A Pope’s Illuminated Josephus, ca. 1425
This beautifully illuminated manuscript written on vellum is arguably the most handsome Renaissance book in the early book collections at Johns Hopkins. The text preserves Flavius Josephus’s invaluable and immensely influential eyewitness account of the first Jewish-Roman War leading to the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem. The present text constitutes an Italian vernacular translation of a Greek intermediary, the original Hebrew or Aramaic version having been lost.
The Jewish War survived thanks, in part, to the critical need among early Judeo-Christians to reconcile themselves to God’s allowing the destruction of their Second Temple in ca. 70 CE, which Josephus described in theological terms as divine retribution for the collective sins of the Jews up to that moment. A considerable part of Flavius Josephus’s authority stems not only from his firsthand account of these events but also because he himself was a Jew.
As a material artifact, this volume expresses with complete clarity the aspirations of Renaissance humanists to clarify and make more accessible the essential texts of the early Christian tradition. The neatly rounded humanista script, based on late Carolingian models, is completely legible to a latter-day reader, eschewing the angular Gothic script one could still easily encounter in manuscripts produced by scriptoria of the period. The handsomely illustrated title-page border and illuminated capital letter are entirely classical in conception, complete with two handsome winged putti holding a wreath intended for the coat of arms of its owner and beautiful birds rendered in bright pinks, greens, and blues. Facing the elaborate title page is an equally classical architectural frame containing the title of the work, highlighted in gold.
Though the place of its production is nowhere identified in the manuscript, the decorative scheme of the opening closely resembles much of the output of Florentine secular scriptoria during the first quarter of the quattrocento. Though the use of fine vellum was lavish and costly, there are no other illustrations in the volume beyond the initial opening. Rather, it is the clarity and immense authority of the text itself that are given pride of place.
It seems especially fitting that this book ultimately found its way to Baltimore through the private library of John Work Garrett. Though the armorial wreath on the manuscript’s title page was never filled in, the gilt papal arms of Pius VI (1775–99) appear on the front cover, lending this crucial patristic text an impeccable provenance. It was Pius VI who responded to a 1788 petition from the Catholic clergy of the United States to make the See of Baltimore the first official diocese in the country. In September 1789, Pius issued the bull that made John Carroll—a scion of the celebrated Carroll family of Maryland—the inaugural archbishop of Baltimore.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Silvia Castelli, “Josephus in Renaissance Italy,” in Honora Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers (eds.), A Companion to Josephus (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 402–13; Martin Goodman, Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2019); Anthony Grafton and William Sherman, “In the Margins of Josephus: Two Ways of Reading,” and Joanna Weinberg, “Early Modern Jewish Readers of Josephus,” in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23:3 (October 2016), 213–38, 275–89.
