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THE GREAT EUROPEAN BOOKS

HILDEGARD VON BINGEN, ALFONSO EL SABIO, BRUNETTO LATINO,

DANTE ALIGHIERI, ST BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN, CHRISTINE DE PIZAN



Today we would call them 'coffee-table books'. Books like Mary McCarthy's Stones of Florence with its splendid photographs in a take from John Ruskin's Stones of Venice with his exquisite drawings and engravings. Books which shared culture across national boundaries. They are part of a great family of books, de luxe books with dazzling illuminations, designed to impress figures in power with the people's message, a message equally expressed by women as by men, a sharing between status and powerlessness, achieved through artistic excellence.




Hildegard's finest manuscript, the Liber Divinorum Operum, is today in Lucca. It is her last work, here completed by her nuns who have created enormous pages of gold leaf by even patching the folios to enlarge them. It is likely a creation carried to the Pope in Rome in an attempt to canonize her, to speak Truth to Power. And this is her text in which she supremely does so, writing of the greatest need for ecology in Europe's Christendom to prevent disease and starvation.



Following Hildegard in Spain we have Alfonso el Sabio, the wise king of that pluralistic land where Jew, Muslim and Christian co-habited and whose father was titled 'The King of the Three Religions'. Among the many books Alfonso penned was one in particular, his coffee table diplomatic gift, Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, an intedisciplinary tour-de-force, which has his poems in their musical settings be exquisitely illuminated with a vast panorama of his multi-cultural society. It was his bid to become Emperor of Europe. This particular manuscript he gave to the Comune of Florence as bribe. They accepted the manuscript but did not support his candidacy.



Brunetto Latino learned of Alfonso el Sabio's project to write encyclopedic books incorporating Aristotle when on embassy from Florence to Spain in 1260. Exiled in France following the Battle of Montaperti, Brunetto then wrote his coffee-table book, Li Livres dou Tresor, as presentation gift to Charles of Anjou, whom the Florentine bankers in exile bank-rolled so he would become King of Sicily and Jerusalem, rather than choosing to elect Alfonso over themselves. They later repented their chose and plotted the Sicilian Vespers against him.



Next it was Dante's turn in this continuum, for Dante Alighieri was Brunetto Latino's student. His Commedia, written similarly in exile, maps the peace of Europe through an imperial Christendom. His love of Italian freedom would be celebrated in the Risorgimento, his love of Empire exploited by Fascism.



Later in Dante's century a Swedish mother of eight would likewise become a great writer of coffee table books, St Birgitta's Revelationes, being compiled decade after decade, in Sweden, in Italy, and as carefully illuminated as had been her father's law book for King Magnus with apocalyptic imagery. Her stance was that of preaching to Europe, to Popes and Emperors, conveying the words of Christ and the Virgin, of the need for peace, of the need to end corruption, particularly by Cardinals.



Similarly, Christine de Pizan wrote such coffee-table books presenting them to royalty, again preaching peace. As a child she had had the run of the King's Library and had there read the works of Brunetto and of Dante.

Nor did this wonderful tradition die out. It continues through Cervantes' Don Quixote, through Madame de Staël's Corinne ou Italie, through Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, through Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Though the later works largely lack the glorious illuminations of their medieval predecessors.

I challenge a graduate student to write his or her thesis on this theme, traveling from great library to great library, following a study of paleography, to examine the manuscripts which are to be found in the Vatican, the Laurentian Library, the Biblioteca Nazionale, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Escorial, the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, and libraries in Stockholm, Uppsala and Lund in Sweden. And here you may glimpse the beauty of such libraries: http://curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/a_librophiliacs_love_letter_1.htm


FLORIN WEBSITE © JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO ASSOCIATION, 1997-2010: FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERY || BIBLIOTECA E BOTTEGA FIORETTA MAZZEI || ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING || WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR || FLORENCE IN SEPIA  ||  BRUNETTO LATINO, DANTE ALIGHIERI AND GEOFFREY CHAUCER || E-BOOKS || ANGLO-ITALIAN STUDIES || CITY AND BOOK I, II, III, IV, V || NON-PROFIT GUIDE TO COMMERCE IN FLORENCE ||  AUREO ANELLO, CATALOGUE || WEBLOG