From divine word to human hand: negotiating sacred text in a medieval gospel book.

Compiled by Eusebius of Caesaria in the fourth century, and thereafter a standard apparatus of medieval gospel books, canon tables index the concordances between the four books of the Christian gospels. Because they are functional and often sparsely decorated, these tables are easily overlooked as a practical device, and have long been assumed to carry little if any iconographical significance. In fact, however, they navigate a fundamental paradox of Christianity, for they reveal the tension between the multiple accounts of Christ as told by the gospels and the belief in a single truth told by scripture. A twelfth-century manuscript from the abbey of Helmarshausen in northern Germany, and now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (MS Ludwig II 3), contains canon tables whose decoration evokes precisely this issue. This article examines these tables within the visual program of the entire manuscript and in the context of twelfth-century thought. Rather than presenting gospel unity, these tables make visible the differences across the four accounts. Thus, they betray a concern for the limitations of imagery and its inability to express the profound gap between written word and sacred truth and between embodied man and infinite God. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]