The past in pictures | Charlotte Gauthier

This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.


The French novelist François Mauriac supposedly said, “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he re-reads.” The premise of Michelle Brown’s Illumino is that 12 manuscripts, and how they were read, re-read, transmitted and laboriously copied over the eight centuries she covers, can tell the heart (or at least the history) of medieval Britain.

It is an intriguing premise, and one to which the non-specialist reader might wish Brown had stuck. Her work is peopled with a kaleidoscopic cast of hundreds of manuscripts and the people who made, read and distributed them. Though we are 30 pages into the book before we have met the first of her principal manuscripts — the Lindisfarne Gospels — we’ve come by way of easily 20 others in a torrent of names and events designed to get us to the founding of Lindisfarne Priory itself. Once we’re there, however, the story of Bishop Eadfrith’s labour of love is engagingly told.

Illumino: A History of Medieval Britain in Twelve Illuminated Manuscripts, Michelle P. Brown (Reaktion, £25)

The subsequent chapters follow the same pattern, though often the manuscript most thoroughly described is not the one given in the chapter heading but any one of myriad others.

Brown was for some years the Curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library, and Illumino displays its author’s erudition and lifetime of scholarship. One of its great strengths is its wide-ranging artistic interest, comparing the manuscripts’ imagery with other decorative arts of the time, including embroidery, sculpture and architecture. Personal stories of some of the people who produced or commissioned manuscripts add texture to what otherwise might become little more than an annotated catalogue.

At the end of Brown’s period, manuscript production jostled along side by side with the newly introduced technology of printing. This is neatly illustrated by her choice of Sir Anthony Rivers’s 1477 translation of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, which was produced in a beautifully illuminated manuscript presentation copy for the author’s brother-in-law Edward IV and printed in multiple editions for an enthusiastic popular audience by William Caxton.

The Dictes and the circumstances of its production might have warranted more than the two-and-a-half pages allocated to it, not least because the chapter is nominally about it. (The Book of Margery Kempe gets seven-and-a-half pages in the same chapter.) Illumino ends with Henry VIII’s 1540 illuminated psalter, demonstrating how long the manuscript tradition persisted in England.

Writing for a general audience is a skill very different from producing academic prose, and few academics do both well. Whilst Brown’s style is never obscurantist — indeed, it is for the most part lucid and enjoyable — it is not always clear what sort of reader she is addressing. Consider: “The zoomorphic, inhabited, gymnastic and historiated initials found in late 11th- and 12th-century books thus fused the legacy of the Insular manuscripts of Britain’s past with the elegant and contorted forms of the sculptured capitals and cloisters of Normandy, Burgundy, Italy and Iberia.”

Few non-specialists are likely to know what an “historiated initial” might be, and Brown doesn’t explain. (It is an enlarged letter opening a paragraph which contains a picture, usually illustrating a story from the text.) Likewise, the long quotations of Middle English will challenge those unused to the vagaries of late-medieval orthography.

This uneven tone is noticeable throughout, not only in the choice of language but also in the historical details chosen for inclusion. For example, in discussing the 14th century embroiderer-turned-illuminator John Fifhide, Brown quotes over four pages of archival documents relating to Fifhide’s career as a City of London alderman and sheriff — including from a legal dispute about a newly built stile impeding a right of way in a City churchyard — with no obvious relation to the manuscript in question.

These documents, whilst deeply interesting to historians (including yours truly), seem an odd interpolation in a book for general audiences. Such quirks will certainly not prevent readers from enjoying what is otherwise an intelligent and interesting book, though a judicious editor might usefully have smoothed them out.

Illumino is heavily illustrated, which will appeal to readers for whom the chief draw of illuminated manuscripts is the pictures — and who could blame them? Whilst not quite the “accessible introduction to Britain’s history, art history and book history” claimed by its publisher, Illumino is nevertheless as enjoyable as any such volume aimed at the (wo)man on the Bloomsbury (not Clapham) omnibus could be.

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