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Abstract
The Huntington Library Legenda aurea (San Marino, California, The Huntington Library, HM 3027) is an undeservedly understudied manuscript. As the earliest surviving extensively illustrated copy of Jacobus de Voragine's famous work, and as one of the handful of the over 1,000 extant manuscripts of the Legenda aurea in Latin to be so comprehensively decorated, HM 3027 is a landmark work in the history of the reproduction of this text, as well as hagiographic illustration in general. In addition, the manuscript is an excellent example of the collaborative nature of manuscript production in thirteenth-century Paris. With its copious written instructions to the rubricator and illuminator, and its many preliminary marginal drawings for the 135 surviving column miniatures, HM 3027 is a unique vehicle to investigate scribal and artistic practice in the manufacture of such manuscripts. Part I is concerned with the making of the Huntington Library Legenda aurea —its place in hagiographic illustration, its artistic context, and its physical structure and decoration.
Many of the miniatures depict violent scenes of martyrdom, and in Part II I examine the myriad of meanings that such images might have had for a medieval viewer. I discuss the perception of pain in the later Middle Ages, and the idea of physical pain as a vehicle for spiritual devotion. The increasing significance of the visualized pain of religious figures such as Christ and the martyrs has its counterpart in the secular world; in the thirteenth century public torture began to be used as a means to extract confession in court. I also discuss the issue of gender; male martyrs are most often clothed and beheaded while female martyrs are most often stripped and penetrated. Yet both male and female saints can be said to transform and transcend the binary system of gender through their embrace of martyrdom; women who were capable of uncommon spiritual fortitude were described as “becoming male,” while men intimately connected to their bodies were feminized.
