For many American art historians, Spain’s fifteenth century is a murky period better known for its religious oppression and explosive colonialism than for its manuscripts. With Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada, Lynette M. F. Bosch introduces Anglophone readers to the era through an assiduously detailed study of two-dozen illuminated liturgical manuscripts produced in fifteenth-century Toledo. Until now, these lavishly decorated books, commissioned between 1446 and 1495 by the prominent Toledan prelates Archbishop Alfonso Carillo y Acuña and Cardinal-Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza, have been only scantily published and were available almost entirely in Spanish. Thus Bosch’s work does great service in bringing them to the attention of a wider, nonspecialist readership. Moreover, in examining the Toledan manuscripts within the peculiar context of what Bosch labels “caballero” culture—that of the aristocratic intellectuals who, along with university-trained letrados, constituted Spain’s educated elite at this time—the book provides an intriguing glimpse into an extraordinarily complex phase of Iberian history, one which witnessed, among other things, the formation of a unified Christian Spain, the beginnings of Spanish modern imperialism, and the transition from medieval to Renaissance culture.

The manuscripts studied by Bosch have been so neglected until now that their publication alone represents a significant contribution. Yet her ambitions go considerably beyond this: she sets the goal of using the manuscripts as “a filter through which Castilian social culture can be interpreted and understood” (2). By investigating the complex social and intellectual forces that shaped the works’ production, she endeavors to provide new insight into the neglected phenomenon of the Spanish Renaissance, the character and viability of which, she argues, have long been misunderstood. This is a tall order for the relatively focused study undertaken here, but it is a worthy one; to the extent that such a narrowly delineated group of manuscripts can accommodate this agenda, the book offers significant food for thought.

The work’s introduction surveys the many contextual factors that underlay the Toledan manuscripts’ production, from Castile’s deep-rooted Islamic past to the role of foreign centers, particularly northern Europe and the Avignonese court, in fostering artistic and humanistic traditions important to caballero culture. Bosch emphasizes the catalytic role played by Spanish patrons, whose connections and collections drew together these disparate cultural threads and whose election of the Hispano-Flemish style for their manuscripts represents “a marker of social, political, and family allegiance” for Castilian aristocracy (15). While it is in the nature of an introduction to be brief, this twenty-page chapter is so densely packed with important ideas and information that it sometimes falls prey to oversimplification. For example, the codices’ incorporation of mudéjar ornament—in truth an artistic lingua franca shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Castile—is read as symbolizing specifically Christian victory, although a tightly condensed and scantily illustrated summary of foreign influences upon the Toledan illuminators provides only skeletal support for what will become some of the book’s most important arguments. Such quibbles aside, this chapter leaves little doubt of the complex context within which the Toledan manuscripts emerged.

Chapter 1, a detailed and knowledgeable introduction to Toledo’s political, ecclesiastical, and intellectual history, surveys the forces that shaped the city’s fifteenth-century aristocratic culture. Readers anxious to get to the works of art may chafe at the length and density of this section, but it proves fundamental to the book’s broad argument. Here, mythic and conventional histories of Toledo offer a sense of the hybrid past within which Toledans placed themselves: the emergence and evolution of the Church under Visigothic, then Muslim, then again Christian rule evoke the city’s mercurial cultural history; and a discussion of the Toledan “School of Translators” reveals the breathtaking richness of the city’s book culture. If this chapter takes on a bit more of fifteenth-century Toledan history than might seem necessary, it must be valued for providing an effective historical overview of a period too often eclipsed by the more familiar stages of Spain’s past.

