navigating the world of meaning-christina normore

8/9/2019 Navigating the World of Meaning-CHRISTINA NORMORE

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Navigating the World of MeaningAuthor(s): Christina Normore

Source: Gesta, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2012), pp. 19-34Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of MedievalArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669945 .

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19GESTA 51/1 © The International Center of Medieval Art 2012

Navigating the World of Meaning*

CHRISTINA NORMORE

Northwestern University

Abstract

In contrast to established interpretative models such as Erwin Panofsky’s iconological method and theories of spo-lia , Friedrich Ohly proposed a medieval sign theory in whichthe physical qualities of an object gain and can shift meaningthrough association with other objects: for example, red cansignify martyrdom because it is the color of blood. Seeminglycommonsensical, this model nevertheless poses serious chal-lenges for modern readings of crafted medieval materials assigns. Using the Nef of St. Ursula as a case study, this paper

examines an extreme but by no means unique instance of thedifficulties arising from the multiple and contradictory senses ofwhat Ohly termed the “world of meanings” in every res (thing). Initially conceived as a table vessel, the Nef of St. Ursula was first given by the city of Tours to Anne of Brittany in 1500.Five years later, Anne ordered it to be remade into a reliquarydepicting St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins. Afterdecades as a courtly devotional object, the reliquary was givento Reims Cathedral, where it primarily served as a sign of royal favor. The nef thus moved from a predominantly secular to asacred context. However, this change in location did not causethe shift in function from nef to reliquary, which was promptedinstead by its physical properties and enacted through the ex-change of items within the sculpted hull. The Nef of St. Ursula and Ohly thus reveal the interpenetration of ever-malleablecontents and contexts in the making of meaning.

How do things signify? Like many seemingly simple ques-tions, this one concerning the relationship between objects andmeaning is at once basic and intractable. It lies at the heart of arthistory but, despite the theoretical arguments of the past thirtyyears, is often answered obliquely through scholarly practicerather than by direct statements. As medievalists increasinglyturn to the issue of matter and its meanings, it is worthwhile toconsider whether the assumptions and methods being brought tothis underexplored aspect of medieval visual culture are indeeduseful and historically informed. In this moment of method-

ological reflection, it may be informative to look to alterna-tive interpretative models. Friedrich Ohly’s pioneering workon the mechanisms by which medieval res (things) signified isparticularly enlightening in this regard for art historians inter-ested in material’s meanings.1 While Ohly admittedly sidelinesmany issues that are justifiably important to art history today,his conceptualization of the connections between things, theirproperties, and meaning nevertheless can point to new ways forart historians to address old questions.

I will first consider the profound differences between themultivalent res that Ohly identifies within medieval concep-tual modes and the modern celebration of things as self-suffi-cient agents. I then juxtapose Ohly’s interpretative model withErwin Panofsky’s still widely influential iconological method.2 This comparison reveals the value of Ohly’s approach as acorrective to more traditional iconography in two respects: itreconstructs a medieval framework for discussing both howthe formal and material properties of an object are inextricably

linked, and how single objects may contain multiple meanings,which may become active or latent depending on changes in theobject’s location over time. To illustrate the possibilities suchan approach might have in allowing us to move beyond theconfines of singular meanings on the one hand and the devalu-ation of the object’s own role in dictating the terms of its reuseon the other, I turn next to the curious case of the Nef of St.Ursula (Fig. 1). The Nef of St. Ursula first entered the historicalrecord as a serving dish offered by the city of Tours to Anne ofBrittany. At the royal court it was transformed at Anne’s orderinto a reliquary honoring St. Ursula and the Eleven ThousandVirgins and then repeatedly updated to register the ownershipof several generations of French kings and queens. In the late

sixteenth century its significance was transformed once morewhen it was offered as a gift to the cathedral of Reims in con- junction with the coronation of Henri III. The well-documentedreimagining of this object over its first century of existenceallows an unusual degree of insight into the processes of refash-ioning and reuse that were so typical of medieval artistic cul-ture. The case of the Nef of St. Ursula, with its multiplicity ofpatrons, forms, and locations, further makes evident the inad-equacies of current scholarly modes that strongly differentiatecontext and content as producers of meaning. Aided by Ohly’scharting of medieval res as the bearers of worlds of meaning,we can perhaps begin to look at objects such as the Nef of St.Ursula anew and to retrace the flexible webs of significance inwhich they were such vital participants.

Modern and Medieval Matter

Ohly’s recognition of the culturally contingent nature ofthe definition of things is central to his reconceptualization ofmedieval signification. In his 1958 essay “Vom geistigen Sinndes Wortes im Mittelalter,”3 Ohly quotes a twelfth-centurypoem about a stone to illustrate how things mean:

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Christ and the virtue of the angel and the bride ofChrist,

A just man, justice, the carnal sense, and wickedpractice,

A grievous sin, an evil spirit, a false Jew,A true gentile, a stone is said to be [dicitur lapis].4

Using only one verb, the anonymous poet builds an edifice ofnouns and adjectives. These begin with Christ and end withthe stone. Despite its relative brevity, the listing of things herecan seem exhaustively unending.5 This sense of infinity is com-pounded by the reconciliation of opposites as false and true,

justice and wickedness meet. Despite its many nominativeforms, the poem has no obvious actors: the only verb is in thepassive voice, a seemingly fragile force with which to marshalthe weight of all that has come before into a single, final stone.While the stone is the ultimate statement of many disparateideas, each must be activated through speech, “said to be,” inorder to be comprehensible. Ohly’s medieval stone is a multi-

valent statement to be read, not a speaker on its own account.Compare this with “Pebble,” a poem also exploring themeanings of rock by the twentieth-century poet Zbigniew Her-bert, that figures prominently in the modern literary theoristJohn Frow’s treatment of things:

The pebbleis a perfect creature

equal to itself mindful of its limits

filled exactlywith a pebbly meaning

with a scent which does not remind one of anythingdoes not frighten anything away does not arousedesire . . .6

Herbert evokes a material world that exists beyond humaninterests, in which things are precisely those objects that canbe completely self-sufficient. In an address on the role of poetryin the modern world, Herbert once expressed his preference forpoetry in which the sign of the word draws attention not to itselfbut to the object it signifies.7 In keeping with this objective, theopening of Herbert’s “Pebble” returns insistently to the pebbleitself, refusing to be led away by its sensible qualities to any-thing remembered, feared, or desired. A pebble is a pebble, a

thing whose qualities run no risk of leading away from its ownparticular “pebbly meaning.”Broadly speaking, both poems are concerned with what

Frow would call things and Ohly would term res: physical enti-ties that fluctuate in their meaning between determinacy andindeterminacy.8 Herbert’s poem begins with the pebble andonly reluctantly branches outward; the twelfth-century poeminstead begins emphatically with Christ and only concludeswith the stone (lapis). It is not surprising, then, that Ohly reads

the lapis poem and other similar texts as evidence for a world-view in which res descend from God, are, in fact, God’s way ofcommunicating with humans.9 In contrast, Frow at first sees thedream of modern matter’s self-sufficiency in Herbert’s pebble,a thing defined by its capacity to be “equal to itself,” the sheerobjecthood of its material presence.10 Yet as Frow develops histheme, he must increasingly qualify his initial theory. In the endhe is forced to conclude, “Thingness and kinds of thingness arenot inherent in things; they are the effects of recognition anduses performed within frames of understanding. . . . This is thereal strangeness: that persons and things are kin; the world is

many, not double.”11

The wonder with which Frow presents his conclusion sug-gests just how counterintuitive it is today to take seriously amodel of meaning that acknowledges contingency and multi-plicity. Yet more than fifty years ago, Ohly was already not onlysketching out a similar concept of signification in medieval lit-erature but also pressing further to understand which particularhermeneutic modes were favored and how the physical quali-ties of things were bound into interpretative chains in earlier

FIGURE 1. Nef of St. Ursula , with additions, gold, s ilver, carnelian, enamel, L. 28 cm, Tours, ca. 1500, Reims, Palais du Tau (photo: © Pascal Lemaître/

Centre des monuments nationaux).




