There is a certain book in the Bodleian not quite so old which I should value more highly. With considerably more evidence than usual in such cases, it is identified as the book of mass of Queen Margaret of Scotland. I wonder if the lovely Saxon princess had it with her when she fled to Scotland after the Norman Conquest to implore the protection of Malcomb Canmore who made her his Queen? But, better still, his people afterwards made her their patron saint, realizing that she had done more to refine them than any other early ruler. Tradition tells how the King, though he could not read, loved to handle the Queen’s precious books—perhaps he gave this little volume adorned with gold and jewels to the lady of his reverent love.
The thirteenth century has great attractions for a bibliophile. Never were the embellishments on books more liberal and amusing. Nowadays illuminators consider the fitness of things, but in the thirteenth century they just designed. I know of a most charming psalter of the late thirteenth century with the capitals filled with the spirited knights and the margins with all-colored dragons whose attenuated tails form circles, sometimes not more than an eighth of an inch in diameter, that separate tiny butting goats or strutting cocks, or Darwinian monkeys or other irrelevant matter from the text.
Did these dragons creep in from the Norse mythologies, I wonder, or were they just creatures of adaptive anatomy for decorative purposes? The early illuminators did not turn to nature; simple people never do. This illustrator’s mind certainly wandered; whether it started with the psalms I cannot determine, but he displays two tiny gilded stops one-eighth of an inch by two inches that the seriously inclined might take as sermons. One represents a jester, with cap and bells and wand, and little other raiment, successfully charging a fully armed knight; and the other, Venus, attended by a blue dragon, pursuing a cross between a man and a devil.
The fourteenth and fifteenth century illuminators and illustrators begin to think; indeed, they are among the best historians we find of that period: modern illustration is fast returning to their methods.
At the commencement of the fourteenth century, miniatures of the noble owners of elaborate volumes began to be inserted in their books. Thus a consecutive history of two hundred years of French portraiture is safely folded away in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where we may watch the stiff early miniatures gradually develop into charming little genre pictures. Though the consideration of atmosphere was passed over at that time, many of them are models of composition.
Some of these little illustrations show the conceptions as well as the manners of the age. In one of these old Bibles is a [picture of six seigneurs] (two famous bibliophiles among them), in full regalia (no grave clothes for them), cordially received by Saint Peter at the Gothic Gates of Paradise in the courteous days of the old regime. There is that magnificent jeweled Bible of Jean Sans Peur, Duc de Bourgoyne, decorated with his armorial bearings, which was given to him by some monks of his domain when he deigned to honor them with a visit; it contains a charming little picture of the presentation scene.
A Page from the Bible of Jean Sans Peur.
Those were royal days for bibliophiles; but a change was to come over the spirit of their dreams. Printing was invented and the democracy of letters set in,—jeweled bindings made way for calf, and collectors are diverted from painting to presses. Bibliophiles develop individual tastes and such a plebeian variety of them; it is akin to free speech—one doting on prayer-books, another on cook-books; one on pamphlets, another on palimpsests; one on school-books, another on Virgils; one on curiosities of literature, execrably illustrated books of travel in impossible lands and comedies of error generally; another on distant glimpses of dawning light, until within the order arises the confusion of Babel, one no longer understanding the language of another.