Reviews 573 terest is the "Guelders Armorial" (which includes literary texts) and its compiler "Gelre Herald." Finally, in the third part ("Court Culture") Nijsten aims "to weld together court and art into court culture" (p. 309) and returns to the question whether arts, festivities, and rituals had a political function. Firstly, he points at the role of art and entertainment in the construction of the duke's (and his consort's and children's) self-image and habitus. Secondly, he analyzes their role in "the integration of the court" (p. 343). In the second manifested increasingly through lavish festivities. In this chapter the relation with the church and with other European courts is also briefly discussed. Finally, in the last chapter, Nijsten argues that "in various fields the court acted as a link in a chain of cultural influence" (p. 399). It did so, for example, between princely courts, with new developments usually traveling from west to east. The book concludes with a discussion of the rise of a "national feeling" in Guelders, surprisingly more outside than inside the court. This leads to the concluding note that court culture had great political potential but its limitations, too. The eye-catcher in the book title of this English version is Burgundy, not Guelders. Yet the relation between both courts is only briefly discussed. Nijsten downplays the supposition that the Burgundian court acted as a model for other European courts, but he does not really elaborate this point. His study is more informative on the relation between the Guelders court and other courts in the Lower Rhine region such as that of the duchy of Cleves. In contrast with Guelders, Cleves opted for a full "Burgundization," a survival strategy that, in the end, was much more effective. Nijsten's study draws from a large number of unpublished sources, including a long series of ducal accounts. The book offers a wealth of prudently interpreted information, but, as such, it is often difficult to truly understand what was particular about Guelders's court life and how the dialectics between culture and politics exactly worked. Here, the method of "thick description," applied with panache in Peter Arnade's study on the cultural politics played out between the Burgundian dukes and the city of Ghent (Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent [Ithaca, N.Y., 1996]), could have complemented Nijsten's rich tableau. However, it is unfair not to take into account the fact that at the basis of this English book lies a thesis written in the early nineties. Nijsten's constant reminders that art, culture, and festivities played an active role in politics may seem a little unnecessary at some points, but, precisely because they do, they show that in recent years much has changed in the research field of medieval politics. Where the Low Countries are concerned, Nijsten's study, comprehensive and informed by cultural theory as it is, can count as one of the forerunners of the prolific cultural approach, and, as such, this English translation comes in good time. ANNE-LAURE VAN BRUAENE, Ghent University VIRGINIA NIXON, Mary's Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 216; black-and-white frontispiece and 36 black-and-white figures. The somewhat vague term "interdisciplinary" is used too freely for some tastes these days, but a book like Mary's Mother reminds us what an interdisciplinary methodology can accomplish. The art historian Virginia Nixon points out in her introduction that she began studying "works of art" but soon realized they were enmeshed in texts and records that revealed "how Saint Anne was used and understood in the late Middle Ages" (p. 6). As a result, her study is written less as traditional art history—focused on style and iconogra- 574 Reviews phy—than as cultural history of religion. In this interdisciplinary cultural frame, art objects become "social artifacts." The subtitle of the book indicates a wider scope (all of Europe) than the study attempts; in actuality the focus is on northern Europe, particularly Germany. After a chapter that traces the early-medieval story of St. Anne to the apocryphal gospel the Protevangelium of Mary (which involved her mother, Anne), and elucidates issues around Anne's three marriages (the trinubium), the rest of the book focuses on the later period, from 1470 to 1530, when the cult of St. Anne reached its apogee. Building on the work of many German, Dutch, and American scholars, Nixon provides a number of explanations for the striking efflorescence of the St. Anne cult around 1500. First, there is the difficult-to-isolate popular veneration of the saint. A silver and gold reliquary image of Anne selbdritt (St. Anne seated with smallfiguresof Mary and Jesus as children on her lap) commissioned in 1472 by Anna Hofmann of Ingolstadt testifies to the presence of a growing popular cult of Anne among the affluent urban bourgeoisie. Secondly, as Ton Brandenbarg and others have shown, reformist clergy and humanists from northern Europe began a campaign to promote the cult of Anne. They wrote new lives of the saint highlighting the Holy Kinship group—Anne and her three daughters and their numerous children—and they developed institutional structures to support the cult. The abbot Trithemius of Spondheim wrote a key treatise in 1494 arguing that Anne should be honored above all other saints; with his clerical colleagues throughout Germany and the Netherlands he "reinvented" Anne as a "transregional saint" through new lives, liturgical offices or poems, as well as shrines and convents dedicated to her cult. Nixon concludes that the "innumerable paintings, sculptures, and prints depicting her still extant in churches and museums in Germany and the Netherlands are the testimony to their success" (p. 31). Chapter 2 concludes with interesting accounts from the "culturally rich" Rhineland of enthusiastic popular response to the "elaborately orchestrated displays of the relics" (p. 36). At these shrines, Nixon argues, older strands of devotion to Anne based on healing miracles mingle with the newer emphases on personal holiness and moral benefits typical of urban bourgeois piety. