Of the dozen decorated biblical manuscripts that survive from late antiquity, the so-called Ashburnham Pentateuch in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. nouv. acq. 2334) is the most elaborate. Its eighteen (more or less) full-page illustrations contain some one hundred scenes set in detailed landscapes and rich architectural settings; and its ten chapter lists are adorned with decorated arches and ornamental fauna. Compared to the other surviving manuscripts, the Ashburnham Pentateuch is also relatively unstudied: even Kurt Weitzmann, who scavenged virtually every bit of evidence to support his concept of the evolution of the illustrated codex, all but completely ignored it in his influential Illustrations in Roll and Codex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947; 2nd ed. 1971). This relative lack of attention, moreover, contrasts with the manuscript’s importance during the Middle Ages. Reaching France at an early date, the book was restored in the eighth and ninth centuries; its miniatures were emended at Saint Martin’s, Tours; certain figures were traced and presumably copied; and it served as a model for the late-eleventh-century frescos in Saint Julian in Tours.

The sidelining of the Ashburnham Pentateuch is due largely to two factors: no scholarly consensus has been reached about provenance, making it difficult to integrate the manuscript into a “development” of art or history of the book; and a focus on elements in the illustrations seemingly derived from Jewish lore has directed attention away from the manuscript itself. Verkerk’s book is not a monograph. It does not include a codicological diagram that would allow the reader to track the extensive losses the manuscript suffered, which according to the author is a full third of the folios and three-quarters of the illustrations (21); it lacks a list of the manuscript’s contents and a transcription of the extensive tituli; and it considers only a selection of the “principal narratives.” However, in its agenda to insert the Ashburnham Pentateuch into the history of early medieval Bible illumination, the book succeeds admirably on three main issues: attribution, alleged Jewish pictorial models, and function.

Verkerk accepts palaeographical indications of a late-sixth or early-seventh-century date and the admittedly inconclusive indications from the Vulgate text, codicology, and style that point to an Italian origin. She goes to great length to build a circumstantial case that, in fact, the manuscript was produced in Rome. In chapter 5, she presses further than she needed to establish the plausibility of this attribution. Using as a straw man Richard Krautheimer’s Rome, Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), now a quarter of a century old, she argues at considerable length that Rome remained a vital cultural center around AD 600, when citation of recent work by Franz Alto Bauer, Beat Brenk, and others would have been sufficient. Nonetheless, no comparison absolutely clinches the Roman attribution, and, in some places, Verkerk’s iconographic analysis actually works against the case. Thus, rendering of the “column of fire” as an architectural element in the Crossing of the Red Sea in the (fourth-century) Via Latina catacomb, which she cites as a parallel to support her Roman attribution, in fact distinguishes it from the imagery of the Pentateuch, which represents the biblical motif in the form of a candle (fol. 68r). Likewise, the author’s attempt to connect the Pentateuch’s iconography to that of the paintings in San Paolo fuori le mura is compromised by the overlooking of differences: the Ark of Noah, for instance, has feet in both works, but the number of feet differs, as do the boats’ shapes—tub in one, chest in the other—and the structure of windows and doors. Moreover, the acknowledged complexity of the Barberini copies of the Roman paintings renders Verkerk’s arguments about the Trinity-Creator questionable. Established by May Vieillard-Troiekouroff and David Wright and accepted by Verkerk, connections between the Pentateuch’s chapter lists and canon tables in early Italian Gospelbooks remain the strongest evidence of Italian provenance, which should be accepted, at least until compelling contrary evidence is adduced.

