Scholars of medieval art increasingly are investigating the modern vicissitudes of the objects and architecture they study. There is a wealth of work, for example, on neo-gothic imaginings of the Middle Ages, as manifest in nineteenth-century church restoration projects, the development of museums, and the construction of new buildings in medievalizing styles. But there are relatively few studies of modern attitudes toward manuscript illumination. This is surprising given the fact that contemporary scholars are so deeply indebted to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century collectors and enthusiasts for preserving, cataloguing, and inaugurating the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Christopher de Hamel’s examination of the manuscript collections of the Rothschild family is, therefore, particularly welcome. Some of the “greatest hits” of late medieval illuminated manuscripts were purchased by Rothschilds and passed to the principal libraries of Europe and the United States. De Hamel’s narrative thus is a piece in a larger story of the recovery of the medieval past in the market and museums of the modern age.

The Rothschild family fortune was founded in the Jewish quarter of eighteenth-century Frankfurt where the paterfamilias of the clan established a lucrative banking business and sent his sons to expand the family enterprise in the principal commercial centers of Europe at the time: Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris. The financial and marital relations of the Rothschilds are famously confusing, with sons and daughters repeatedly marrying cousins—typically from a different one of the Rothschild cities—so as to control the Rothschild name and fortune. De Hamel does an outstanding job, however, of keeping the genealogies of the clan and their holdings straight by dividing his book into four chapters focused on different clusters of Rothschilds, though many of the most important manuscripts resurface in various venues throughout the discussion.

The first chapter introduces the collections of members of the Italian, Austrian, and English branches in the mid and late nineteenth century. With their fabulous wealth long entrenched, the Rothschilds at this time already were leading collectors of paintings, luxury metalwork, and tapestries, as well as furniture. As the trade in illuminated books developed, the Rothschilds acquired some of the most dazzling manuscripts to come on the market. The Brandenburg Prayerbook (illuminated by Simon Bening, now Getty MS Ludwig IX.19), the so-called Rothschild Gebetbuch (illuminated by Gerard Horenbout and others, until recently ÖNB Cod. s.n. 2844), and half of the then-divided Hours of Catherine of Cleves (now Morgan MS M. 917), for example, came into the Rothschild holdings. It is not surprising that the Rothschilds would pursue such treasures associated with the nobility of Europe. But the Rothschilds also showed a taste for some of the more unusual trends in the late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for manuscript illumination. A list of the holdings of Baron Anselm von Rothschild in 1866, for example, includes two boxes of cuttings, illuminations snipped from fifteenth-century missals; another book in this collector’s possession, the so-called Egmond Hours (BL Add. MS 35319), includes a miniature overpainted in the nineteenth century by modern illuminator Caleb Wing. Members of the English branch of the family in these same years acquired a sixteenth-century French Book of Hours that previously had been owned by Horace Walpole, father of the gothic novel, as well as an album of illuminated cuttings that had been sold in William Young Ottley’s sale at Christie’s in 1838, the first auction of illuminated cuttings presented as panel paintings (on these nineteenth-century phenomena, see Sandra Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction, Evanston, Ill.: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2001).

De Hamel’s second chapter addresses manuscripts amassed mostly in Paris in the mid nineteenth century, a portion of which were passed to the English branch of the family where they were housed, and remain at the Rothschild’s neo-Renaissance palace, Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. The manuscripts that went to England form the core of the collection recorded in one of the few catalogues of Rothschild holdings, The James A. de Rothschild Collection of Illuminated Manuscripts at Waddesdon Manor, by L. M. J. Delaissé, James Marrow, and John de Wit (1977; reissued Unicorn Press, 2006). Among these holdings are “bright and showy” Italian prayerbooks of the kind favored by the Medici (24). But de Hamel makes the compelling observation that members of the Rothschild line sometimes stayed away from Christian sacred texts, perhaps for religious reasons (more on this below). Baron Edmond de Rothschild, for example, an ardent supporter of the Zionist project, tended to collect secular works as well as Hebrew medieval manuscripts, the most celebrated of which is the Rothschild Miscellany, a northern Italian work of the late fifteenth century (Israel Museum, MS 180/51). In keeping with familial trends, however, this Rothschild did make exception for Christian works with exalted royal pedigrees, such as the Belles Heures of Jean de Berry (now Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters, Acc. 54.1.1).

