This article explores the fifteenth-century reinvention of Getty Ms. 101, a late Romanesque picture book that was reconfigured as a devotional manual. The fifteenth-century additions included rosary prayers and the only surviving image of Robert of Bury, one of the child saints said to have been murdered by Jews in the twelfth century. The article examines the ways in which changes to the manuscript, including a number of adjustments to the Infancy narrative, not only reflect an evolving and widespread devotional practice, but also how the book was attuned to its local environment.

Sometime toward the close of the fifteenth century a late Romanesque picture cycle was reconfigured as a devotional miscellany and rosary manual (fig. 1).¹ The fragmentary codex, consisting of seven quires with over fifty illuminations, was interleaved with new images and prayers (fig. 2). Manuscript history is in large part a history of such accretive processes. We would be hard-pressed to find a manuscript that had not been added to, corrected, or improved in some small way. Yet Getty Ms. 101 (also known as the Getty Vita Christi) offers a case study not only in intervention but also in the nature of concentrated, focused response. Unlike other medieval manuscripts that changed gradually, through interventions over the years, this manuscript was decisively transformed around 1480–90.²

The three-hundred-year gap between the creation of the Romanesque pictures and the late medieval additions invites a series of questions about the fifteenth-century reception of the twelfth-century object. How do the changes to the twelfth-century pictures signal points of emphasis for its early modern reader? What value did the Romanesque pictures hold for the fifteenth-century patron? To what degree did the retention of the older illuminations reflect consideration or memory of a twelfth-century cult? This transformed manuscript offers valuable insights about the role that the past played in artistic invention in late medieval England.

The manuscript includes more than one hundred images and numerous prayers; this article will focus on a series of images depicting the infancy of Christ. Changes and additions to this section of the manuscript offer clues to the resonances that the older programme may have had for its fifteenth-century users.

In order to appreciate the changes that shaped the fifteenth-century manuscript it is necessary to understand the volume’s original twelfth-century structure. Painted on one side of the bifolia and arranged in facing pairs, the Romanesque book once contained over fifty miniatures providing an expansive visual chronicle of the life of Christ and the Virgin (fig. 3).³ The Getty Vita Christi’s twelfth-century illuminations may have once served as the prefatory cycle for a psalter or as a devotional picture book. The tradition of prefacing luxury psalters with pure pictorial programmes became a hallmark of English manuscript painting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such Christological programmes may have promoted meditation, prayer, or discussion while establishing the link between Old Testament prophecy (present in the text of the Psalms) and its perceived fulfilment in Christ. However, at 17.6 by 12.8 centimetres, the Getty manuscript is considerably smaller than surviving English psalters from this period. Its lack of accompanying text has led to speculation that it might have been a devotional picture book, but there is no definitive evidence for such books until the thirteenth century.⁴ The picture cycle is unusual both for the scope of its programme and for its iconography. With fifty-one surviving images, it is lengthier than any earlier known examples. The twelfth-century programme particularly emphasized childhood, with scenes of the early life of Mary and Jesus. It began with seven episodes dedicated to the early life of the Virgin, including images of her as both a child and a maiden in the temple, and featured a number of scenes with King Herod, including the rare image of his suicide.⁵ It is unclear whether the blank backs of the folios had been glued together, as in the twelfth-century Life and Miracles of St Edmund, King and Martyr,⁶ but in any case they were not conceived of as a space for text, as in a northern English psalter now in Oxford.⁷ Rather, this cycle was conceived of as a purely pictorial invitation to contemplation or prayer.⁸

In the fifteenth century, the formerly textless picture cycle became a prayer book. Its core served as a manual designed to lead the reader through the fifty meditations on the life of Christ that also featured in one of the emerging forms of the rosary prayer. The manuscript’s Romanesque bifolia were interleaved with new parchment (fig. 2). Prayers and illuminations were added to these pages as well as to the backs of existing illuminations. Although where and by whom these changes were made is unknown, the style of the fifteenth-century illuminations is East Anglian. Throughout the book, gold was scraped away and inscriptions and speech banderoles were added, embedded among the older illuminations and uniting them with the new.⁹

