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Violence and Daily Life. Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job by Conrad Rudolph (review)

Violence and Daily Life. Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Citeaux Moralia in Job. By Conrad Rudolph. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 145; 59 illustrations.) Conrad Rudolph's new book presents an interpretation of the decoration of Pope Gregory's Moralia in Job, contained in a manuscript completed in 1111 at Citeaux during the reign of its third abbot, Stephen Harding. This decoration, consisting of a full-page frontispiece and initial letters at the beginning of the prefaces and the thirty-five books that comprise this staple of the monastic literature in the early Middle Ages, has long attracted the attention of art historians for its draftsmanly virtuosity and enigmatic charm. A product of the heroic beginnings of Cistercian spirituality, it seems to dissent, in its apparent accommodation of aesthetic fantasy, from the ascetic ideals enunciated in the founding documents of the Order and later codified in its legislation. Rudolph notes that the manuscript betrays in its format and formal inconsistencies of the illumination some changes of heart on the part of its makers in the course of production. Originally designed to encompass two volumes, the first part was subdivided soon after its completion into three separate tomes. The second volume, which retained its homogeneity, is also much larger in its dimensions than its companion. The decoration was begun in a fairly restrained and sober manner, Books I and II having only smallish pen-work initial letters. Thereafter, the initials become formally more elaborate, though still conventional in their choice of imagery. From Book VIII onward, however, the space allotted to them becomes much larger, and their design exhibits the extraordinary mixture of variety and inventiveness for which the Citeaux Moralia is famous, departing from a literal construal of the text and forsaking as well the customary devices of allegory or overt symbolism in favor of an expressive medium that seems to be compounded of metaphor, allusion, or perhaps only hermetic self-reference. This imagery has not surprisingly constituted a challenge to the hermeneutical pride of modern readers. Modernists among them have celebrated in them a nearness to life and a certain vindication of the private or the gratuitous in the realm of aesthetic experience even in these remote and unpromising times. Rudolph belongs with the traditionalists or those for whom historical contingencies compel a search for religious meaning in works of monastic art even as obdurate to interpretation as these designs. …