The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth-Century Voyage of Saint Brendan (review)

Abstract

ianate features and parallels, written in Italy but in Northumbria. We have no luxuriously decorated or illustrated books from York,or Lyon,or for that matter Rome; we cannot be certain that any were produced in these important centers,nor can we be confident of their appearance if they once existed.Verkerk’s frequent use of Roman liturgical and textual sources in her interpretations of the miniatures is valuable and interesting, but not much of an argument for an origin in Rome. Roman liturgies were widely emulated or adapted elsewhere; the manuscripts she perforce uses to ascertain just what Roman liturgy was during this period are themselves Frankish manuscripts, not Roman.The seven deacons she identifies in one of the miniatures are an important feature of the urban church in Rome,but, as she points out,depend upon a scriptural passage of universal currency. On the point of origin of the book, a healthy agnosticism still seems in order. Scholarship has probably devoted too much effort to the question of origins, which often becomes a reductive and schematic exercise, forcing a definitive choice beyond the limitations of our knowledge. More interesting is the discourse to which Verkerk’s book effectively contributes, a discourse not about where books were made but about for whom they were made, what they signified, and how they were used.