The transformed book begins with a list of the eight ages of the world and a fifteenth-century illumination of the Fall of Rebel Angels on folio 6 (fig. 4). Additional texts include biblical readings from the Gospel of John, Genesis, Exodus, and Samuel, as well as the penitential psalms, a litany, and various prayers to Mary and Christ. A concluding section contains miniatures with the rare iconography of the Fifteen Signs before the Day of Judgement (see, for example, fig. 5).¹⁰ While the choice of prayers is not standard, the additions of Old Testament and apocalyptic material stretch the original programme from its previous Christological focus to an all-encompassing history of salvation.¹¹

Throughout the book, the original narrative cycle of vita Christi illuminations was also expanded, with fifteenth-century images being interspersed among the earlier pictures.¹² Within the newly elaborated Christological section of the manuscript, rosary prayers served as an organizational spine uniting most of its illuminations. A series of numbered clausulae (abbreviated Ave prayers and references to moments in Christ’s life) were added to the bottom of the illuminations, new and old, to mark the fifty meditations on the life of Christ associated with the rosary (fig. 6).¹³ A lengthy preface underscored the ultimate reward to be gained through these devotions. It mentions a Carthusian monk near Trier who was rewarded with a vision of the Virgin and angels singing the rosary in heaven, and promises indulgences to those who similarly repeated the rosary.¹⁴ The anonymous monk was probably a reference to Dominic of Prussia, a Carthusian who had served at the Abbey of St Alban in Trier. Writing in the early fifteenth century, Dominic had composed a series of fifty meditations on the life of Christ that were intended to be recited with the rosary.¹⁵ The rosary in the Getty Vita Christi is structured as fifty clausulae that for the most part correspond with those composed by Dominic sometime between 1409 and 1415. Where the Getty manuscript’s rosary diverges slightly from his text, it corresponds to a similar rosary from the Cologne Charterhouse.¹⁶ The preface goes on to promise full forgiveness of sins for contrition and recitation of the rosary, and varying years of indulgences for membership in the Confraternity of the Rosary, as well as instructions for saying the rosary with these images. The preface specifies that before each picture the devotee was meant to recite an Ave and then read the meditation. The clausulae were punctuated at regular intervals with images of the Virgin and Child, set within a rose and accompanied by devotions (fig. 7). Just as strings of beads had long been used to mark one’s progress through groups of Pater Nosters and Aves, each turn of the page guided the reader through this increasingly complex form of the rosary prayer.

The addition of luxurious images to the numbered meditations was by no means a standard feature of rosary books at this time. The Getty Vita Christi is unique among other contemporary illustrated rosaries, not only for its highly individualized reuse of an older manuscript, but also for its comprehensive synthesis of text and image. The first printed version of an illustrated rosary appeared in 1483 and consisted of fifteen woodcuts, each depicting five scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin. While appearing in a book with several other printed rosary prayers, the images themselves were not glossed and were intended to function independently of the printed prayers.¹⁷ In the Getty manuscript, each of the narrative images of the life of Christ added in the fifteenth century (with just one exception) corresponds to a rosary prayer, demonstrating the degree to which this particular devotional practice drove the fifteenth-century illustrative campaign.¹⁸

In recycling the Romanesque images, the fifteenth-century patron took these formerly flexible stimuli to prayer, meditation, and contemplation and embedded them in a choreographed devotional practice. And yet, even as the old images were subsumed by the new, scripted content, the patron chose to preserve Romanesque images that were not necessary for the rosary prayer. Lacking numbered prayers, these miniatures are nevertheless interspersed in the appropriate chronological order, as can be seen at the beginning of the rosary section. The white rose marking the prologue to the rosary appears on folio 18 and is followed by several uninscribed twelfth-century images of the life of the Virgin. A second rose announces the beginning of the rosary itself (fig. 7) and is followed by an uninscribed image of the Marriage of the Virgin and then by the Annunciation (fig. 6), below which is written the first clausula. While the life of the Virgin pictures did not mark points in the prescribed meditation, they clearly amplified the spirit of the prayer and materially enhanced the value of the book.

