Abstract
Stephen Prickett (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2014; 608 pp.: 9780748639335, £150.00 (hbk)
Stephen Prickett belongs to a minute group of scholars of extraordinary multi-disciplinary range, including biblical scholarship, who could edit a (beautifully illustrated) volume such as this. Maybe the centre of gravity of his scholarly achievement lies in the areas of rhetoric and the history of ideas in English and German Romanticism, and these areas are well represented. But the volume’s scope is so wide I was tempted back to Stephen Prickett’s two introductory essays to remind me where I had been.
Perhaps the areas furthest from my own centre of intellectual gravity lie in the first section concerned with aesthetics, inspiration, translation and theory, as (for example) in the contested worlds of Jews and Arabs in medieval Spain, in Migne and the transmission of ancient manuscripts, and in revisionist understandings of Augustine on beauty. Yet I was thoroughly engaged by the problems of retranslation after the Revised Version, intrigued by fiction referring back to the Bible, and by mutations of the notion of the sublime.
The largest section concerns art and architecture. I did not know about anti-Judaism in the art of fifth-century Rome but the theme of the blind synagogue is familiar enough, as was the iconography of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Two essays specially caught my attention: Christopher Herbert on art and the resurrection narratives, and Christopher Irvine on the iconography of the cross as the green tree. Vivienne Westbrook’s discussion of the representation and misrepresentation in art of Bathsheba comes from a feminist perspective (and I was slightly surprised that Rembrandt barely figures anywhere else as a great interpreter of the Bible). Shirley Smith’s discussion of how the Sistine Chapel illustrated the twists and turns of assertions of papal authority provides a nice exercise in the sociological history of art; likewise Nigel Aston on Moses in eighteenth-century religious art. The remaining essays in this section, on the iconography of nineteenth-century stained glass from Pugin to Morris and Burne-Jones, on the mystical meanings of Van Gogh’s paintings, on text and image in Blake, and on the tribulations attending the creation of Coventry cathedral, are insightful and sympathetic.
As for the Bible and literature, I knew where I was with J. R. Watson on Wesley and Watts, Robin Gill on changing emphases in hymns, and Jan Gorak on the prophetic books in Eliot, and I enjoyed the erudite discussions of Milton and Herbert, of changing moral emphases in Victorian literature (Gaskell, Dickens, George Eliot) and of changing representations of the creator from Frankenstein to H. G. Wells. I had to work harder with analyses of the apocalypse, Dante, the medieval Bible, George MacDonald and the Imitatio Pilati et Christi in historical drama.
Stephen Prickett anticipates querulous wiseacres asking, ‘What about Auden, Ruskin and Smart?’ or projecting a totally different book, with John Butt or Robin Leaver on the Bible in Bach, or Ruth Smith on Handelian oratorio, or Jim Sansom on the Bible in opera from Rossini to Richard Strauss. Anyone can play that game; but who else could have devised the riches we actually have.