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epistemes. Unlike limited human words, he notes, God’s res were considered intrinsically polyvalent.12 Where Herbert cel-ebrates the pebble’s lack of non-pebble associations, its abilitynot to refer outward to other things or ideas, Ohly explores theways in which res do possess qualities that evoke memories,desires, fears, and so much more. Ohly’s res can and should be

verbalized by as many words as their physical properties mayevoke: a stone’s hardness, for instance, can stand equally forobdurate refusal and noble commitment.13 No surprise, then,that in the lapis poem, stone is Christ and the carnal sense,angelic virtue and terrible sin. It is, in short, a typical res for theHigh and Late Middle Ages, a period in which Ohly believeseach thing has “a universe of signification, which stretches fromGod to the devil.”14

Ohly vs. Panofsky

Having established this new vision of medieval things inthe late 1950s, Ohly continued to investigate its implications

not only in the literary but also in the visual arts. One part ofthis work was to expand and clarify problems raised by hisown early formulation. In “Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes imMittelalter,” Ohly noted that while a res had multiple and con-tradictory meanings, not all of these were emphasized equallyat any given moment:

The thing . . . has a universe of signification, whichstretches from God to the devil and which is potentiallypresent in everything which is designated by a word. Itrealizes itself at a given moment only in a direction thatis determined by the context and the property adducedto the thing. Thus in the concrete textual case the lion

cannot signify “God or the devil” but only one. . . . Aninterpretation of meaning from the context is also neces-sary in the case of the signification of things, so that wecan find the signification which is correct, in the givencase, from all the possible ones.15

This is rather vague advice: if all things in the world each havemultiple meanings, how can any of them be fixed long enoughto provide the context by which we interpret the others?16 Howcan we know which properties are the ones to be emphasized?Moreover, having so eloquently defended multiplicity, is Ohlynow attempting to reimpose a false stability?

Ohly’s appeal to the use of context, including written

texts, as a check on the interpretation of formal qualities is, ofcourse, familiar to art historians particularly from the work ofErwin Panofsky. Yet, in later essays, where Ohly more fullyengaged the mechanisms by which medieval authors foundmeaning in things, he delineated a medieval mode of interpre-tation that differs sharply from the iconological method bothin terms of how it defines the object of study and in the respectit accords alternative interpretations of significance as objectsshift contexts. The different models that emerged from these

two medievalists’ studies of texts and images are aptly summa-rized in two of their most-cited essays. In one of these, Panof-sky encapsulated the iconological process into three parallel butdistinct levels in the first half of the chapter best known underthe title “Iconography and Iconology.” In the other, the 1966“Probleme der mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung und das

Taubenbild des Hugo de Folieto,” Ohly explained how physicalproperties communicate meaning through an extensive exami-nation of a thirteenth-century painter’s diagram of the qualitiesof a dove accompanying the twelfth-century Benedictine Hughof Folieto’s De avibus (Fig. 2).17

Despite its subtitle, Panofsky’s “Iconography and Iconol-ogy: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art” pairshis famous theory of iconological analysis with a comparisonof the role of classical motifs and meanings in the Middle Agesas well as the Renaissance.18 Indeed, the separation of form andmeaning that is central to Panofsky’s method is epitomizedin his account by the medieval rather than the early modernmentality, since he believed the Middle Ages divorced classi-

cal style and motif from classical subject matter owing to itslingering fear of idolatry.19

Panofsky begins his essay with a loaded proposition thathas since become a widely accepted assumption of art histor-ical research: “Iconography is that branch of the history ofart which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaningof works of art, as opposed to their form. Let us, then, try todefine the distinction between subject matter or meaning on theone hand, and form on the other.”20 To model this separation,Panofsky provides the famous example of meeting a friend onthe street who doffs his hat in salutation. A critical move takesplace at the very beginning of this manufactured anecdote.Panofsky proposes that when he encounters this acquaintance,

what he sees

from a formal point of view is nothing but the changeof certain details within a configuration forming part ofthe general pattern of color, lines and volumes whichconstitute my world of vision. When I identify, as I auto-matically do, this configuration as an object (gentleman). . . I have already overstepped the limits of purely formalperception and entered a first sphere of meaning. 21

This purportedly commonplace encounter thus brings thereader, almost against her will, into Panofsky’s analytical pro-cess as a series of colors and forms instinctively coheres into a

thing (Panofsky’s acquaintance) distinct from its background.With all other visual stimuli effortlessly blocked out, the humanobject in the scholar’s sight becomes the sole focus of atten-tion and interpretation. That Panofsky wishes his direction ofattention toward a figural, narrative object to be accepted as aninevitable and neutral act is clear from his naming of its variouscomponents: such objects are “ primary or natural subject mat-ter,”22 and the resulting interpretation provides an “elementary,”“factual,” or “natural meaning.”23




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The following two levels of Panofsky’s analysis simi-larly highlight the artwork against the backdrop of a surround-ing context, usually accessible through written text. At thesecond, iconographic level, the object of study is a particu-lar instance of more general traditions. Thus, identifying themythic acquaintance’s raised hat as a greeting requires culturalknowledge reaching back directly to the Middle Ages: it isa “residue of medieval chivalry.”24 In the third, iconological,level, the artwork is a unique statement that both encapsulatesand transcends its cultural matrix. The acquaintance may be“a man of the twentieth century,” but he is also “distinguished

by an individual manner of viewing things and reacting to theworld.”25 Although based in the visual arts, Panofsky’s proj-ect nevertheless explicitly reaches out toward the world of theword as well. Just as the naming of the first level signaled itssupposed naturalness, these two stages are tellingly titled tosuggest the relationship between the written and visual sign.Panofsky draws attention to the link between writing and theending -graphy in iconography, as well as the root logos thatlies behind his iconology.

Ohly’s later work shares this sense of the sympathybetween word and image, yet to a large extent the medievaltheory of signs he reconstructs is diametrically opposed to Pan-ofsky’s iconological method. Beginning with a miniature suchas the thirteenth-century diagram of a dove in Hugh of Folieto’s De avibus (Fig. 2), the viewer might immediately identify thecombination of lines and colors in the central figure as a dove(at the very least, a bird). Yet to make meaning from this dove,the accompanying text reverses Panofsky’s path. Panofsky sawthe emergence of meaning in the moment when a series of col-ors, lines, and so forth resolved into a thing, and more refined

meaning as emerging when this thing was interpreted throughtexts. In contrast, Ohly shows that Hugh of Folieto steadily dis-sects both the dove and the biblical texts that refer to it in orderto understand the allegorical message it holds.

Placed before a long discussion of the qualities and signi-fication of the dove, the thirteenth-century miniature serves atonce as a guide and a summary to what follows. 26 In keepingwith a long tradition of memory training that linked spatialarrangement on the page with the organization of information,

FIGURE 2. Hugh of Folieto, De avibus , Paris, BnF, MS lat. 2495, fols. 1v–2, Dove and Hawk (photo: BnF).

Figure 2 also appears in the color plates between pp. 34 and 35 of this issue.




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the delicate web of meanings that Hugh outlines is visuallyevoked in the miniature by the array of circles and encirclingtexts in which the representation of the dove nests or is caught.The visual sign of the written word here is deployed as sparselyand tantalizingly as the careful placement of highly chargedcolor: strangely, while both words and miniature reference a

similar color palette, the image frequently shifts the named col-ors to different locations. The tituli enigmatically speak to themeaning of colors in short phrases. A vertical inscription at thebottom center reads, “red of the feet: blood of the martyrs,” 27 although the red actually appears in the background behind thedove rather than the dove’s foot. A similar inscription at the topdeclares that the dove’s eye shows the maturity of its percep-tion, later explained in the body of the text, where the saffroncolor of doves’ eyes is linked to ripe fruit: in the diagram, theyellow eyes are not painted on the dove proper but displacedinto disembodied circles that bracket the inscription.28 Text andimage do, however, align in certain cases. The tail feathers ofthe dove are painted gold because, the circular inscription at

top right declares, there will be an eternal reward at the end oflife.29 Neither entirely adhering to nor contradicting the inscrip-tions, the image renders the precise referent of the brief burstsof verbal parallelism ambiguous; the red feet, saffron eye, andgolden feathers might be those of real doves in the world or offlat, schematic doves traced by a miniaturist’s hand. Uncon-cerned with the distinction between the real and the pictured,Ohly and Hugh instead direct the reader to a different set ofdualisms in the connection between feet and martyrs, eyes andfruit, tail feathers and the End. Each of the dove’s parts signi-fies, just as the dove as a whole does, by analogy.