The fifteenth-century iconography more generally echoes elements of contemporary church decoration. The rose-en-soleil motif that punctuates the rosary prayers (fig. 8) is widespread, often in fragmentary form, in fifteenth-century windows across Norfolk and Suffolk. This is seen in several fifteenth-century quarries found in the restored church at Foulsham (fig. 9) and, demonstrating the association of this formerly heraldic device with the Virgin, in a border around one of the Annunciation windows at Bale (fig. 10). Such architectural correspondences are seen as well in the Fifteen Signs miniatures at the end of the manuscript (fig. 5). The design elements in the upper corners appear to echo the decorative cornicing found in the windows of the same subject in York (fig. 11). The incorporation of imagery found in the architectural spaces of contemporary churches speaks to the kind of environmental response that informed the creation of the new devotional book and suggests that the book functioned as a virtual liturgical space one entered through private reading. The rosary preface clearly indicates that the individual using the book was not an isolated reader. As beneficiary of all the prayers of the other members of the far-flung Confraternity of the Rosary, the reader was participating in an imagined community performance. In this respect, the manuscript echoed both the physical and symbolic elements of the material church.

The rosary formed the framework for the fifteenth-century vita Christi programme, and the captioning of the twelfth-century pictures for the most part served to integrate the older pictures into the fifteenth-century devotional practice. Several miniatures deviating from this system invite closer examination. Three images of Herod (or in one instance an image that became Herod) were enhanced with captions and embellishments that draw particular attention to the massacre narrative. The Herod pictures were reinscribed, textually and pictorially. Unlike the rosary prayers, the texts in these instances serve as explanatory captions, with passages either excerpted from or informed by the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.

The first addition, to the image of Herod giving orders to his soldiers, specifies the evil deeds of the various kings who shared the name of Herod: Herod Ascalon, Herod Antipas, and Herod Agrippa (fig. 12).¹⁹ Jacobus de Voragine identifies them by their evil deeds. Herod of Ascalon, also known as Herod the Great, was the ruler to whom the murder of the Innocents was ascribed. Antipas was his son, and Agrippa his grandson. Antipas was the cruel tyrant to whom Pilate sent Christ and who was also responsible for the murder of John the Baptist. Agrippa executed St James and imprisoned St Peter.²⁰ The caption added to the image of Herod and his soldier specifies Herod Ascalon’s killing of the Innocents. The second captioned image constitutes both a textual and a pictorial intervention. Formerly a twelfth-century image of the Dream of Joseph, in which Joseph is warned by an angel to flee, the reclining figure here has been transformed into Herod (fig. 13). A caption explains that “Herod of Ascolon was tortured with a sickness of the stomach for fifteen days because worms ate away at his entrails” (Herodes Ascolonita per. 15. dies uentris dolore cruciatus quia corodebant uermes eius uiscera).²¹ The text in the banderoles however, along with the addition of the owl, relate events from the death of his grandson Herod Agrippa, who had been warned that the owl would be a portent of his death, which would occur within five days: “Behold I our god, will die according to the prediction of the Augur. According to the appearance of the owl, he knew he was going to die” (En ego deus noster moriar iuxta predicionem auguris preuisionem bubonis sciebat se moriturum).²²