Verkerk effectively challenges the tendency to look through the Paris manuscript to lost Jewish pictorial prototypes. To do so, she targets Weitzmann unjustly, who in fact carefully distinguished the Ashburnham Pentateuch from the Dura Europos synagogue frescos and, indeed, considered it only in a general picture book. Verkerk is certainly right, however, that the folkloric and exegetic amplification of the Hebrew Bible—deployed by Weitzmann in other cases and by many students of the Pentateuch—was shared by Jews and Christians and, in itself, can not be used to point to an origin in one group or the other, yet alone the existence of pictorial sources. For instance, she succeeds in situating the giants of the Deluge scene (fol. 9r), often cited as a Jewish feature, in Christian exegesis. That said, it must be noted that the paintings in the Dura synagogue are rife with Midrashic details, establishing without question that, in their pictorializations, Jews embellished the biblical narrative in the manner also evident in the Pentateuch. The question must still be answered in each case why—either through invention or replication—a Christian work did the same.

Even while leaving open the possibility of some sort of Jewish sources (17), Verkerk rightly insists on the book’s essential Christian character. Eschewing the tendency to explain anomalies in the manuscript in terms of alleged models, she makes an important contribution by discerning, instead, a kind of logic in the arrangement of the narrative, the use of color, the deployment of the tituli, and the staging of the scenes. She argues that the very choice and distribution of major scenes reveal a Christian agenda, and she discovers in the smaller vignettes—the Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau stories, for instance—moral lessons directed toward Christian readers. Verkerk locates the Trinitarian Creator of the Genesis page (and its ninth-century emendation) in specific doctrinal disputes and argues convincingly that the events from Genesis through Exodus were pictured with an eye to Roman liturgy, for example, the chalices atop the altar on folio 10v in place of the Jewish “holocausts” mentioned in the Bible and accompanying titulus. Other clearly liturgical elements are the (Paschal) candle in the Crossing of the Red Sea (fol. 68r) and Moses’s diptych, the Eucharistic elements, and ecclesiological setting in the Reading of the Covenant (fol. 76r). To her credit, Verkerk takes up instances that appear to undermine the argument, for instance, the seeming deemphasis on the theophany on Mount Horeb (36), an event of great typological significance. Moreover, her effort to relate the liturgical elements through a precise analysis of the Roman context, rather than simply to some generic idea of liturgy, is a signal virtue of the discussion, for instance, the men in white attending Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai in the latter miniature, which she identifies as Rome’s seven deacons. This is a serious work.

Citing Augustine and John Chrysostom, Verkerk extends her analysis of the miniatures and manuscript’s physical aspects to a consideration of the book’s function. In her most important contribution, she maintains that the retelling of biblical stories in the illustrations served a pedagogical purpose. In so doing, she joins a chorus of scholars singing the same tune, but Verkerk goes further in trying to specify the intended students. Couching the conclusion very tentatively—“The Ashburnham Pentateuch is possibly one of the codices that deacons might have commissioned to aid in the training of new deacons” (190)—Verkerk contends that the miniatures were designed to serve the ordained ministers of the Mass, whose duties also included teaching. If she is indeed correct, then it would be a trick to reconcile such a function with the emphasis on women that she identifies as one of the pictorial program’s distinctive characteristics. More important, it would make it difficult to connect the manuscript, as she attempts to do, to Gregory the Great’s famous justification of pictures as an instrument for educating the idiotae. As far as I know, it is not until the mid-ninth century that Gregory’s dictum was extended to include literate people, and these surely were seculars; beginning in the fifth century with Caesarius of Arles and continuing most notably with Bernard of Clairvaux, the clerical use of art remained a fraught issue during the Middle Ages.

The book is clearly written and generally, but not entirely, free of error; the following mistakes should have been caught: Stephan Waetzoldt as Stephen Waetzold (167), Agnus Die (169), San Paulo (181), superceded (193). Furthermore, the authenticity of the Last Judgment sarcophagus in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (121)—used by the author to advance an argument—has recently been questioned.

By posing central questions and proposing original and judicious answers, Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the Ashburnham Pentateuch sets the study of an important manuscript on the correct course. No small achievement in itself, Verkerk’s book will certainly stimulate further research—as will the newly published facsimile with a (forthcoming) commentary by Bezalel Narkiss—securing the manuscript’s rightful place at the center of the history of early biblical illumination.