In an extended discussion of the meaning of colors inHugh’s work, Ohly points to the fact that colors had no intrin-

sic meaning for Hugh and many of his contemporaries. Instead,a color gained meaning by being a connecting point betweentwo res that shared it: “The significations of colors emerge byway of the things that have color as a property. . . . If a thing’sworld of signification develops from the aggregate of its proper-ties, that of the property ‘color’ develops from the aggregate ofthings to which it may refer.”30 To put this more concretely, thefeet of the dove may signify the martyrs’ blood because they arered, but red only has that possible meaning because it is also thecolor of blood. Likewise, saffron can indicate maturity becauseripened fruit can be saffron colored. This understanding of theway in which qualities convey meaning is extended to proper-ties other than color: the future is signified by the dove’s tail,

because whereas the one comes at “the end of a man’s presentlife,” the other appears at the back end of the bird.31 No prop-erty is static, each depends in turn on the presumed meaningof other res that share that property, which in turn are infinitelyinterpretable. The reader, like the dove, is caught in a constantlyshifting labyrinth of meaning.

The messy contingency of such an interpretative methodstands in stark contrast to the attempted regularity of Panof-sky’s iconology. At each level of his careful setting of things

as distinct from their context, Panofsky insisted on havinga control mechanism that would help secure the correctnessof interpretation. Hugh (and Ohly reading Hugh) is basicallyunconcerned about establishing such tight boundaries arounda correct meaning. While Hugh often refers to the Bible as anauthoritative source, he is equally willing to introduce elements

of the dove as important signs simply on the grounds that acertain property exists in real birds. In a particularly beautifulpassage, he examines the gray color of the dove. Although hecan quote no previous discussion of this feature of doves, Hughclearly feels that it must have a meaning. He establishes whatthis meaning might be through an elaborate analogy with theequally gray sea:

The color of the rest of the [dove’s] body resembles thecolor of the turbulent sea. Raging with the motion ofthe waves, the sea surges; surging with the motion ofthe senses, the flesh rages. . . . While the sea is disturbedby such great storms, soil is mingled with waves by the

crashing of breakers, and thus by the concussion of seaand land the sea receives its mixed color. Likewise, whilethe flesh suggests and the soul does not agree, it is asthough a certain tone in the body is made from black andwhite, which tone, made from various elements, is calledindecisive. Therefore, the sea color on the breast of thedove denotes distress in the human mind.32

The ability of the dove to signify the psychological effects ofthe struggle between flesh and spirit depends on the metaphoricrelationship that can be drawn between qualities of the sea andthe human mind. The actual and even the common literarybehavior of doves for the moment is entirely ignored. Rare is

the dove that surges and crashes on the shores, but the sharedphysical quality of gray is enough to justify introducing theseelements into Hugh’s analysis of what a dove signifies.

Hugh of Folieto’s analytical methods and those used byOhly to reconstruct Hugh’s argument can both be faulted forrelying almost entirely on close formal reading as the source forinterpretation. Ohly notes some basic details of Hugh’s back-ground. He also acknowledges that the prologue of De avibus indicates that both the text and images were designed for theedification of Hugh’s fellow monk Rayner. Ohly even cites apassage from the prologue in which Hugh addresses Rayner:

See how the hawk and dove sit on the same perch. I am

from the clergy and you from the military. We come toconversion so that we may sit within the life of the Rule,as though on a perch; and so that you who were accus-tomed to seizing domestic fowl, now with the hand ofgood deeds may bring to conversion the wild ones, thatis, laymen.33

The importance of this meeting of dovelike clergyman andhawkish soldier, both in the convent and on the manuscript




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page, is reinforced by the miniature above this text (Fig. 2), inwhich two gray birds face each other on a ground line that pro-claims, “This is the perch of the monastic life.”34 The remark-ably similar dove and hawk are differentiated primarily bytextual labels: clericus and miles above; “the contemplativelife / the wall of holy thoughts” and “the wall of good works /

the active life” to the sides.35Such a clear indication of social roles seems to cry out

for some attention to social structure, reception theory, andidentity formation in reading the figure of the dove, particu-larly since the clericus and miles birds resemble the dove inthe larger diagram, a comparison facilitated by the fact that allthree appear in the same opening. Writing in the twelfth cen-tury, Hugh demonstrates some awareness of the connectionbetween prologue and text, several times repeating imagesfrom the former in the latter.36 Ohly, however, shows little ifany interest in such issues. Indeed, he appears not to draw theconnection between Hugh as dove and the dove as a sign ofhuman nature at all, preferring to treat each image and discus-

sion of the figure in isolation.So marked is Ohly’s isolation of individual miniaturesthat he regularly obscures the integrity of manuscript cycles.Although he extols the virtues of the dove miniature in Biblio-thèque nationale de France, MS lat. 2495 at length, he payslittle attention to the prologue image that is found in the sameopening. He not only separates the two pages and places theminiature of the clericus and miles birds second in a list of threeexamples of illustrations in the prologue, but he also neglectsto mention in either his text or captions that the two imagescome from the same manuscript.37 This lack of concern for theintegrity of individual manuscripts is endemic. Ohly acknowl-edges and even partially catalogues the multiple editions of De

avibus’s text and illumination cycle. His annotations recog-nize that these manuscripts differ in ways both small and large.However, Ohly largely attributes such differences to devia-tions from the presumed original image cycle: the richer andmore nuanced the miniature, the closer it is assumed to be tothis Ur-manuscript. This singular concentration on individualimages underscores the formalist tendency of Ohly’s methodas a whole and his curious willingness to disregard historicalcontext in favor of literary analysis, even when constructinglarger cultural patterns.

These are very real problems in Ohly’s approach, but theyshould not be allowed to prevent medievalists from taking seri-ously the larger challenge that Hugh’s method and Ohly’s more

general conclusions pose for current art historical approachesin which Panofskian iconology is wedded to social art historyin the attempt to reconstruct medieval modes of perceivingand making. Despite its flaws, Ohly’s theory offers excitingpossibilities for considering how parts may relate to wholes;rethinking the division between materials and form; and mod-eling how meanings may lie latent within objects, ready to beactivated when new connections are made between them andother things.

The Nef of St. Ursula

The need for such a reevaluation of common art historicalcategories like material and form, text and context, productionand reception is readily apparent when one is confronted bya complex object such as the Nef of St. Ursula. Housed since

the late sixteenth century at Reims Cathedral, the Nef of St.Ursula is primarily discussed and exhibited in relation to Anneof Brittany, independent duchess of Brittany and twice queenconsort of France. Despite its place in the recent France 1500 exhibition as “le seul objet d’orfèvrerie subsistant spécifique-ment exécuté pour Anne de Bretagne de son vivant,” the Nefof St. Ursula in fact led a varied career of reuse and adapta-tion, only the early stages of which can be directly linked toAnne.38 Within its first century, it migrated from the city to theroyal court to the cathedral, transformed from a table-servingvessel to a reliquary, and changed from a container of spices toa container of saints. Throughout its well-documented history,these shifts not only defy any simple separation between social

and political realms but also underscore the importance of thephysical matter and form of the object itself in proposing newuses and interpretations. Considered as a whole, the history ofshifting meanings that occurred as minerals became a nef anda nef became the vessel of St. Ursula reveals a compelling pat-tern of use and reuse that calls for the type of reimagining ofcategories Ohly’s work can provoke.

The art historical story of the Nef of St. Ursula may besaid to begin, after eons of geological formation, with a set ofmaterials in a workshop in Tours. In the worldview outlinedby Ohly, each of these substances—gold, silver, enamel, andcarnelian—was already a res in and of itself before the gold-smith began to change its form. To take only one example, the

prominent veined carnelian that would become the nef ’s hull isa hard stone, streaked red and white. It has been suggested thatthe corruption of the English name cornelian to carnelian isin part due to this unusual coloration, the similar sound of theLatin for flesh (carnis) recalling carnelian’s visual similarity toflayed flesh.39 Likely based on its carnal appearance, carnelianwas used to avert miscarriages and other female reproductivedisorders, to stop bleeding more generally, and to increase theflow of breast milk.40 It was also, however, a biblical stonementioned in the description of Aaron’s breastplate and so hadanother range of anagogical and historical readings.41 All thesequalities are present equally in the unworked stone.

At the end of the fifteenth century, a goldsmith fashioned

this large stone into a nef , or boat, complete with golden sailsand bulwark as well as a complement of sailors and soldiers.The artist at work here may have been the merchant and citizenof Tours Rémon Guinnot from whom the nef was eventuallypurchased.42 The maker’s mark of an inscribed R and the twocrowned towers of Tours register the nef ’s facture and sale.43 The nef ’s delicate workmanship, as well as its precious mate-rials, contributed to the eventual high price the city of Tourspaid for the object.




