The Age of Faith
The Flowering of the Middle Ages. Edited by Joan Evans. (Thames and Hudson, 6 gns. to December 31, then 8 gns.) The Great Pilgrimage of the Middle Ages. By Vera and Helmut Hell. (Barrie and Rock- liff, £6 6s.) FOR the 'general reader' Dr Evans has engineered a sumptuous multi-illustrated volume in which different scholars show various aspects of mediaevalism, each essay preceded by a précis, a mosaic of notes and pictures, the latter often in fine colours. The eleventh to fifteenth centuries are seen as a coherent civilisation rather than a picturesque jumble of battles, superstitions and dead alliances. The treatments are conventional but thorough. Knights begin as a line of defence and end as a sort of anthem. Trade, industry, learning, monastic orders, the position of women, the cult of the dead are explained clearly with much interesting details. Fourteenth-century bakers, for example, were praised as artists equally with painters, whose London guild was long considered merely as an offshoot of the saddlers. Artists were frequently employed as valets de chambre or managers of practical jokes. (The custom is not dead.) John Harvey is particularly informative about architecture: how the cathedrals were built and by whom. Original plans are shown alongside completed buildings. The old nonsense of the Gothic, with its Saracenic influences and inter- national masons' congresses, rising as an anony- mous inspired act of faith, is again exploded. Christopher Hohler discusses the technical and domestic side of castles as well as the romantic, their military importance and, more frequently, unimportance. Those who talk glibly about bad mediaeval communications may be astonished at the cross-fertilisations. Savoy architects worked on Welsh fortresses, Normans on Seville churches, Persian silks influenced Romanesque decoration, English alabaster graced Polish households, Oriental and Moorish goods and thought stimulated western development. The editor emphasises the intense individualisation throughout, even to the naming of bells, rings, pots. Biography, autobiography, personal poetry began long before 'the Renaissance.'
The complementary illustrations make all this excitingly clear. Illuminations from Froissart, Book of Hours, a marvellous dragon-shaped G from a Cistercian edition of Augustine, Burgun- dian altar-pieces, the Syon Cope, Hardwicke Tapestry, Florentine frescoes, masons' marks, the
Duc de Berry being received by St Peter 'with the respect due to his rank.' . . . The visual ap- proach is delightful and will doubtless soon over- whelm our schools. Nevertheless it has dis- advantages. Here, for instance, despite a few grisly death-scenes and Pisano's picture of God modelled on Dionysus and supported by a satyr, the final impression is of Christian glory and unity.
That both are disputable is recognised but scarcely underlined by the texts. Knightly thug- gery largely gets its deserts, but Satanism, dual- ism, witchcraft, paganism, the beats and heretics, even such legend-clustered sceptics as Frederic II get scanty treatment. The Inquisition is men- tioned once. Readers will scarcely guess that Roland died within an alliance with the Moslems or that towns nominally Christian prospered on selling co-religionists as slaves to the Turk. Also, the more attractive the pictures the more effectively they can embalm. These suggest a mediaevalism at once unique and extinct, though it was not only an era but remains an astro- logical state of mind nakedly explicit in such paladins as Hitler and his star-gazers and Himmler with Round Table and belief in him- self as reincarnation of Henry the Lion. The editor shows the Gothic lingering on in Shake- speare as much as in architecture. She might perhaps have gone farther.
The Great Pilgrimage, too, is better to own than to borrow, and likewise not given away free. Mediaeval pilgrimages were as much psychological necessities as modern general elec- tions. The Compostela pilgrimage was the great- est in Europe. In the eighth century, largely owing to a confusion between Hispanium and Hierusalem, James became adopted as Spain's patron saint, and his bones were soon discovered, in exact time to help defeat the Moors. That he was also reputedly buried at Toulouse meant
little. From such origins' the cult never ceased ' (Main was a pilgrim in 1941), though with varied fortunes. Using many outstanding photo- graphs and engravings, the authors explain who went and how, what they saw and can still see, and the general historical consequences. Sir Thomas Kendrick's introduction has enthusiasm tempered by scrupulous attention to the material facts underlying ages of faith.
PETER VANSITTART
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