The fifteen papers collected in this book were presented at a conference in honor of Walter Cahn at the Index of Christian Art, Princeton, in 2007. As Colum Hourihane notes in his introduction, the term “Romanesque” is fraught with difficulties, and one of the themes that runs through many of the papers is a questioning of just what constitutes Romanesque style. As is usually the case with collections of this kind, however, there is no unifying theme to the volume other than the contributors’ attempts to address the subjects and questions that have been central to Cahn’s work.

The first three papers in the volume work nicely together. In “The Art-Historical Work of Walter Cahn,” Elizabeth Sears emphasizes the rigor and variety of Cahn’s scholarship, setting the stage for the papers that follow. Cahn himself then looks back over his career in “Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence.” He explores one of the assumptions behind the organization of the symposium: the lack of scholarship on Romanesque art emerging from the United States and United Kingdom. In the United States, as he points out, Romanesque art was never tied to national history, self-definition, or religious belief in the way that it was in Europe. Moreover, contemporary scholarship is questioning the material record in a manner that has moved art historians away from their earlier interest in matters of style and form. He is not, however, overly pessimistic, concluding that if the study of Romanesque art is to remain strong it must continue to attract talented students. Willibald Sauerländer follows with “Romanesque Art 2000: A Worn Out Notion?” Rather than a structured essay, the paper consists of “remarks on some of the issues and problems advanced by the conference” (40). After briefly surveying the history of scholarship on the Romanesque, Sauerländer proposes that current scholarship should be less concerned with traditional stylistic classifications and more focused on the larger context of “living monuments.” How, for example, do art and architecture work in relation to liturgy—cult or memory? He also questions whether there is really a decline in scholarship on the Romanesque, as opposed to a more general waning in all aspects of Medieval Studies.

Madeline Caviness picks up on Cahn’s contributions to historiography in her “The Politics of Taste: An Historiography of ‘Romanesque’ Art in the Twentieth Century.” She focuses particularly on “the uses of history and of material cultural production as political tools” (59). Using the examples of Catalunya and imperial Germany, she explores the resonances of their regional Romanesque styles and monuments on artists in the early twentieth century—including Antoni Gaudí and Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt and Ernst Barlach—and outlines the ways in which Romanesque art and art-historical scholarship were made to do ideological work. Caviness’s examples are well chosen, and it would be hard to disagree with the core of her argument, but the paper is marred by some sweeping generalizations such as the statement that “visual language is inherently subversive” (60).

Three papers are devoted to manuscript studies. Patricia Stirnemann’s “Where Can We Go from Here? A Study of French Twelfth-Century Manuscripts” deals with issues of provenance, style, and ornament. Stirnemann believes that ornament and textual transmission (rather than sources, themes, and iconography) provide the most potent means of expanding a knowledge of Romanesque manuscripts. Lucy Freeman Sandler offers a study of a single manuscript in her “The Weingarten ‘Lectionarium Matutinale’ in St. Petersburg and New York.” Her goal is to identify what type of book (or books) they constituted, where they were made, how they were used, and what they reveal about book production at Weingarten in the early thirteenth century. Close examination of the contents of both manuscripts reveals that they were intended for liturgical use, but that they were limited rather unusually to the liturgical readings for the month of November. She argues convincingly that the manuscript was produced for liturgical convenience and because of the importance of November feasts at Weingarten, and that it was never part of a set of liturgical books devoted to individual months. The script has frequently been described as archaizing, and Sandler believes that it was deliberately so, an evocation of historical tradition aimed at proclaiming the “ancient dignity and status” of Weingarten. The conservative style of the illumination she believes to be a very different matter, aimed at conveying a new intensity rather than a retrospective tradition. The paper includes an appendix listing the contents of both manuscripts. More problematic is T. A. Heslop’s “The Implication of the Utrecht Psalter in English Romanesque Art.” There is no question that the Utrecht Psalter was enormously influential on Anglo-Saxon art, and that the style that developed out of the Anglo-Saxon response to Utrecht was a key element in the transition to the Romanesque, but the visual “quotations” of Utrecht cited from a wide range of manuscripts are vague and often unconvincing. Moreover, the Romanum text of the psalter was not necessarily “outmoded” (272) in England by the eleventh century so much as it was part of a tradition of textual transmission and scholarship that was very much alive, finding perhaps its clearest expression in the mid-twelfth-century Eadwine Psalter. Heslop borrows his approach from Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), but fails to acknowledge the extensive scholarship on the limits and problems of that approach.