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Although the majority of the original figures of sailors andsoldiers have long since been removed, the nef ’s largely intactrigging, deck, and anchor suggest the balance between natu-ralism and courtly elegance that likely once characterized thewhole. The fine patterning of the gilded deck rails is arrangedin two registers with a diapered ground of thin rectangles belowand fragile arcades above, while the carefully braided golden

ropes stow a furled enamel sail that appears to bulge and droopin reference to real cloth. As in many other fifteenth-centuryluxury objects, the presence of precious materials is highlightedby their prominent placement and light-catching polish, yet thereference to the actual appearance of a seagoing vessel is clear.This balance of attention between the form of the ship and theminerals used to create it underscore Ohly’s insight that res canbe equally identified in what are usually termed materials andin the objects they are made to represent.

A Panofskyian reading of the nef is possible for the firsttime at this stage, since a man-made form with a traceablehistory is in place. For Panofsky, the unworked stone wouldlikely belong to a precognitive stage of colors and outlines notyet molded into a recognizable form; in contrast, the nef , as abearer of form, is a bearer of human meaning. Although Pan-

ofsky never makes the connection directly, in many respectsthe process of manufacture reenacts as well as conditions thesudden jumping forward of the object of interpretation fromthe background of the larger world. The boat shape of the nef dictates its interpretation at the primary level of iconologicalanalysis, since the recognition of boats belongs to (supposedly)common experience. Panofsky would undoubtedly warn, how-ever, against assuming that this boat form can be read either asa real ship or even as an attempt simply to represent a real ship.The second or iconographic stage of iconology requires the arthistorian to examine the longer tradition of any form, whetherit is the startling vision of a head on a platter or the more plau-sible image of a peach in a woman’s hand.44

In the case of the nef , such contextualization leads not tothe sea but to the table. Forming precious stones and metals intoships was a common feature in the design of one of the mosttypical of all elite medieval serving vessel types, the so-callednef . Often erroneously identified in English as a saltcellar, thenef was most often but not exclusively made in the form of aboat and could be either purely decorative or a general-purposecontainer of salt, spices, or other goods used at table. The formmight have been suggested by the recovery of salt from the seaor the transportation of cargo by merchants, but the origins ofthis type of container remain obscure. It seems already to bewell established by the early thirteenth century, although fewexamples survive.45

A lack of sufficient comparative material for what seemsto have been a quite varied type makes any generalizationsabout nefs difficult, but a rare early extant example, now in theCloisters, New York, suggests both the high degree of abstrac-tion possible in the form and the importance of showcasingprecious materials (Fig. 3). In contrast to the detailed ropesand railing of the Nef of St. Ursula, the thirteenth-century Pari-sian artist of the Cloisters example reduced the ship to a singlelong crystal hull with a gold cover whose edges are studdedwith precious stones and pearls. The conversion of the openinghook into a curved serpent recalls the use of so-called serpent’steeth in elite dining as a means of testing for poison (the teethwere believed to sweat in reaction to toxic substances). Records

from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Valois courts sug-gest contents ranging from napkins, plates, and silverware tospices and serpent’s tongues. Smaller nefs, such as those in theCloisters and the Nef of St. Ursula, were more likely to holdspices or salt.46

For Panofsky, this check of iconographic tradition wouldhave prevented a misreading. The Nef of St. Ursula is a nef rather than a ship, not a representation of a seafaring vesselbut luxury tableware in its own right. Its form simply indicates

FIGURE 3. Saltcellar, gold, rock crystal, emeralds, pearls, spinel or balasrubies, H. 14 cm, Diam. of foot, 7.9 cm, Paris, mid-13th cent., The Cloisters

Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1983.434 (photo: ©

The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY).




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that it is in effect a very nice serving platter. Such nefs werenot uncommon as gifts of goodwill from cities to sovereigns:Charles V, for instance, received three nefs from Paris followinghis coronation entry; Paris also gave Anne of Brittany a gold nef in 1504.47 This tradition explains why the town council of Toursconsidered the Nef of St. Ursula to be an appropriate gift when

Anne of Brittany, queen of France, made a joyeuse entrée inNovember 1500. Anne had previously participated in an entryinto Tours in 1491 following her marriage to Charles VIII, atwhich she also received a nef .48 When Charles VIII died froman accident in Amboise in 1498, the heirless Anne was legallyobliged to marry his successor, Louis XII, which she did in1499. Although this was her second joyeuse entrée into Tours,the city nevertheless made a concerted effort to please its queenby devising several new performances and stressing her dearlyheld Breton sovereignty in the urban decoration. 49 Perhaps thecarnelian was considered appropriate for a frequently pregnantqueen whose children had all died before the age of five; per-haps the striking stone was attractive for its visual splendor.

There is in any event no strong reference either to the sea orto ships in the five performances staged by the city during theentry, suggesting that a maritime connotation did not figure inthe city council’s choice of gift.50

Panofsky’s story would presumably end here. The vexedproblem of whether and how Anne of Brittany might have usedthe nef at her table lies outside the sphere of the iconologicalmethod. Panofsky’s focus on the moments of initial creationand reception often takes the form of a poetics of interpreta-tion as reconstitution and rescue, and generally leads to fix-ing of the correct meaning of the work at those origin points.This does not mean that motifs are not acknowledged to recurand change in later historical moments (that this is possible

is evident from Panofsky’s discussion of Judith holding thehead of Holofernes on a platter, a shift argued to arise fromthe migration of the devotional image of John the Baptist).51 Rather, Panofsky tended either to ignore or to view the materi-als and biography of particular objects as accretions that mustbe scraped away to see an artwork’s true meaning.

Panofsky might have seen the series of adaptations thatthe Nef of St. Ursula underwent in the following century as itmoved from court to cathedral and from saltcellar to reliquaryas distortions to its original significance. Certainly these shiftsadded new inflections to the nef ’s meaning, appearance, andmaterials. Yet there is no reason to see these new meaningsas somehow less valid than the old. As the later history of the

Nef of St. Ursula illustrates, continuity and change are highlyrelative categories. Rather than being marked by moments ofrupture, the shifting form and function of the Nef of St. Ursula recall Ohly’s claim that the particular meaning of the multi-valent res at any given moment is determined both by its ownqualities and their interaction with a shifting web of other res.

Although the boat shape of the Nef of St. Ursula wasalmost certainly intended by its first purchasers to signal itsrole as tableware, its future forms can be understood only

if the latent meaning of its shape as a link to real boats isacknowledged to remain despite those intentions. Even ifrarely activated, the shape of the ship always remains as a qual-ity possibly linking the nef to other ships. This connection isplayfully suggested in an illumination from the Grandes chro-niques de France created for Charles V of France. Charles V’s

manuscript contains an unusually extended account of thestate visit of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV.52 One ofthe miniatures depicts Charles V and Charles IV at a grandbanquet during which the taking of Jerusalem in the FirstCrusade was reenacted as a dinner entertainment (Fig. 4). Theminiaturist wittily drew attention to the dual meaning of nef asboth boat and container by creating a visual parallel betweenthe symmetrical flattened crescents with two decorated endsof the nefs on the high table and the similarly shaped largerboat that, as a stage prop representing a troop transport, trans-gresses the miniature’s left border. The shape of the nef givento Anne of Brittany by the city of Tours seems equally tohave suggested an alternative use for the object. The Nef of

St. Ursula reappears in the archival record in 1505, when theroyal goldsmith Henry Duzen completed a commission fromAnne to refashion it into an object honoring the legend of oneof her favorite saints, Ursula: a surviving receipt refers to “asmall boat of gold . . . given by the same lady in order to havethe Eleven Thousand Virgins put on.”53

The legend of St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virginshas several variants, but the key points are simply told.54 Ursulawas a princess of Britain or Brittany, who agreed to marry apagan king if he would convert to Christianity. Either to delayher wedding or because of a burning desire to go on pilgrim-age, she set sail with eleven thousand female virgins and somemale companions. They were blown off course and massacred

in Cologne by pagans who, the Golden Legend rather unneces-sarily adds, hated Christians. Because of her possible birth inBrittany, Ursula was an important symbol for Anne of Brittanyas she strove to maintain the independence of the duchy ofBrittany, despite the efforts of both her royal husbands to addit permanently to the French domain.55

The connection between Anne of Brittany and Ursula isparticularly evident in the Grandes heures de Anne de Bretagne,which Anne commissioned from Jean Bourdichon in the sameyear that her nef was refashioned into a reliquary. In the fron-tispiece miniature, Ursula appears alongside St. Anne and St.Margaret as protective companions and patrons of the kneelingAnne of Brittany at prayer (Fig. 5).56 Ursula is the only saint

who does not gesture toward Anne with her hand, yet her posi-tion directly behind and gazing tenderly down at the queensuggests the close relationship of guardian saint and pious dev-otee. Their most obvious connection is the golden line of theshaft delicately held in Ursula’s hand that disappears behind theyellow-gold of Anne of Brittany’s shoulder. At the top of thisstaff is a flag with the plain ermine-covered ground that con-stitutes the distinctive arms of the duchy of Brittany, stressingthe role of Breton heritage in uniting the two queens. Ursula