The decision to transform the image and the story, eradicating Joseph and borrowing text about Herod Agrippa’s impending death to describe the death of Herod Ascalon, may have been an attempt to build momentum to the rare suicide image that appears several folios later, on folio 47 (fig. 14). The story of Herod’s suicide has its roots in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, according to which the king was so overcome by an excruciating, and apparently disgusting illness that he took an apple and called for a knife with which to pare it. He then lifted a hand to stab himself, but was prevented by his cousin Achiab.²³ He died from his illness five days later, although subsequent retellings abridged the account from an attempted suicide and later death to a conclusive suicide. The image in the Getty manuscript lacks the apple but has an added caption, also from the Golden Legend, that reads: “In his original (commentary) on the Gospel of Matthew, Remigius said that Herod Antipas killed himself with a knife with which he was peeling an apple” (Remigius in originali super mattheum . dicit quod herodes antipas gladio quo pomum purgabat se peremit).²⁴ Rather than adding clarity, these inscriptions once again scramble Herods. The caption connects the suicide story of Herod Ascalon to his son and heir Herod Antipas. This confusion is puzzling, but not without precedent. Such conflation was a characteristic of the English mystery plays performed for the feast of Corpus Christi.²⁵ Herod, who had a leading role in the Epiphany plays from the twelfth century onward, came to have more pronounced dramatic presence in the fifteenth century; Herod’s successful suicide is first documented in this medium during this period. In the Corpus Christi plays, one Herod’s deeds were merged with the others in order to maximize the evil qualities of the protagonist.²⁶ In the Vita Christi manuscript, the amplification of Herod by similar means and the addition of the captions can be seen as a contemporaneous attempt to achieve this kind of villainous concentrate, while working with the existing images in the book.

The fifteenth-century manipulation of the Herod images comprises the most emphatic series of interventions in the earlier pictures. They are the only illuminations to receive explanatory captions—all other captions are related to the rosary prayers or to a prayer on the Seven Last Words of Christ.²⁷ While the captions ultimately introduce as much confusion as clarity, they do highlight and draw attention to this potion of the book, physically underscoring the importance of the infancy cycle, and particularly to the massacre narrative.

The key to the added emphasis on the Herod images appears in the pages that directly follow the image of Herod and the Owl. The manuscript contains the only extant image of Robert of Bury, along with a prayer to the saint. Robert was a young child said to have been murdered by Jews in 1181.²⁸ Like the better-known ritual murder cults of William of Norwich and Harold of Gloucester, Robert’s cult was created in the twelfth century, during a period of growing anti-Judaism that included mob violence and the curtailment of legal rights.²⁹ In 1190 there was a riot in Bury in which fifty-seven Jews were massacred. Later that year, all of Bury’s Jewish residents were driven from the town by the order of the abbot. A hundred years later England’s Jewish population was driven from the country.

The ritual murder accusations involved stories of Christian children who were “sacrificed” by Jews for use in blood rites. The story of William of Norwich’s mock crucifixion at the hands of the Jews was invented by his determined hagiographer, Thomas of Monmouth, several years after William’s body was found in the woods outside Norwich.³⁰ Elements from Thomas’s own account make it apparent that not all believed the story, but this particular manifestation of anti-Jewish behaviour was to have a lasting impact on Jewish–Christian relations for centuries to come.

As Emily Rose has demonstrated, not all ritual murder cults were driven by the same motivations.³¹ While certainly fuelled by anti-Jewish sentiment, Robert’s cult initially seems to have been a calculated and top-down operation initiated as part of Samson’s bid for the abbacy of Bury St Edmunds. His competitor for the abbacy, William the Sacristan, was maligned for his purported friendships with Jewish money lenders, who he was said to have allowed into the abbey church during the Mass.³² However, the expulsion had much to do with a larger power struggle, namely Samson’s assertion of jurisdictional independence from royal justices in the Liberty of St Edmund. The Jews, who were deemed “king’s men” (possessing recourse to hearings by the king’s justices) were forced from the community, leaving behind property and debts owed to them.³³ Robert’s cult therefore began with the politically motivated actions of the community’s leader, and unlike that of William of Norwich or the later Little Hugh of Lincoln, it left few traces.³⁴ Writing in the mid-1190s, the monk Jocelin of Brakelond recorded the child’s death in 1181.³⁵ Jocelin’s chronicle alludes to a vita, unfortunately now lost, and a burial within the abbey church.³⁶ Gervase of Canterbury supplied the additional details that the child was murdered at Easter and by Jews—a key element in the ritual murder myth was that Christian children were used for Jewish rituals that mocked the crucifixion.³⁷ The death of William of Norwich was regarded in this way, while Robert’s death occurred at Easter.³⁸ Although this is the only image of St Robert to survive, an eighteenth-century description of a now-lost panel painting on a rood screen in Erpingham indicates a wider diffusion of his cult outside of Bury.³⁹ A prayer appearing in a late fifteenth-century prayer book in Oxford attests to the persistence of the cult in the late Middle Ages, as does an early sixteenth-century record of payments to cantors in Robert’s chapel on his feast day.⁴⁰

