Sarah E. Frisbie
(Case Western Reserve University)

Abstract of Paper
presented at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies
(Kalamazoo, 2025)

Session on
“Rending the Veil:
The Rupture of Image and Text
in Medieval Apocalypse Commentaries”

Sponsored by the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Organized by
Mildred Budny and Vajra Regan

2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Program

“In terra et mare:
Constructing Cosmos
in the Beatus of Saint-Sever”

Abstract

In approximately the year 776, a monk of the monastery of San Martin de Turieno, Beatus of Liébana, penned a
complex commentary on the Biblical apocalypse, now enshrined in thirty-four extant North Iberian manuscripts
known collectively as the Beatus Manuscripts. The Beatus of Saint-Sever (Paris, BnF MS Lat. 8878), made in Gascony before 1072, is one of two of these from the French side of the Pyrenees. Folio 119r depicts Revelation 7:1–3, in which four angels hold back the four winds, waiting for the righteous to be sealed with Godʼs favor before the
destruction of the earth.

In this paper, I analyze the composite aerial and frontal composition of folio 119r as a manipulation of cosmic space-time. My semiotic approach diverges from prevailing scholarship on the Beatus Manuscripts, which leans on iconography and historiography. Comparing the folio with the writings of Isidore of Seville and the Pseudo-Aristotle and cosmological and creation diagrams, I explore how the folio frames the momentary within the eternal. The folio, I argue, serves as a narrative “blip” that marks the depicted faithful for eternity, and, in turn, marks the readers through their faith. I delve into the disruptive nature of the folio as a reprieve in an apocalyptic narrative which tracks toward destruction, and I consider the ways in which this reprieve is extended to the viewer. In a time rife with fear of the end, this brief moment in the Beatus of Saint-Sever ultimately invites the viewer to participate in the dialectics of creation and destruction, granting meaning to the brevity of human experience.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 8878, fol. 119v. Image Public Domain, via ark:/12148/btv1b52505441p.

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