Kathleen Maxwell, Between Constantinople and Rome: An Illuminated Byzantine Gospel Book (Paris gr. 54) and the Union of Churches

The late thirteenth-century bi-lingual (Greek-Latin) gospel codex, Paris gr.54, housed at the BnF is known to New Testament textual critics by the Gregory number 16.It is a de luxe production, of generous proportions in fine grade parchment and, rarely for a manuscript of its probable provenance, namely Constantinople, and date is illustrated with portraits and an illuminated cycle of pictures.Plate XXVII shows the beauty of the archaising Greek and indeed the Latin script.Its Greek text is a standard Byzantine type and, as a consequence, is seldom referred to in the apparatus of critical editions.It is not included in NA28 or UBS5 for example, although readings from 16 appear in the IGNTP's edition of Luke (1984Luke ( , 1987)).2 Kathleen Maxwell, however, justifiably studied this codex for a university thesis and subsequently has lavished much well-merited time and energy pursuing its many unique and important features.The book, the first published study of this ms., is the fruit of her labours.Prof. Maxwell is an art-historian, and many of the chapters examine in detail the illustrations in the codex.After a worthwhile analysis of the modus operandi of the scribes (one or two for the Greek script; more for the Latin column) and the artists, she explains the distinctive and characteristic features of each of the three illuminators.3 One unique feature of this manuscript is that it is a rare example where one can identify with certainty the main manuscript that influenced its artwork.The inspiration for many of its illustrations has been known to scholars for some time -several art historians have recognised the link between Iveron 5 (990) and Paris 54 (16).What could have been particularly telling would have been if plates of all the parallel illustrations in these two manuscripts were shown, ideally on facing pages.Minuscule 16 has space for 52 illuminations; 990 has only 29, all of which are represented in 16, albeit sometimes differently distributed.The details of the illustrations in common and the additional illuminations in 16 are carefully described in Maxwell's longest chapter (of over 40 pages in length).Sometimes comparison of the artwork was obscured by the poor reproductions of Iveron 5 in the plates in Pelikanidis et al., Treasures of Mount Athos (and Maxwell is duly critical of some of the editing in those albums); she was able to study Iveron 5 for herself when the ms.was on display in Thessaloniki.4 Another distinctive aspect of the manuscript is its use of polychrome text, with four colours used for differing purposes, bright red for narrative text, with crimson, blue or brown for distinctive categories of speaker.This is a more sophisticated version of what is found in some recent children's Bibles where Jesus' words are picked out in red (despite publishers' quandaries about what to do with John 3: 31-36).As this book began life as an academic thesis, it is not surprising that Maxwell thoroughly investigated the consistency of the scribal efforts to maintain the correct use of the four inks in the right places throughout the Greek and then the Latin columns.In general, despite her having spotted some inconsistencies and slips, Maxwell gives the scribes high grades for this work!5 Among other unique features is this ms.' incompleteness.