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daughter Claude’s coat of arms to the platform at the top of themast.61 The link continued to be renewed in the following years:first by the inclusion of the intertwined initials of Claude’s sonHenri II and Catherine de Médicis that replaced Claude’s coatof arms on the crow’s nest, and then by the addition of theenameled arms of Poland and France belonging to their sonHenri III on the base. This last royal addition must have takenplace between the time of Henri III’s election as king of Polandin 1573 and his gift of the Nef of St. Ursula to Reims on the

occasion of his consecration in 1574. Across four generations,then, rulers of France continued to insist on the royal pedi-gree of the transformed nef . In the process, an object that onceshowed the special devotion of a Breton duchess to a Bretonsaint came to serve as a transmitter of French royal lineage. 62

The final act in the history of the Nef of St. Ursula ismarked by its preservation as a historical document, yet itsmultiple previous meanings remain. In 1574, when Henri IIIoffered it as a gift on the occasion of his coronation, the Nef

of St. Ursula moved from the royal treasury to the cathedralof Reims. Just as the nef had originally been given by the cityof Tours because such plate was a traditional gift following joyeuses entrées, this second donation was also likely basedon precedent. Henri II had given a casket-shaped reliquarycrowned by the scene of the resurrected Jesus rising from histomb to Reims at his coronation in 1547. 63 Like the Nef of St.Ursula, the Reliquary of the Resurrection was initially madein the late fifteenth century (it was, however, from the first

intended to hold relics). The selection of the Nef of St. Ursula asa suitable offering in 1574 was more dependent on its retrofittedrole as a reliquary than its original use as a nef .

However, the precious materials and boat shape that hadpreviously allowed for reuse were also important factors in thegift selection. Henri III’s donation is memorialized on the baseof the Nef of St. Ursula, which declares: “Henri III, King ofthe French and Poles, has presented this little ship to the VirginMother of God, so that France [res Gallica], long tossed about

FIGURE 5. Grandes heures d’Anne de Bretagne , Paris, BnF, MS lat . 9474, fol. 3, Anne of Brit tany praying, accompanied by St. Anne, St. Margaret, andSt. Ursula (photo: BnF).

FIGURE 6. Grandes heures d’Anne de Bretagne , Paris, BnF, MS lat. 9474, fol.199v, Martyrdom of the Eleven Thousand Virgins (photo: BnF).




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by waves of sedition, may with divine help finally return to thetranquil sea of the ancestors. Crowned in 1574.”64 The vessel ofSt. Ursula thus became the ship of state.65 It is as a “little ship”that the Nef of St. Ursula is suitable for memorializing rescuefrom the “waves of sedition”: as in Hugh of Folieto’s graydove, the metaphoric alignment of turbulent sea and spirit con-

nects the object with a larger field of signification. The memo-rializing function of the Nef of St. Ursula is also evident in thepatterns of conservation and restoration of the nef at Reims.The centuries-long preservation of the signs of royal owner-ship in the form of rulers’ monograms, coats of arms, and theinscription describing Henri III’s gift historicizes the Nef of St.Ursula’s earlier provenance in a manner quite distinct from theconstant updating performed by the French court. Although fivesaintly female figures were added in the seventeenth century(perhaps to replace losses) and the decking reworked in thenineteenth century, these physical changes reflect an interest inretaining the reference to the relics within through the mainte-nance of the nef ’s outer form.66 Likely chosen for its status as

a reliquary, the Nef of St. Ursula was treasured at Reims bothfor its sacred contents and as a sign of the cathedral’s role asthe site of consecration for centuries of French kings.

Particularly within its first century of existence, the Nefof St. Ursula’s biography presents a varied case study of thepotential for a single res to hold a world of meanings. Like St.Ursula herself, the Nef of St. Ursula migrated from secular tosacred as it moved from tableware to reliquary. This radicalchange in status did not result from an equally marked changein location: the Nef of St. Ursula remained a royal possessionfor the next seventy years. As with many medieval treasures,there is no clear distinction here between devotion and poli-tics. Anne of Brittany (and her descendants) could both pray

to Ursula and derive political legitimacy from her. Even whenthe vessel finally left the court for the more obviously sanctifiedspace of the cathedral of Reims, it did so as part of a typicalmixture of spiritual and political needs: Henri III may have seenin its virginal relics the possibility of a proper gift to bestow onthe Virgin of Notre-Dame de Reims, but the inscription makesclear that the political metaphor of the ship of state was also asignificant factor in his deliberations.

Just as the modern expectations surrounding secular andsacred are severely compromised by the Nef of St. Ursula’shistory of reuse, current scholarly constructions of contextare complicated by the importance of its material identity inmotivating the successive changes in its meaning. While the

basic shape and some of the precious materials of the Nef ofSt. Ursula were established in its earliest crafting, these weresubject to new readings as gold came to signify differently fromsilver gilt, and the shape of a ship changed meaning from atableware form, to a martyr’s attribute, to the representation ofFrance. These changes were far from arbitrary. Each new func-tion was equally rooted in the physical properties of the objectitself, so that it seems in this sense to have partially written itsown history. At the same time, the modifications to the vessel’s

contents played a fundamental part in allowing its transforma-tion from luxury plate to blessed container. While the documen-tary and physical evidence makes the early history of the Nef ofSt. Ursula relatively accessible, the larger theoretical problemsposed to models of meaning, reuse, and indeed the delineationof the object itself by its shifting significations and forms (a

pattern that refuses to sit easily within normative art historicalcategories) remain to be explored.

Context, Contents and Constructs

The shifting roles of the Nef of St. Ursula might at firstseem to be the result of changing contexts or practical concernsthat lie far from Ohly’s complex webs of flexible, materiallybased signification. Yet they equally fail to adhere to the con-cept of spolia that undergirds most current art historical discus-sion of intentionality in medieval repurposing. Indeed, the moststartling moment in the Nef of St. Ursula’s history, when the nef became reconceived as a reliquary, appears at first glance to be

a paradigmatic case of what Anthony Cutler has termed userather than reuse.67 Found even in Cutler’s thoughtful criticalreappraisal of the category spolia, the current Anglo-Americanconcentration on ideological rather than formal considerationsin determining evidence of conscious reuse is profoundly mis-leading in a case such as the Nef of St. Ursula . In its compara-tive ambiguity, Ohly’s more fluid model of meaning making,as well as his broader definition of the forms and materialsthat can come to signify within a single object, offers a farmore plausible conceptual framework for understanding therich complexity of object signification in the later Middle Ages.

Anglo-American art historians have traditionally equatedreuse, or at least reuse worthy of serious investigation, primarily

with overtly ideological programs. Early Christian art, the Caro-lingian and Ottonian renovatio imperii Romani, and the variousCrusade and reconquista settings have thus fueled the vast major-ity of English-language studies.68 Spolia, the most commonlyused term for intentionally reused materials, reflects this bias,deriving as it does from the Latin spolium, the flayed skin of ananimal and thus, metaphorically, the captured arms of the enemy.When analyzing the modern scholarly use of the term spolia,Cutler is understandably concerned primarily with temperingthis tendency and thus largely equates reuse with historicismand use with pragmatic concerns. He argues that art historiansmust be more careful in distinguishing between “those instancesin which the ‘second user’ was aware of his or her posterior sta-

tus, and was affected by an object’s earlier owner or function orperceived meaning, and those in which such concerns were oflittle or no detectable importance.”69 The early reuse of the Nefof St. Ursula is rather hard to account for in these terms. Anneof Brittany presumably must be counted as both the first and thesecond owner, which makes little sense; the transformation fromtableware to reliquary has only an utterly pragmatic connectionto its previous function (containment). The early changes to theobject were not the result of a historicizing intent; such concerns




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figure instead in its later history and are marked by conservationrather than physical alteration.

However, to chalk up the myriad roles of the Nef of St.Ursula simply to a general medieval understanding of the“mutability of objects”70 would be to ignore the equally glaringfact that at each step its previous meanings and functions were

integral to setting the stage for its future adaptations. The physi-cal qualities of a ship silhouette, the vessel’s precious materialsand, most important, its capacity to serve as a container for yetmore precious materials are not signs of an imperial past orenemy culture, but they are very real and particular qualitiesof the nef offered by Tours to Anne of Brittany, qualities thatwere desirable for and intentionally retained in the Nef of St.Ursula. Ohly’s attention to the details of each res and respectfor the significance of physical properties in making meaningsmay usefully intervene here as a corrective to the tendency felteven among art historians to explain appreciation of the mate-rial in terms of generalities.

