Published on H-Judaic (July, 2012)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman
"Those familiar with Marc Michael Epstein from the
lecture circuit--both scholarly and popular--know him as an entertaining
and facile speaker. These qualities are on display in Epstein’s recent
book--The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination---even
his art-historically gifted children appear here as they do in his
lectures--but readers expecting a “synagogue circuit” text will be
sorely disappointed. This is a serious book, with careful observations,
robust opinions, and footnotes forged by years of reading and thinking
about Jewish medieval imagery, manuscript illumination, and its
historiography. Indeed, publication of Epstein’s book offers more proof
that Jewish art history, so long in its infancy, has finally come of
age.
As suggested by the title, the unifying thread in
Epstein’s study is the haggadah, its place in Jewish ritual and
imaginative life, and the choices made by its medieval patrons/artists
while crafting its programs of illumination. Epstein makes no effort to
trace the development of Jewish manuscript illumination or to center his
study in one particular geographical area. The four manuscripts Epstein
investigates (the Bird’s Head Haggadah, the Golden Haggadah, the
Rylands Haggadah, and the “Brother” Haggadah) come both from Ashkenaz
(the first), and Sepharad, (the following three). This is a work of
interpretation; each manuscript forms the centerpiece of thematic essays
prompted by careful study of its particular iconographic features
within the larger umbrella of Jewish art-making and haggadah
illumination."
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