Art history is a revelatory discipline. Seeking to recover meaning from the past, we uncover pictures only to cover them once again with a veil of our own words. This instinct of turning pictures into puzzles, James Elkins argues, has led to an explosion, since at least the late-nineteenth century, in essays and articles about images (Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity, London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Whereas ancient or even early modern authors were satisfied with a brief sentence, stretched occasionally into a long paragraph—and very rarely into a few pages—modern writers extended their discussions of images to monographic lengths. There can be no better illustration of this thesis than Mildred Budny’s catalogue of manuscripts at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK.

There is much to praise in Budny’s two-volume work entitled Insular, Anglo-Saxon and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College: An Illustrated Catalogue, and it should find a home in the library of any art history program with a serious interest in medieval manuscripts. Budny is a former Research Associate at Corpus Christi’s Parker Library, and her intimate knowledge of its manuscripts is evident in these two visually stunning and well-produced volumes. Together they contain a descriptive catalogue and photographic record of illustrations, prominent decoration, artist sketches, and even doodles, from fifty-six manuscripts that date from the late sixth century to ca. 1100. Volume I contains a forward by David M. Wilson, and Budny’s preface with extensive acknowledgements, an introduction, analysis, description, works cited, and index of manuscripts. Budny provides a complete inventory of illustrations, including paleographical and codicological information, and an overview of the scholarship that places items in historical and stylistic development.

The photographs in Volume II comprise the highest glory of the catalogue. Here, we find 747 black-and-white and 16 color plates, all specially made for this project, and many of them published for the first time. Budny is responsible for the photography, and it is especially laudable that she did so with an eye for both art history and codicology. Most of the photographs are full folios, and were cropped so that the edges of the folios, and the marginal decoration found there, can be seen. As a result, the flourishes at the ends of lines, the pen-trails of scribes, and hard-point sketches are given same treatment as narrative illustration and full-color frontispieces. These photographs alone are a major contribution to the study of early medieval art.

The manuscripts in the Corpus Christi College collection are rivalled only by those in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum. The heart of the this collection and catalogue are the manuscripts donated by Matthew Parker, former Master of Corpus Christi and Archibishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth I. In her fulsome description, Budny provides a much needed account of the evidence for the postmedieval provenance and treatment of these manuscripts.

Budny’s catalogue is particulary welcome because, in the past, the Parker library has had the reputation of restricting access to its collection. In part, this is due to the terms of Parker’s will that takes unusual precautions with the donation of his books. As a result, the Parker Library was considered by some to be a kind of inner sanctum reserved for the elite of Anglo-Saxon studies. Although the once restrictive policies of the Parker Library have now eased, Budny’s volumes nonetheless still have the effect of opening its archive to a broader audience.

This audience, however, will find the catalogue at times frustrating and confusing. To her credit, Budny orders her discussion and descriptions consistently, and once this system is mastered (her discussion of the structure of her entries takes some 43 pages of the introduction), the encyclopedic text opens somewhat. One unfortunate element of her system, however, is that the manuscripts are catalogued in chronological order and are given catalogue numbers according to this sequence. Throughout her text, Budny refers to the manuscripts by these numbers, with the unsettling result that a student familiar with recalling a particular manuscript by the library shelfmark must learn a different set of numbers in order to follow cross-references in the entries.

Budny separates description of specific details such as illustrations, initials, and pen-flourishes from analysis, often by tens of pages. As an example, let’s look closely at her treatment of a zoomorphic initial “S” found at the beginning of CCCC Ms. 23, an eleventh-century, illustrated copy of Prudentius. The catalogue’s description of the manuscript runs 163 pages (275-437), and the discussion of the initial spans two columns of text across two pages (295-96). This initial is illustrated in the catalogue in a lovely colorplate (plate V). Why, with a photograph of the folios at hand, does the description require so many words? Moreover, Budny’s analysis of the historical and stylistic import of the initial occurs in yet another location, snippets of which are sprinkled through several paragraphs earlier in her text (279-283). It takes very careful detective work to assemble all the evidence Budny presents. On page 279, Budny explains that “one initial” in the Corpus Prudentius displays characteristics that conform to “Wormald’s Type I and IIb.” Later, on page 282, she tells us that indeed this “Type I-IIb” initial is found on folio 2r. Finally, on page 283 Budny reveals that the initial can play an important role in dating and localizing the manuscript. A reader unfamiliar with the conventions of Anglo-Saxon scholarship might wish to know exactly what is Wormald’s typology of initials. Budny’s general overview of initials found in Corpus Christi occurs on pages lxix-lxx of her introduction. Even here, her text depends on a knowledgeable readership, for she offers only a cursory definition (she lists manuscripts containing “initials of Wormald’s Type IIa or IIb, which combine creatures’ heads with foliate, geometric, and interlace ornament”). Because of the lack of footnotes, the reader is expected to know Wormald’s work and his typology of Anglo-Saxon initials, but he or she might not even know whether this Wormald is the “P. Wormald” or the “F. Wormald” that appears in her bibliographic material (it is the latter) or which of the fifteen items listed for Francis Wormald is the source of this information. The index lists only the manuscripts themselves and not individual topics such as initials or illustrations. For that reason, it would be easy for a reader to miss important elements of Budny’s analysis.

Characteristic of the catalogue in general, this diffuse treatment suggests that the text is directed primarily to experts who already know these manuscripts. It is puzzling, then, that at other times the text provides information that seems directed at a general, if not beginning audience. For example, in her discussion of the Gospels of St. Augustine (cat. no. 1, CCCC ms. 286), Budny pauses to list the various stopping-off places in the career of St. Jerome, the man responsible for the Vulgate translation of the Gospels. This discussion would only be useful to a reader completely unfamiliar with the history of the Bible; this audience seems at odds with one who would have the expertise needed to disentangle other parts of the text.

Arcane, erudite, difficult to use—even for those devoted and knowledgable of the subject—the catalogue presents itself as a puzzle. Nonetheless, the historical importance and the general unavailability of manuscripts at Corpus Christi College makes this catalogue an extremely worthwhile, if rather unhandy and expensive, tool. Budny contributes to a distinguished history of cataloguing English manuscripts, including Humfrey Wanley’s pioneering work in the early eighteenth century, the accounts provided by M.R. James in the early twentieth century, Neil Ker’s, Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts (1957), and the numerous volumes in the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, edited by J.J.G. Alexander (1975-present). Like these, Budny’s work continues the act of counting the precious folios that form our understanding of English art and culture. Yet, when comparing these catalogues, I cannot help but marvel at just how many more words Budny finds for her manuscripts than her predecessors did, not to mention the contrast between the cursory entries in the early modern Corpus inventories and Budny’s dense tome. Overall, the prolixity of this text suggests that one of the principal aims of these two volumes is not only to make an outstanding collection of manuscripts widely available, but also to find a verbal replacement. This replacement not only turns the pictures into puzzles, but it becomes, at times, puzzling to read. Following the terms of Parker’s will in her own way, Budny accounts for some of his manuscripts through a complex description that seeks to protect them by laying a verbal claim to the now dangerously circulating images provided by her own photography. In effect, the now cracked-opened inner sanctum becomes obscured once again by words.