A Small Door: Recognizing Ruth in the Psalter Hours a*Yof Yolande of Soissonsa*Z
Year: 2017

Long the subject of iconographie speculation, the miniature that currently opens the luxurious late thirteenth century Psalter Hours uof Yolande ofSoissons" (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 729) can now be securely identified as a depiction of the opening scene of the book of Ruth. The iden tification rests on an iconographie peculiarity shared with two roughly contemporary vernacular Bibles, a connection that in itself gives some sense of the textual and pictorial en vironment in which the "Yolande" manuscript was conceived. The choice of this extremely rare subject for a pictorial preface to a devotional book created for an aristocratic laywoman in dicates the interp?n?tration of devotional concerns with ideas about marriage, lineage, and the particular role of women in both sacred and family history. Recent research into the origins of the manuscript complements the argument that in select ing a subject from Ruth, the book's creators focused on the female protagonists of the story as idealized models for the book owner's own identity. The iconographie link to ver nacular works suggests further that the viewer was intended to approach the illustration from a position of literate famil iarity with the text, albeit in French rather than Latin, com plemented by interpretative tools drawn from the oral culture of preaching and religious instruction. As such, the miniature challenges medieval and modern categories of literacy and illiteracy and reveals the integral role of pictorial represen tation in both articulating and formulating varieties of re ligious and social experience. A picture or a series of pictures that are difficult to decode reveals the great gap between even a sophisticated understanding of history and the lived experiences of a given period and place. As Michael Camille demonstrated in his monograph on the Luttrell Psalter, the relations between the images in the margins of medieval manuscripts that appear to reproduce the texture of everyday life and the meanings they potentially bear are in fact unstable, multifaceted, and deeply embedded in an imaginative universe that we can only begin to reconstruct.1 That is precisely why an iconographie riddle? a picture of elusive meaning?exercises such seduction; it promises a view into the strange country of past mentalities and ways of seeing. The picture discussed in this essay poses such a riddle and offers, in its solution, new insight into late medieval experiences of prayer, devotion, gender, and the family. The picture in question is a full page miniature at the beginning of the Psalter Hours "of Yolande of Soissons" in the Pierpont Morgan Library, M.729  The manu script, produced in or near Amiens in the late 1280s or 1290s, is a luxurious volume including the complete Psalter and three full Offices (dedicated to the Virgin, the Holy Spirit, and the Passion) as well as other texts in Latin and Old French, originally accompanied by at least forty full page miniatures (of which thirty nine survive) and numerous illuminated initials and marginalia.2 While many of the full page minia tures are iconographically unusual or even unique, the paint ing that now opens the book is the only one that has not been satisfactorily identified. When Eric Millar assessed the manu script in 1928, he described the subject simply as "man, woman, and two children."3 Others have sought more fully worked out iconographie solutions. William Wixom, writing in 1967, sug gested that this might be a portrait of the book's intended owner and her family.4 In her doctoral thesis and subsequent monograph on M.729, Karen Gould supported this interpreta tion.5 Fran?ois Avril has suggested that it might depict Lot and his family fleeing "Nineveh," by which I assume he intends Sodom.6 Both of these ideas are problematic. Though the notion of the painting as a representation of the owner's family is appealing, it seems very unlikely in light of its place in the prefatory pictorial cycle to a Psalter. Such cycles had their own conventions, which did not include portraiture, even in the broadest sense of images meant to evoke the identity of individuals living or recently dead.7 The identification with the episode from Genesis is more plausible in this context? Old Testament scenes were frequently included in Psalter prefaces?but the visual evidence does not support the asso ciation with Lot. Contemporary depictions of the flight of Lot and his family from Sodom clearly show the destruction of the city and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For example, in both the Morgan Old Testament Picture Book (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M.638, fol. 4) and the St. Louis Psalter (Paris, Biblioth?que nationale de France, MS lat. 10525, fol. 9v) the towers of Sodom tumble down and Lot's wife is colored a uniform gray to indicate that she has already been turned to salt. One further strike against the identification with Lot and his family is the fact that Lot has two daughters, whereas at least one of the children in M.729 is clearly a boy, a point to which I will return. GESTA 46/1 The International Center of Medieval Art 2007 19 This content downloaded from 129.123.127.4 on Mon, 06 Feb 2017 17:47:10 UTC All use subject to http:/about.jstor.org/terms