Another set of papers is concerned more broadly with issues of seeing and reading. In “Evil Eye(ing): Romanesque Art as a Shield of Faith,” Herbert Kessler revisits Meyer Schapiro’s distinction between art as aesthetic object and art as a vehicle of doctrine through a detailed study of a mid-twelfth-century ivory diptych in the Bargello that pairs Christ over the beasts with St. Michael killing the dragon. He makes a convincing case that the ivory carver invoked the concept of the evil eye to protect against “desire of the eyes,” although there are places at which the distinction between the aesthetic and doctrinal seems a bit forced. Looking at Romanesque art, he concludes, “was a psychomachia, a battle for the soul of the viewer” (135). Bruno Reudenbach’s “Visualizing Holy Bodies: Observations on Body-Part Reliquaries” argues that body-part reliquaries are both performative and communicative, visualizing the notion of the saint’s body as corpus integrum or corpus incorruptum. Neil Stratford surveys the prosody of verse inscriptions in Romanesque art in his “Verse ‘Tituli’ and Romanesque Art,” while Ilene Forsyth’s “Word-Play in the Cloister at Moissac” looks at the complex relationship between word and image in one particular series of sculptures. She demonstrates that the inscriptions are riddles that force the viewer to unravel their meanings in an active form of viewing possibly intended as a weapon against monastic boredom. She suggests, albeit tentatively, that they may have been produced during the abbacy of Ansquetil (1085–1115).

Finally, four papers are devoted to architectural subjects. Dorothy Glass’s “Revisiting the ‘Gregorian Reform’” focuses on the years roughly 1100–1125, and the consequences of the expansion of cities, cathedrals, and monasteries that took place in North Italy at the time. She argues that it is in the forward-looking sculpture of Emilia/Romagna rather than in the retrospective art of central Italy that the ideals of the Reform were most effectively visually promulgated. She makes her case through a close reading of the sculptural programs at Monte Cassino Abbey and the cathedrals of Modena and Piacenza. John Williams explores the programmatic originality and framing function of the three sculpted façades of Santiago de Compostela in his “Framing Santiago.” He questions why sources such as Saint-Sernin and Saint-Foy, Conques, were used, what concerns might lie behind the individual iconographic programs of the three façades, and the ways in which the three may have been intended to work together as a frame for the tomb of St. James. The paper includes a hypothetical reconstruction of the south transept façade. In “‘Maiestas Domini’ Portals of the Twelfth Century,” Éliane Vergnolle traces the development of the Maiestas Domini motif from the early eleventh through to the second quarter of the twelfth century. She notes its popularity on pre-Romanesque liturgical objects such as shrines and book covers, and suggests that its transference to church portals was due at least in part to the multivalent associations of portal space, particularly with regard to liturgical processions. The volume closes appropriately enough with Mary Shepard’s “Memory and ‘Belles Verrières,’” a study of the three great stained-glass windows depicting the Virgin and Child in Majesty at Vendôme, Chartres, and Angers. Her paper blurs the divisions between the Romanesque and Gothic, understanding the architectural context in which the three windows are set as a matrix of memory, and the windows themselves as part of an architectural lineage in which the one era was deliberately referencing the other.

In sum, there is a wealth of scholarship contained in this volume, as well as some provocative suggestions for new lines of research. It is a fitting tribute to the career of Walter Cahn.