The most fascinating and poignant chapter is the third, recounting the vicissitudes of the collections of the French line that were looted by Hitler’s troops during the Second World War. Here de Hamel does a stunning job, piecing together the fortunes of prized manuscripts, following them from Rothschild homes and deposit boxes, through Nazi possession, to the shelves of the world’s leading libraries. The Très Belles Heures of Jean de Berry (BnF ms. n.a. lat. 3093), for example, was seized from a bank vault, likely brought to the Jeu de Paume for sorting with all the other Nazi spoils, selected for Goering, or perhaps the Führer’s own personal collection, and was taken to Berchtesgaden at the edge of Bavaria. The manuscript finally was found by a French officer amidst a trove of abandoned Nazi possessions at the end of the war and was returned to its Rothschild owner, who then gave it to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters, Acc. 54.1.2) was sent to Neuschwanstein, the nineteenth-century “proto-Disneyland” (41) medievalizing castle in the northern Alps. There the tiny book was meticulously catalogued by Nazi record-keepers and, following the German retreat, was discovered by a U.S. regiment, a member of which was Second Lieutenant James Rorimer, future director of the Cloisters. After the war, the precious book was returned to its Rothschild owner who put it on the market, allowing Rorimer to purchase it for the Metropolitan Museum. Elsewhere in the book, de Hamel also recounts the recent fortunes of the Rothschild Gebetbuch. This lavishly illuminated prayerbook, which had been owned by the Viennese Rothschilds, was seized by Hitler’s troops in 1938. After the war it went into the collections of the Austrian National Library, but in 1999 it was returned to the Rothschild family who sold it at Christie’s (July 8, 1999) to a private collector for a record $13.3 million.

In the final chapter of his book, de Hamel considers more deeply the relationship between the Rothschild family manuscript holdings and the status of Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Discussion here focuses on the Rothschild holdings now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, amassed by James de Rothschild and his heirs. James helped to found the Société des Anciens Textes Français, a group committed to the publication and study of medieval French literature. With delicacy and probity de Hamel suggests that, against the background of the Dreyfus affair, an interest in national literature allowed the Rothschilds a means through which to assert an unimpeachable French patriotism. At the same time, a focus on literary texts avoided some of the confessional contradictions attendant with a Jewish family collecting emphatically Christian devotional books.

Throughout his study de Hamel returns to the issue of the Rothschilds’ status as Jewish collectors, and his observations open the door to future scholarship that considers such issues more broadly. Indeed, Jewish families such as the Rothschilds, the Wildensteins, and the David-Weills, as collectors of medieval and Renaissance art, were key players in the formation of both the market for and public collections of works with predominantly Christian themes. The stories of these collectors contribute to the larger narrative of the transformation of sacred objects into Art (capital “A”), a process advanced in the scholarly realm also by Jewish intellectuals such as Meyer Schapiro, Erwin Panofsky, and Bernard Berenson, the last of whom converted to Christianity. Moreover, the episodes of ownership, confiscation, restitution, and sale recounted in de Hamel’s text are crucial to current debates about repatriation and national rights to premodern treasures.

This is the first such study of the Rothschilds’ patterns of collecting, and the author himself opens with the caveat that much of his disquisition is “extremely conjectural and provisional” (1). As librarian at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and former head of the Western Manuscripts Department at Sotheby’s, de Hamel is one of the few scholars who has the knowledge and connections to write this probing book. The text and footnotes are peppered with personal anecdotes, sometimes conveyed verbally by the giants of twentieth-century manuscript scholarship. Other references are drawn from little-known archives in Europe and the United States and from rare published catalogues. De Hamel writes in an engaging style, familiar already from his popular surveys of medieval manuscript illumination (A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, London: Phaidon Press, 1997; Scribes and Illuminators—Medieval Craftsmen, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, among others), echoing the lecture format in which these chapters originally were delivered. So although this is a book principally for specialists, complete with periodic interruptions of catalogue lists, it is presented as an absorbing tale, recounting the fortunes of some of the most celebrated illuminated manuscripts of medieval Europe as they passed through the hands of one of the most fascinating families of the modern world.