The absorption of Ohly’s insights into a new model of

reuse, however, requires certain accommodations to the com-monly employed categories of text and context. Ohly observedthat res always possess a wide range of meanings keyed totheir physical properties, both material and formal, but thatthe particular meaning of any given quality operative in asingle situation is dependent on how it is perceived to relateto other res. This acknowledgment of both the importance offormal elements and their ability to tie together the world ofmeanings requires a serious reconsideration of the distinctionbetween object and context employed in most discussions ofreuse. Spolia are largely constructed by scholars as old objectsinserted into new contexts. The Nef of St. Ursula refuses thismode of resetting in several ways: moving from city to court, it

remained equally a table nef ; moving from court to cathedral, itwas equally a reliquary. Moreover, the most surprising changein its history was the result less of context in the traditionalsense than of contents.

Neither simply the newly added female figures nor thepossible movement from a sideboard to a side altar changeda nef into the Nef of St. Ursula. The central alteration insteadinvolved the substitution of relics for spices within the object.Just as the enameled St. Ursula sculpture added to the vessel’sdeck was differentiated from its fellows by the unseen goldthat lay below its colored surface, so, too, the Nef of St. Ursula derived its status as a reliquary not from the sculptures on itsouter surface but from its new, saintly inhabitant(s).

The relics and edible contents that could be placed withinthe carnelian hull of the Nef of St. Ursula trouble not only theboundary between context and content but also the very natureof the object of study. Able to move in and out of the recessedspace, composed of fragile, perishable organic matter, theyare nevertheless integral parts of the object, the elements thatdefine its function and significance. Despite the rapidly increas-ing recognition of the importance of relics in medieval materialculture, these are substances that are far more difficult for art

history to absorb than the brightly glinting stones and gold thatform the rest of the nef .

Only recently and somewhat hesitantly have art historiansbegun to treat elements such as spices or relics as part of theirobject of study. The perishable nature of spices lies uneasilywithin the traditional conceptualization of art as a permanent

remnant of societies and agents, that battered but resilient repre-sentative from a lost past that Panofsky’s method so eloquentlyevokes as in need of scholarly aid in order to imaginativelyrestore its setting.71 Similarly, while touch and hearing havebegun to creep inexorably into a more embodied medieval arthistory,72 smell and taste,73 with a very few exceptions, remainlargely the preserve of contemporary art and its critics.74

A similar if not stronger unease surrounds the place ofrelics, particularly human remains, within objects presented asart. With regard to the objects they display, many art museumschoose to remove human remains or tell docents not to mentionthem.75 On the one hand, this removal may partially appeasepotential descendants and prevent ghoulish interest in visitors.

On the other hand, it arguably helps to maintain the distinctionbetween the art museum and the natural history museum bypresenting objects classified as art in a properly aestheticizedand secularized form. Yet relic contents are sometimes the onlything that makes it possible to identify a vessel as a reliquary,as numerous other examples of reused caskets make clear. The Nef of St. Ursula may be unusual in its recasting of a foodvessel into a holy vessel, but it is far from unique. Already inthe ninth century, a Late Antique Roman serving dish was refit-ted with a small inscription to make it a suitable receptacle forthe bones of St. Sebastian.76 The Pamplona Casket, often citedin discussions of spolia, received no physical changes at allother than the addition of relics within it: to this day it retains

its highly secular iconography of outdoor partying and hunt-ing as well as a dedicatory inscription praising ‘Abd al-Malik,son of the ‘Amirid regent Al-Mansur.77 Such instances reveala constant underlying truth about the nature of reliquaries asa broad category, namely, that they derive their meaning fromthe fact that they hold relics.78 These contents in turn take theirmeaning from their perceived connection to other things, oftenthough not always human. The link here is generally materialrather than visual, yet it suggests the dependence of meaningon an interconnected web of things. As Ohly shows in tracingthe pattern by which one res endows another with significationthrough a shared property, content in such a case is context;all components of the thing not only go into making its mean-

ing but also link it to other meaningful things. Just as relicsthemselves derive their sanctity from their relationship to aholy human, so too is the reliquary distinct from other contain-ers because of its relationship to the relic. The material of therelic mediates between such disparate things as saint and box,each with its attendant array of meanings, much as Hugh ofFolieto claimed the color gray not only links doves and wavesbut through the qualities of each conveys a broader messageconcerning human nature.




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The alterations in the contents of the Nef of St. Ursula are thus at once analogous to the additions and subtractionsof other, more visible sections of the sculpture—such as thefigures and coats of arms—and to the changes in the object’sphysical location that are more commonly acknowledgedto be significant by art historians. The ease with which the

nef became a reliquary and the continual ebb and flow of itsadditional other meanings underscore the blurred boundariesbetween secular and sacred so often acknowledged but rarelytruly admitted in scholarship on the period, which still tends tospeak of the borrowing of motifs or a reuse of objects as cross-ing a divide that largely seems to be a product of modern ratherthan medieval perception.

Considered in light of the signification of their proper-ties, the numerous overlaps between spices and relics may alsohave contributed to the ability of the nef to become the Nef ofSt. Ursula, just as its representation of a ship did. Spices andrelics are, of course, in many ways distinct from each other:spices lose their pungency over time, while relics are often said

to endure without change; spices generally come from plantsor the earth, while relics are almost always associated withspecific saints. Yet in a far larger variety of ways, the two cat-egories of res are remarkably similar and were closely linkedin medieval and early modern Europe. Each through their dif-ferent properties evoked the pleasant, the supernatural, and thecurative.79 Scent in particular was fundamental to linking thetwo substances: paradise smells sweet like spice, and so doesthe incorrupt body of the saint. Spices were frequently used inhealing, but so were relics. Not only might relics and spicesbe applied to the outer body, both could also, on occasion, beconsumed.80 This intersection of qualities not only may haveeased the refashioning of an object such as the Nef of St. Ursula,

but it also speaks to the larger interpenetration of things andmeanings more broadly within medieval culture.Such overlaps are made apparent when meaning is con-

ceived, as Ohly proposed, as the result of the ever-shifting

relationship of things mediated by their properties. In place ofseparating context from text, “putting” texts into contexts, thismore adaptable practice addresses the methodological problemof context as construct by directly engaging with the processesby which this construction takes place, in both the past and thepresent. In doing so, it allows us to recapture some of the origi-

nal connotations of the term context itself. The more limitedmodern use of the term is aptly summarized by the eleventh edi-tion of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which definescontext as “the circumstances that form the setting for an event,statement or idea; the parts that immediately precede and fol-low a word or passage and clarify its meaning.”81 Yet contextonce held a far wider range of meanings. Its late medieval usesmore closely reflect its origin in the Latin contextere, referringto “the weaving together of words and sentences, the construc-tion of speech, of literary composition,” while sixteenth- andseventeenth-century authors used it to express “the connec-tion or coherence between parts of a discourse.”82 Focused onconnections and construction, these earlier meanings present

meaning making as a process of facture in which various partsare linked together to create signification.Tracing the history of an object such as the Nef of St.

Ursula underscores the importance of attending to the ways inwhich individual things weave in and out of their larger sur-roundings. Just as things may be emphatically present, theyare equally given to being vague and profoundly conditional.In pointing to the porous joints between doves and seas, soulsand stones, angels and demons, Ohly’s work challenges medi-evalists to look more carefully at the processes of connectionthat operate in the histories of our objects of study; for these,indeed, may in the end be the very place where meaning, how-ever messy, is made. If we are to navigate the richly varied

world of meanings that Ohly opens before us, we will need toembrace an older vision of context as an agile and open weavein which all aspects of an object are liable to new configura-tions, as human effort continually tinkers with the open work.

NOTES

* I would like to thank Aden Kumler and Chris Lakey for their many gener-ous and insightful comments on both the original and revised versions ofthis paper.

1. Many of Ohly’s most relevant essays have been gathered in two col-lections: F. Ohly, Schriften zur Mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung (Darmstadt, 1983); and idem, Sensus Spiritualis: Studies in MedievalSignifics and the Philology of Culture, trans. K. J. Northcott, ed. S. P.Jaffee (Chicago, 2005).