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the history of Anne's cult, which by 1500 had "spread throughout Germany, Switzerland, Flanders, and Holland, making substantial inroads as well into Poland, Bohemia, and Scandinavia" (p. 41). Nixon argues that one factor underlying the new popularity was a concern with personal salvation; devotion to Anne because of her powerful place at the head of the holy family guaranteed access to heaven. Paintings and sculptures widely produced show the Holy Kinship group. According to Nixon, the German Anne is represented with the high-medieval characteristic of Mary, the detached gaze, meant to symbolize her role in the plan of salvation. Nixon acknowledges the substantial variations in the iconography of the Anne, Mary, and Jesus image in Germany, Holland, Italy, and England; however, she does not flesh out her suggestion that English texts and images emphasize Anne's marital life and that Dutch images tend to be domestic genre scenes—in both cases because, unlike Germany, there was no coordinated clerical proChapters 5 and 6 return to the central argument about the Flemish and German clergy and civic authorities as promoters of Anne's cult in the late fifteenth century because they saw the cult's potential to achieve the pastoral goal of controlling lay piety and the economic goal of attracting wealth to shrines. These historical arguments are most concretely developed with regard to the cities Augsburg and Annaberg, where we are shown Anne's focusing on "how people used images." Nixon argues a strong propensity in German texts and images to conflate image and referent; such a conflation would be appropriate to the Reviews 575 cult of Anne "since her importance was so bound up with the metonymy inherent in the power that derived from her bodily connection with Christ and Mary" (p. 115). Chapter 8 describes the decline of Anne's cult after 1530 as the elements of the hagiography (especially the trinubium) were attacked by reformers. Anne lost her central generative female role, now being portrayed merely as an aged grandmother, subordinated in images to Mary and Jesus. The history of the cult's dramatic rise and fall in a relatively short period is for the most part persuasive and informative, although it is by no means the definitive account. The attempt to sketch such a broad cultural history in brief compass (the text is only 164 pages) of necessity results in the sacrifice of depth on many topics that a more narrowly defined disciplinary study might pursue. The final chapter of the book seems a recognition of that weakness of interdisciplinary study, for Nixon identifies images remaining from Anne's cult in northern Europe and discusses their stylistic and iconographical details in isolation from the foregoing cult narrative. Given the integrated and interpretive sweep of the first eight chapters, chapter 9 seems tacked on, although it may well provide information useful to art historians. Even where the framing argument may be undermined, Nixon is unwilling to settle for easy answers but tends to acknowledge a multiplicity of potential factors and explanations. What thefinalchapter—and indeed the whole book—reveals is that scholars continue to investigate, think, and write about saints' cults precisely because they are such fascinatingly complex phenomena. KATHLEEN ASHLEY, University of Southern Maine BARBARA OBRIST, ed., Abbon de Fleury: Philosophie, science et comput autour de Van mil. Actes des journees organisees par le Centre d'histoire des sciences et des philosophies arabes et medievales. (Oriens-Occidens: Sciences, Mathematiques et Philosophie de l'Antiquite a l'Age Classique, 6.) Paris-Villejuif: CNRS, 2004. Paper. Pp. iv, 254; 48 black-and-white figures and tables. €20. The anniversary of the assassination of Abbo of Fleury (1004) has been so beneficial for study of Abbo that he has been the subject of a literary resurrection. With the appearance of several editions (the commentary of Abbo on the Calculus of Victorius of Aquitaine by A. M. Peden, the Vita et passio Sancti Abbonis of Aimo of Fleury by Robert-Henri Bautier and Gillette Labory, and the Consuetudines FloYiacenses antiquiores of Thierry d'Amorbach by Anselme Davril and Lin Donnat), the biography of Pierre Riche, and finally the exhibition catalogue of the Musee des Beaux-Arts at Orleans, edited by Annick Nottier and Aurelie Bosc, there has been a renewal of our understanding of Abbo's intellectual This volume shows Abbo as a cleric endowed with an unusual analytic skill, which he used with pioneering tenacity. Close study of the Fleury manuscripts of the Commentarii in Somniunt Scipionis of Macrobius and of the Commentarius of Chalcidius on the Timaeus leads Irene Caiazzo to the firm conclusion that Abbo is the first medieval author to have acquired a good knowledge of those two ancient authors. In its technical demonstration, Abbo's textual understanding surpasses even that of the renowned William of Conches, a century and a half later. Franz Schupp presents to French speakers the essentials of his annotated edition (Brill, 1997) of the De syllogismis hypotheticis of Abbo, the first person to know the treatise of Boethius of the same title, although Abbo's effort had no influence and did not establish a tradition. Peter Verbist should be congratulated for unraveling the particularly complex manuscript tradition of Abbo's computus, classifying it into four distinct periods. This impressive work is part of a much-needed project to edit the work. David Juste reveals a little-known aspect of Abbo's achievement, divinatory practices based