Such questions of course lie outside the (already broad) scope of Portrayed on the Heart. With this intensely ambitious and absorbing book, Hahn challenges us to reformulate our understanding of a critical component of the medieval artistic legacy, while prompting us to ask new questions of material from throughout the Middle Ages.