2. First published as E. Panofsky, “Introductory,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939),

3–31. Reprinted with some expansion in idem, “Iconography and Iconol-ogy: An Introduction to the Study of the Renaissance,” in Meaning in theVisual Arts (Chicago, 1955), 26–54.

3. F. Ohly, “Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mittelalter,” in Schriften zur Mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung , 1–31. Unless otherwise noted,quotations in this article are from “On the Spiritual Sense of the Word inthe Middle Ages,” in Sensus Spiritualis, 1–30.

4. Ohly, “On the Spiritual Sense of the Word,” 12: “Christus et angelicavirtus, Christi quoque sponsa / Iustus iustitia, carnalis sensus, et usus /Pravus, peccatum grave, daemon, falsus hebraeus, / Verus gentilis dicitur




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esse lapis” (my translation). Northcott’s slightly different translationends, “each is said to be a stone,” making the preceding nouns ratherthan the stone the subject of dicitur esse.

5. On this quality in lists, see U. Eco, The Infinity of Lists from Homer to Joyce, trans. A. McEwen (London, 2009), 15–18.

6. Z. Herbert, “Pebble,” Selected Poems, trans. C. Milosz and P. D. Scott(Harmondsworth, 1968), 108.

7. Z. Herbert, “Poeta wobec współczesności,” in Poeszje, ed. K. Podgórecka(Warsaw, 1998), 5–8. I would like to thank Bethany Braley for providingme with a translation of this speech.

8. Despite their differing linguistic roots, these terms as used by the twoauthors are roughly equivalent: Frow’s terminology (J. Frow, “A Pebble,a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” Critical Inquiry,28/1 [Autumn 2001], 270–85) is drawn in part from Martin Heidegger’sformulation, in which Heidegger explicitly links Ding and the English“thing” to the Latin res (M. Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Lan-guage, Thought: Martin Heidegger Works, trans. A. Hofstadter [NewYork, 1971], 174–82), while Ohly’s original text uses Ding and res interchangeably.

9. Ohly, “On the Spiritual Sense of the Word,” 13.

10. Frow, “A Pebble,” 273.

11. Ibid., 285.12. Ohly, “On the Spiritual Sense of the Word,” 5–8.

13. Ibid., 9.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. On the larger issue of appeals to context, see M. Bal and N. Bryson,“Semiotics and Art History,” AB, 73/2 (1991), 174–208, at 175–80.

17. Reprinted as F. Ohly, “Probleme der Mittelalter lichen Bedeutungsfor-schung und das Taubenbild des Hugo de Folieto,” in Schriften zur Mittel-alterlichen Bedeutungsforschung, 32–92, at 32–33; and idem, “Problemsof Medieval Significs and Hugh of Folieto’s ‘Dove Miniature,’” in SensusSpiritualis, 68–135.

18. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology.”

19. E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York,

1972), 42–113.20. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” 26.

21. Ibid., 26.

22. Ibid., 40.

23. Ibid., 26–28.

24. Ibid., 27.

25. Ibid.

26. M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990), 240–42.

27. “rubor ped[um] cruor m[a]r[tyriu]m”

28. “oc[u]l[u]s ec[c]e matu[r]as sensus”

29. “color aure[us] i[n] posteriorib[us] e[s]t in finitio[ne] [a]et[er]n[a]e retri-butionis munus”

30. Ohly, “Problems of Medieval Significs,” 104.

31. “per ea [posteriora dorsi columbae] finem vitae praesentis in quolibethomine moraliter demonstrat”; W. B. Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium , Medieval and Renaissance Text and Stud-ies, 80 (Binghamton, NY, 1992), 132.

32. Ibid., 133–35.

33. Ibid., 118–19. Ohly (“Problems of Medieval Significs,” 84) quotesroughly the first half of this passage.

34. “Hec [sic] pertica e[st] regularis vita.” There may be intended wordplayhere between two definitions of pertica (as both “perch” and “measuringrod”) that strengthens its role as a sign of the “regular” life.

35. “Contemplativa vita / paries sanctarum cognacionum; Paries bonorumoporum / activa vita.”

36. E.g., the tame hawk is a spiritual father because it seizes the wild birds(laymen) and compels them to die to the world (Clark, The Medieval Bookof Birds, 142–43); Rayner i s told that as a monk he will seize and convertlaymen (ibid., 118–19).

37. Ohly, “Probleme der Mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung,” ills. 3–5:BnF, MS lat. 2495 is ill. 4.

38. Paris, Grand Palais, France 1500: Entre moyen âge et Renaissance (Paris,2011), ed. E. Taburet-Delahaye et al., cat. 31, p. 105.

39. The English carnelian is related to the medieval Latincarneolus, used forthe red form of sardius or onyx. Sardius, which can be used for carne-lian as well, of course is not linked etymologically to carnis. Isidore ofSeville claims the Latin name sardius is owed to its supposed discoveryby the Sardinians, linking hematite instead with blood; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, trans. S. Barney (Cambridge, 2006), 323.

40. T. Forbes, “Chalcedony and Childbirth: Precious and Semi-PreciousStones as Obstetrical Amulets,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine ,35 (1963), 390–402, at 394; and F. Klein-Franke, “The Knowledge ofAristotle’s Lapidary during the Latin Middle Ages,” Ambix , 17 (1970),137–42, at 141.

41. Exodus 28:17. Carnelian is the first of the twelve stones listed.

42. The municipal record of the purchase from Rémon Guinnot, with a shortdescription of the workmanship and basic iconography of the nef , wereidentified by H. Lambron de Lignim, “Quelle influence le séjour de lacour en Touraine a-t-il exercé sur le langage et sur le développementde l’art théâtral dans cette partie de la France?” Congrès scientifiquede France, 5ème session, 1 (1847), 119–45, at 134. An attribution to amember of the Rousseau family on the basis of the hallmark has also beensuggested, first by E. Giraudet, Les artis tes tourangeaux (Tours, 1885),356. The brevity of the payment record makes it unclear whether the nef was made with Anne as the intended first owner.

43. First noted by P. Verlet, Bulletin [Societé des antiquaires de France], 1937, 139–40.

44. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” 29, 36–37.

45. R. W. Lightbown, Secular Goldsmiths’ Work in Medieval France: A His-tory (London, 1978), 3.

46. Ibid., 30–31. Nefs could, on rare occasions, be adapted to liturgi-cal service as containers for holy water, a use that has been suggestedfor the Cloisters saltcellar, http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/70009873.

47. Lightbown, Secular Goldsmiths’ Work , 31, 108.

48. C. Oman, “Trésor de la cathédrale de Reims: La nef d’Anne de Bretagne,” Les monuments historiques de la France, 1–2 (1966), 123–25 at 125.

49. Lambron de Lignim, “Quelle influence,” 134.

50. Boats did play a prominent role in the festivities at nearby Amboise sev-eral days later, where Julius Caesar’s construction of a fleet was restaged.Entertainments under the control of the court were often linked through

this type of symbolic play, but there is no evidence to suggest collusionbetween the two locales on this occasion.

51. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” 36–38.

52. A. D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the “Grandes Chro-niques de France,” 1274–1422 (Berkeley, 1991), 128–34.

53. Based on a receipt dated 3 June 1505 signed by the royal painter Jehande Paris for plate received from Henry, including a “petite navire d’or. . . que la dicte dame a faict prendre pour mectre les unze mil vierges”;C. Oman, Medieval Silver Nefs (London, 1963), 18.




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54. For a basic outline, see J. de Voragine, The Golden Legend , trans. W. G.Ryan (Princeton, 2012), 642–46. Anne of Brittany’s interest in St. Ursula(with whom she shared a royal status and Breton origin) rather than theEleven Thousand Virgins as a whole runs counter to the general shapeof the cult at this time, which tended to stress the corporate nature ofthe group; see S. B. Montgomery, St. Ursula and the Eleven ThousandVirgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group

Sanctity in Late Medieval Europe (Bern, 2010), 1–46.55. Like many female rulers, Anne of Brittany’s political engagement has

largely been sidelined if not dismissed out of hand by historians. For someimportant correctives indicating her proactive work on behalf of Bretonautonomy, see M. Nassiet, “Anne de Bretagne, a Woman of State,” inThe Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne , ed. C. J. Brown(Woodbridge, 2010), 163–75; and idem, “Les traités de marr iage d’Annede Bretagne,” in Pour en finir avec Anne de Bretagne?, ed. D. Le Page(Nantes, 2002), 71–81.