In the Getty Vita Christi, the image with scenes related to Robert’s martyrdom represent not only the sole pictorial record of the child saint, but also the one hagiographic illumination in the book. A prayer to the saint appears on the facing page. The miniature and its preceding prayer were added to the backs of a twelfth-century Dream of Joseph (now Herod) and the Flight into Egypt. All of these images were embedded within the miscellany’s litany among the martyrs, effectively casting Robert as one of the Holy Innocents (fig. 15). Robert, interestingly, is not named in the manuscript’s litany.

Several scenes relating to the martyrdom of the child saint unfold across the upper register. To the left, a veiled woman lowers Robert into a well. A scroll issues from her with the words, “the woman wished but was not able to hide this lamp of God” (voluit set non potuit anus abscondere lucernam dei). The language of the accompanying prayer is general, offering scant clues to the events depicted, but more can be deduced by a poem written by John Lydgate (1370–c. 1449/1450?), a poet and monk at Bury St Edmunds.⁴¹ Lydgate wrote that Robert, a suckling infant, was far from his nurse when the murder occurred. The woman is thus perhaps his nurse, a figure who in European accounts of child murder was often cast as the accomplice.⁴² The body of Little Hugh of Lincoln was said to have been hidden in a well after his death, and the woman at the top-left corner of the Vita Christi’s miniature may be engaged in similarly clandestine activity.⁴³ Lydgate also wrote that Robert was scourged and nailed to a tree, a martyrdom much like that suffered by William of Norwich, whose body was found in a forest. At the right of the picture an archer draws his bow with his left hand, facing a tree under which lies the child’s body. A golden sun blazes overhead. One line in Lydgate’s poem refers to Bury’s eponymous saint as a bright sun with whom Robert’s star would shine. Given that Edmund was martyred by being shot with arrows and then beheaded by the Danes, this image may have attempted to align the child saint with the abbey’s primary saint. Between and above the two scenes with the woman and archer, Robert’s soul is lifted to heaven.⁴⁴

A red-robed and tonsured supplicant kneels in the miniature’s lower register before a crimson scroll, which shows a red-breasted robin on a document with a seal. Christopher De Hamel has suggested that the book was assembled for a private owner, possibly a devout layman, although not necessarily the patron.⁴⁵ Both the added prayer and the miniature were painted on the backs of twelfth-century miniatures, making it clear that these elements were part of the wholesale reconceptualization of the manuscript. Whether the person who commissioned the manuscript or the person for whom it was intended, the figure individualizes the sole hagiographic miniature in the manuscript. While contemporary print culture provides examples of generic images of kneeling devotees (see, for example, a pasted-in print of a Carthusian kneeling before Christ in a contemporary manuscript in the British Library), this image was created specifically for the reworked manuscript.⁴⁶ A banderole issues from the robed figure with the words: “May he have mercy on me by the merits of St Robert, now and forever” (Meritis sancti Roberti hic et in euum misereatur mei). The object he kneels in front of is ambiguous. While often described as a scroll representing the Liberty of St Edmund, the properties over which the abbey had been granted independent jurisdiction by King Edward the Confessor in 1044, the object is not easily categorized. Warner first described it as drapery in the shape of a sail, while De Hamel described it as a textile wall hanging.⁴⁷ Its long rectangular shape curls upward at the bottom of the miniature, framing a charter, rendered as a parchment-coloured square with dangling seal, against a swathe of dark crimson. However, its looped edges appear to be supported by a blue shaft. This may be simply a compositional device meant to divide the zones of the image, but could be intended as a staff with a pennon bearing a badge.⁴⁸ The red-breasted robin has been interpreted generically as a reference to Christ, who shed blood for humanity, and also as a play on Robert’s name.