In chapter 2, Bosch introduces the patrons behind the production of the Toledan manuscripts, Toledo archbishops Alfonso Carillo y Acuña (1446–1482) and Pedro González de Mendoza (1482–1495). Here, the author adeptly navigates a wilderness of genealogical and political relationships as she traces the two figures’ participation in the centralization of the diocese within a Spain newly unified by the marriage, engineered by Carillo, of Isabella of Castile to Ferdinand of Aragon. Fascinating details of court intrigue and political crisis sometimes threaten to seduce the reader from the main point of the chapter, which is to show how the family history, international connections, and humanistic interests of the two patrons shaped the appearance of the manuscripts they commissioned during their successive tenures as archbishop. The introduction of artworks at the midpoint of the chapter emphasizes this point, presenting the emergence of the Hispano-Flemish style in Castile, in the hands of such artists as Jorge Inglés and Juan de Carrión, as directly fostered by caballero patronage, specifically that of the Marqués de Santillana, the father of Pedro González de Mendoza, and of the archbishops Carillo and Mendoza themselves.

The book’s third and most important chapter, which turns to the Toledan manuscripts themselves, is presented with the confidence and skill of an author to whom these works are consummately familiar. Following a historiographical section that reveals how an overwhelming concern with attribution and stylistic analysis has obviated a more contextual view of the manuscripts and obscured important differences between the Toledan group and others with which it has been associated, each manuscript is introduced, described, and briefly analyzed. Although stylistic and format disparities among the codices are acknowledged and at times explored, Bosch emphasizes the commonalities that allow them to support the postulation of a recognizable local style, in which the blending of diverse external traditions mirrors the social and political interactions of the two archbishops. If one could ask anything more of this already highly informative chapter, it would be to set the Toledan group more clearly against the backdrop of other, contemporaneous Spanish manuscript traditions, the contrasting trajectories of which might highlight more effectively the unique Toledan context.

The book’s concluding chapter offers less a summation of prior arguments than the introduction of a new and slightly disorienting claim: that the manuscript’s marginalia served as a locus for the humanistic and spiritual concerns of Toledo’s caballero culture. These luxuriant and intriguing images, which range from the fabulous to the graphically erotic, are indeed sufficient to tempt any author toward interpretation, and Bosch is right to emphasize their importance within books’ multilayered textual and pictorial discourse. Although she makes a good case for the interpretation of several individual motifs, the marginalia as a group takes such a variety of forms and evokes such a complex tangle of past traditions that the reader may be left wishing for a fuller analysis than this single chapter can offer.

A trio of appendices is among the book’s most useful features, offering a brief outline of the liturgical calendar used in fifteenth-century Toledo, a run-down on the local saints included there, and descriptions of the letter types, formats, and dimensions of the two-dozen manuscripts surveyed. The welcome presence of this fundamental documentation makes the lack of a proper bibliography all the more regrettable, especially since this book is sure to be widely consulted by researchers in adjacent disciplines. Also disappointing is the size and limited quality of the book’s illustrations: the black-and-white figures are so small in scale that when entire manuscript pages are reproduced, as is frequently necessary to support Bosch’s holistic approach, the extremely fine details and subtle stylistic variations so important to her arguments are rendered all but invisible. Scale is less of a problem in the nine color plates, but these vary significantly in resolution and many do not read well; in the end, some of the book’s most powerful arguments rest upon meticulous visual observations that must be accepted literally sight unseen. Such limitations are becoming all too familiar among academic presses, whose growing concern for the bottom line seems to overshadow any other aspect of their final product; here the reproductions do a disservice both to the author and to the works of art, which deserve to be introduced to their new readership in more legible and appealing guise.

The manuscripts of fifteenth-century Toledo offer an impressively rich and still largely unexamined field for scholarly investigation, and Bosch’s book provides it with a very welcome point of entry, one which will be valued by any serious student of Spain’s medieval and Renaissance past. If in the end this book may promise a bit more than can be delivered in a work of its scale, this must be ascribed both to the enormous historical potential of the material and to author’s keen determination to do it all justice. Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo lays a sound foundation for future study of artistic culture in late-medieval and Renaissance Spain, shedding much-needed light on a phase of history left much too long in shadow.