56. Anne and Margaret are frequent companions of Anne of Brittany in herbooks of hours both as the namesakes of Anne of Brittany and her motherrespectively and as saints connected to childbirth and rearing. See E.L’Estrange, “Penitence, Motherhood, and Passion Devotion: Contextual-izing Anne de Bretagne’s Prayer Book, Chicago, Newberry Library, MS83,” in Brown, The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne,

81–100, at 91–93.57. On the ship as a sign of St. Ursula, see Montgomery, St. Ursula, 40–44,

55–56; and G. Zarri, “La nave di sant’Orsola,” Annali dell’Institu toStorico Italo-Germanico in Trento, 19 (1993), 129–55.

58. On Anne’s practice of creative reuse, see C. Vrand, “Les collectionsd’objets d’art d’Anne de Bretagne à travers ses inventaires: Le spectacleet les coulisses” (Thèse, École Nationale des Chartes, Paris, 2010).

59. M. Bimbenet-Privat, “L’orfèvrerie de François Ier et de ses successeursd’après des inventaires inédits de 1537, 1563 et 1584 conservés aux Ar-chives nationales,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français,1995, 41–54, at 47. Bimbenet-Privat expresses reservations as to whetherthe Nef of St. Ursula was in fact a reliquary given the lack of additionalcorroborating evidence concerning the identity or presence of the relics.For the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to take the documentary source

at its word. Bimbenet-Privat’s caveat does, however, raise fascinatingavenues for future inquiry concerning the role of belief in materiality andits meanings that extend well beyond Western European reliquaries (e.g.,are the dedication offerings and relics occluded in, but considered vital tothe power of, a Buddhist stupa part of its materials even if no one livinghas seen them?).

60. Ibid., 47.

61. Ibid.

62. This portion of the Nef of St. Ursula’s history comes closest to resemblingthe processes of appropriation outlined by R. Nelson, “Appropriation,” inCritical Terms for Art History, ed. Nelson and R. Schiff (Chicago, 2003) ,160–73.

63. Bimbenet-Privat, “L’orfèvrerie de François Ier,” 47–49.

64. “HENRICUS.III. GALLIARUM POLONIARUMQUE REX HANC

DEIPARAE VIRGINI NAVICULAM UT RES GALLICA DIUTURNISIACTA SEDITIONUM FLUCTIBUS OPE DIVINA TANDEM CONFER-RETUR IN TRANCQUILLUM M[A]RE MAIORUM INAUGRATUSPOSUIT ANNO MDLXXIIIII.” I would like to thank Barbara Newmanfor her help in correcting this inscription.

65. On the ubiquity and malleability of the ship of state in sixteenth-centuryFrench royal iconography, see F. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme inthe Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), 121–207. Henri III was alreadyportrayed as a calmer of the turbulent seas during the reign of his brotherCharles IX in both poetry and festival imagery; ibid., 135–37.

66. Bimbenet-Privat, “L’orfèvrerie de François Ier,” 47.

67. A. Cutler, “Reuse or Use? Theoretical and Practical Attitudes towardsObjects in the Early Middle Ages,” Settimane di Studi del Centro Italianodi Studi sull’alto Medioevo, 46 (1999), 1056–79.

68. Following a few isolated studies in the mid-twentieth century, the lit-erature on spolia has grown exponentially in the last several decades.For examples, see G. Bandmann, Mittelalterliche Architektur als Be-deutungsträger (Berlin, 1998); P. Buc, “Conversion of Objects,” Viator ,28 (1997), 99–143; J. Déer, “Das Kaiserbild im Kreuz: Ein Betrag zurpolitischen Theologie des früheren Mittelalters,” Schweizer Beiträge zurallgemein Geschichte, 13 (1955), 48–110; F. W. Deichmann, “Säule undOrdnung in der frühchristlichen Architektur,” Römische Mitteilungen,55 (1940), 114–30; A. Esch, “Spolien,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 51(1969), 1–64; I. Forsyth, “Art with History,” in Byzantine East, LatinWest: Art-Historical Studies in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann , ed. C. Mossand K. Kiefer (Princeton, 1995), 153–62; D. Kinney, “Spolia: Damnatioand renovatio memoriae,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome,42 (1997), 117–48; eadem, “The Concept of Spolia,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. C. Ru-dolph (Malden, MA, 2006), 233–52; A. Shalem, Islam Christianized: Islamic Portable Objects in the Medieval Church Treasuries of the Latin

West (Frankfurt, 1998); and E. Zwierlein-Diehl, “‘Interpretatio chris-

tiana’: Gems on the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne,” in EngravedGems: Surivivals and Revivals, Studies in the History of Art, 54, ed.C. M. Brown (Washington, DC, 1997), 63–83.

69. Cutler, “Reuse or Use?” 1056.

70. Ibid., 1077.

71. F. B. Flood and Z. S. Strother, “Editorial: Between Creation and Destruc-tion,” RES , 48 (2005), 5–10, at 5, 7, 10.

72. A growing body of recent scholarship exists on the role of touch andsound in premodern art. For just a few examples, see G. Frank, The Memory of the Eyes (Chicago, 2000); D. Howard and L. Moretti, Soundand Space in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 2009); R. Nelson, “Empa-thetic Vision: Looking at and with a Performative Byzantine Miniature,” AH , 30 (2007), 489–502; and B. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, PA, 2010).

73. The metaphoric evocation of these senses has received the most atten-tion. See, for example, R. Falkenburg, The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticismand the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child,

1450–1550, trans. S. Herman (Amsterdam, 1994).

74. Contemporary use of scent and taste varies widely: a small samplingof this diversity can be seen in the disparate work of Janine Antoni, theCenter for Tactical Magic, Fallen Fruit, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, HildaKozari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Giuseppe Penone, Ashley Rowe, DieterRoth, Saito Takako, Daniel Spoerri, Rikrit Tiravanija, Sissel Tolaas, andClara Ursitti.

75. While there is a substantial body of literature on human remains in mu-seums, it issues almost exclusively from within anthropology and naturalhistory museums and largely focuses on repatriation of ancestral bodies tonative peoples. See, for example, M. Brooks and C. Rumsey, “The Body

in the Museum,” in Human Remains: Guide for Museums and Academic Institutions, ed. V. Cassman et al. (Lanham, MD, 2007), 269–90; K. Coo-per, Spirited Encounters: American Indians Protest Museum Policies andPractices (Lanham, MD, 2008); and P. Turnbull and M. Pickering, eds.,The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation (NewYork, 2010). Although concern with the display of bodies was broughtto the fore by the legal actions of those seeking to reclaim ancestors’bodies, it has since come to alter museum practices surrounding all hu-man remains in countries such as Britain; T. Jenkins, Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority (NewYork, 2001), 4.




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76. Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art; Baltimore, The Walters ArtMuseum; and London, The British Museum, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (Cleveland, Baltimore, andLondon, 2011), ed. M. Bagnoli et al., cat. 19, p. 42.

77. J. Harris, “Muslim Ivories in Christian Hands: The Leire Casket in Con-text,” AH , 18 (1995), 213–21.

78. This is not to say that reliquaries always mimetically portray the detailsof the relics within. As Cynthia Hahn’s work on speaking reliquarieshas clearly shown, the shaping of reliquaries into forms such as armsis often determined by functional needs and does not regularly corre-late to the presence of an arm bone within; Hahn, “The Voices of theSaints: Speaking Reliquaries,” Gesta, 36 (1997), 20–31. As reliquaries,

however, they contain, have contained, or have been believed to contain

relics.

79. P. Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New

Haven, 2008).

80. Unsanctified flesh was also distributed as a spice for medicinal use; see

K. H. Dannenfeldt, “Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience

and Debate,” Sixteenth Century Studies, 16 (1985), 163–80; and R. Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (New York, 2011), 11–22.

81. Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. context n.

82. OED Online, s.v. context n, accessed 20 July 2012, http://www.oed.com/

view/Entry/40207?rskey=Uw3mfV&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid.




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PLATE 1 (Kumler and Lakey, Fig. 2, and Powell, Fig. 12). Sacramentary of

St. Gereon, Cologne, ca. 1000, Paris, BnF, MS lat. 817, fol. 12, Annunciation

(photo: BnF).

PLATE 3 (Kumler and Lakey, Fig. 3, and Normore, Fig. 2). Hugh of Folieto, De avibus , Paris, BnF, MS lat. 2495, fols. 1v–2, Dove and Hawk (photo: BnF).

PLATE 2 (Kumler and Lakey, Fig. 4). Lyell Aviary, Oxford, Bodleian Library,

MS Lyell 71, fol. 4 (photo: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford).




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PLATE 5 (Fricke, Fig. 1). Rel

navigating the world of meaning-christina normore

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