Two inscriptions on the manuscript’s flyleaves indicate that the book was in the possession of Robert Themilthorpe, age forty-two, in 1594.⁴⁹ Anthony Bale has suggested that the painted figure is an earlier family member, also called Robert Themilthorpe, a deputy steward for the crown, and that his tonsure was an expression of piety rather than an indication of clerical status.⁵⁰ Building on Warner’s earlier note that Roger Themilthorpe had presented to the rectory of Themilthorpe, near Foulsham, in 1586, Bale pointed out that the church at Foulsham was dedicated to the Holy Innocents, who were the religious precursors of the ritual child murder saints of the twelfth century.⁵¹ The earlier Robert Themilthorpe of Foulsham died in 1505. His will records a generous bequest to the Guild of the Holy Innocents there, as well as to the Guild of the Virgin Mary, and this image of the donor praying before the child saint would have had added significance for him as a member of this congregation.⁵² The fact that this dedication was shared by only four other churches in England makes it a particularly compelling association, although one of the other churches was that of Great Barton, Suffolk, located only a few miles from Bury. The language of the prayer accompanying the images has been recognized for its local aspect: “Hail sweet boy, blessed Robert, you who flowered in the martyr’s palm in the time of infancy, pray for us to God that we may rejoice in your own town.”⁵³ As already noted, the child Robert is not listed in the accompanying litany, but, as Bale emphasizes, the cult was apparently informal in nature. Four animals—a stag or an antelope, a collared bear, a cat, and an ox—march across the page, under the prayer. They have alternately been proposed as bestiary symbols, a rebus, or with the bear, as a pun on Bury, and may yet provide clues to the manuscript’s provenance.⁵⁴ More work on the guilds of the Holy Innocents, in Norfolk and Suffolk, may yet lend insight into this puzzling imagery and the manuscript’s fifteenth-century provenance.

I have suggested elsewhere that the twelfth-century portion of this manuscript (frequently associated on the basis of style and iconography with a group of psalters from the north of England)⁵⁵ might have been commissioned for an inhabitant of Bury St Edmunds, perhaps even the abbot.⁵⁶ Abbot Samson had actively promoted the cult of the child saint Robert of Bury through the establishment of a shrine in the abbey church at Bury and by commissioning a vita. This manuscript’s twelfth-century programme, which had a particularly pronounced focus on Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents, as well as the childhood of the Virgin and Christ, would have mirrored the central theme of the new cult dedicated to a murdered child. While little is known of Robert, he was said to have been just a suckling child, distinguishing him from the older William of Norwich (said to have been twelve at the time of his death). Whether or not the twelfth-century book was an artefact of the earlier cult, the fifteenth-century amplification of the Herodian narrative (and implicitly the story of the Massacre of the Innocents) through alterations to the earlier illuminations, speaks to the resonance this narrative had in the region.

The Getty manuscript is distinguished by its remarkable synthesis of old and new images. Ultimately the identity of the tonsured supplicant remains unknown, but the emphasis on an obscure cult and the amplification of the Herod images were clearly meaningful. First created during a period of intense anti-Jewish activity, including mob violence, murder, and accusations in the twelfth century, the child murder cults experienced a resurgence in the fifteenth century, when Jews had been absent from England for two hundred years. The appeal of the twelfth-century child saints’ cults in fifteenth-century England constituted its own form of hagiographic and cultural response, which has generated a large field of study in recent years.⁵⁷ Lisa Lampert has argued that the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament, with its anti-Semitic tale of Jewish host desecrators/Christ killers, enabled viewers simultaneously to engage with biblical and local history. She argues that the play, which refers to little Robert’s death, overlaid Christ’s murder with that of Robert, thus bringing biblical history into the “eternal present”.⁵⁸ The Getty manuscript, with its reuse of the older Romanesque illuminations, does much the same. Through captioning and the insertion of the Robert miniature into the Herod programme, the Holy Innocents were brought forward into the environment of the early modern reader, just as valued images from Robert’s own era were embedded in a contemporary book.

The preservation of pictures in the prayer book is not in itself unusual, but the comprehensive inclusion of the earlier Romanesque illuminations does suggest that they held symbolic and material value for the fifteenth-century patron. This kind of repurposing proliferated throughout the Middle Ages: one need think only of Abbot Suger, who describes the Carolingian foundations of his new church as “stones like relics”.⁵⁹ What is striking is the degree to which this book’s makers synthesized new and old. The reuse of medieval manuscripts is often an accretive process, but in this case the makers accommodated the older elements both structurally and aesthetically into one campaign. The late medieval makers wove new texts and images throughout the book, using the blank backs of the older illuminations but preserving the existing quire structures where possible. The care taken to preserve the older miniatures is seen particularly in one instance, where the fifteenth-century artists went so far as to re-gild losses to the twelfth-century golden backgrounds.⁶⁰ These artists also aesthetically softened the distinctions between the two campaigns. The later illuminations echo the size and dimensions of the earlier works, although the fifteenth-century illuminations are squarer in shape. Several different artists worked on the fifteenth-century additions, and one noticeably echoed the elongated forms of the Romanesque figures, as seen in several images of Christ on the Cross (figs 16 and 17). Although gold was used less freely in the later works, in certain miniatures, such as those of the Crucifixion, the artist echoed the golden backgrounds of the earlier miniatures, clearly bringing the newer images into line with the Romanesque cycle. Linear gold frames, quite unlike the foliate frames used on the Old Testament subjects at the beginning of the manuscript, were used around the fifteenth-century miniatures in this section. The golden frames resemble those seen on the Romanesque Crucifixion (fig. 17) and Deposition, further synthesizing old and new. A possible nod to the Romanesque Hellmouth appearing on folio 82v, moreover, is seen as well in the fifteenth-century Fall of the Rebel Angels on folio 6 (fig. 18 and see fig. 4).

DOI This pronounced effort to bring the older image into line with new devotional practice invites consideration of the ways the Romanesque pictures may have evoked Bury’s past. A similar example of artistic synthesis is seen in the redrawing of an image of Gregory the Great in an Anglo-Saxon copy of his Dialogues (fig. 19). The figure was retraced by a later artist who nevertheless left visible the lines of the earlier illumination. Catherine Karkov discusses the process of tracing as “an act of historical remembering”, binding present and past.⁶¹ Similarly, Larry Nees has discussed the motivations of Ottonian illuminators who embellished Carolingian Gospel books; prized for their association with missionaries, small-format Gospel books evoked a significant period in Christian conversion and served as a material link to that aspect of Christian history.⁶² Historical remembering is an essential concept when considering the motivations for the Getty Vita Christi’s renewal. The reuse of images speaks not only to a sense of general retrospection in late medieval manuscript culture but also marries this book to a significant period for Robert’s cult.

I am grateful to the staff at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for jointly organising the Invention and Imagination conference, and for the support that led to this publication; as well as to the circle of colleagues who have read and commented on this manuscript over the past several years, especially especially Peter Kidd, Richard Leson, and Nancy Turner. The visualisation of the Getty manuscript’s quire structure presented in the the essay (fig. 2) would not have been possible without Nancy Turner’s collaboration. I am particularly grateful to Sandy Heslop and Jessica Berenbeim for their close reading of this essay and their insightful suggestions for its improvement.