“The Methodology of Credulity:
Assessing the Manuscript Witnesses
to Beatus of Líebana, On the Apocalypse“

Reflections on
A Project Proposal

[Posted on 9 May 2025, with updates]

In honor of the session sponsored by the RGME at the 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies and proposed and co-organized by our Associate Vajra Regan, I reflect with hindsight on the proposal years ago for a collaborative research project about the surviving “Manuscript Witnesses” to the influential medieval Latin Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Líebana (circa 730 – circa 735).

Proposed with a distinguished colleague circa 1999, that ambitious collaborative project did not come to fruition, so I turned to other ones claiming attention. For years its subject (rather than project) lay in the background, waiting, for a return to attention, amidst other projects and activities of the Research Group on Manuscript [and Other] Evidence (RGME) which advanced as this organization has continued on its path.

The 2025 RGME Session
on Beatus Manuscripts

The RGME Session on 10 May 2025 at the ICMS presents its focus thus:

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

Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Vitrina 14-2, fol. 287r. Facundus Beatus. Image via Biblioteca Digital Hispánica via https://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000051522.

The title and approach were proposed by Vajra Regan, who deserves credit for the inspired approach to the genre. Responses to the Call for Papers for this session focused on specific aspects or case studies. Their approaches are reported in our Home Page for our events at the 2025 Congress and in the Abstracts for the presentations in the Program of the Session. See:

• 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies: Program
• Kambour (2025 Congress)
• Frisbie (2025 Congress)

We give thanks to the co-organizers and contributors to this session and to the helpers behind the scenes for its preparations and accomplishment. We admire the participants’ choices of subjects for their presentations, which focus respectively on a specific manuscript as case-study or on different manuscripts’ approaches to a specific illustration across the corpus of Beatus Manuscripts.

The Once-Upon-A-Time
Project Proposal on Beatus Manuscripts

It is this multi-tiered exploratory experience — with manuscripts containing Beatus’ Commentary on the Book of the Apocalypse in the New Testament and the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, with studies about these manuscripts, their group, and their context, and with a developing awareness of a wealth of manuscript witnesses across time as my own research and that of the RGME — that leads me now to offer reflections with hindsight about an eager preparatory exploration of the manuscripts and their power as witnesses which generated a proposal for a major project.

The proposal envisioned an extended, several-year, multi-disciplinary study of the manuscripts themselves (where permitted), along with an international symposium to gather a range of relevant perspectives and approaches to them and their context, both individually and collectively as a genre attesting to the transmission and sometimes creative transformation of a compelling text which often traveled with resonant, sometimes disturbing, often challenging, images.

The details and aims for the plan are set out in the six-page proposal. Using Adobe Garamond for its font (in keeping with our preferred font before RGME Bembino, it has a title page and five pages of text outlining the “Project Proposal,” set out in sections:

The Material
The Nature of the Problem
The Scope and Aims of the Project
The Collaborative Process
The Stage of Development of the Project
Institutional Resources to be Consulted and Travel Plans
Results

With its strengths and weaknesses, the proposal can be viewed here.

It makes a statement about our reflective views on the subject of Beatus Manuscripts as a body of evidence, their challenges for research and comprehension, and possible approaches bringing a combination of perspectives and expertise in the pursuit of further knowledge about their potential as witnesses. In a way, it represents a statement of intention about a long-term project bringing together many fiends, centers, fields of expertise, and dedication.

Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Vitrina 14-2, fol. 6v. Facundus Beatus. Image via Biblioteca Digital Hispánica via https://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000051522.

Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Vitrina 14-2, fol. 7r. Facundus Beatus. Image via Biblioteca Digital Hispánica via https://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000051522.

AfterLife and Renewal

The proposal was not accepted, so its text has been set aside. It was said, whether accurate or not, by my collaborator that a reason, or the reason, for the rejection had to do with the choice of reviewer (an obvious choice), who had long expressed disagreement with my collaborator’s approach to the manuscripts, of which he had made a long-term study bringing a series of volumes on them as individuals and as a whole body of material.

The issues between those two scholars were not my concern. Both individuals (now dead) were RGME Associates; both contributed to various RGME Symposia in their own time and on different occasions.

With hindsight, I observe that it may well have been fortunate that the project did not go forward. Aside from the complex logistics across countries and disciplines outlined in the proposal, which may have proved unwieldy or intractable, there emerged other, more fundamental concerns. Unexpected arduous difficulties imposed in working with the same collaborator at her request to move her library from one state to another in 2002–2003, leading to months of ill health for me, taught that the responsibilities for such a project as the one which we proposed several years earlier would have placed most of the work upon me unaided. Meanwhile, I can be glad that the discussions and planning which led to the proposal brought me into contact more closely with the subject of the Beatus Manuscripts and its witnesses.

The occasion of the RGME’s Session on Apocalypse Commentaries in 2025 brings it forward as a record of our long-term interest in and commitment to the study of the manuscript witnesses. The renewal brings the chance to look afresh at the manuscripts, their scripts, their images, and their histories, especially as the arrival of digitization and online facsimiles for many of the witnesses has granted the ability to observe, compare, contrast, and learn ever more from their pages.

Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Vitrina 14-2, fol. 6r. Facundus Beatus. Image via Biblioteca Digital Hispánica via https://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000051522.

A Treasured Memory

The process of planning a collaborative project involved learning from each other about our different, but overlapping, approaches to the study of manuscripts and their contexts from fields ranging from history and art history, through codicology, palaeography, and book history, to textual and linguistic studies and the transmission of text, scripts, and illustrations from exemplar to exemplar, place to place, and time to time. The quest was exhilarating.

Especially worthwhile was the opportunity which I could arrange, with the approval of the then-Curator at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, William Voelkle (now a RGME Associate), to see two Beatus manuscripts side by side. We traveled to New York for the day from Princeton, New Jersey, for this purpose.  In the old Reading Room, as he turned the pages, we two collaborators could examine the two books at the same time, observing, conversing, and consulting with each other, all three of us. In decades of examining manuscripts at close hand, this experience remains one of the most memorable.

Thus we had the privilege of looking together at the Morgan Beatus (M. 644) of circa 940–945 and Las Huelgas Beatus (M. 429) dated by colophon to September 1220. I had seen one and other before, in the flesh, as part of my decades’ long study of manuscripts, but looking at both of them together, and with a colleague as well, represented a step forward for our collaborative work. Before digitization, long before online digital facsimiles of manuscripts, this opportunity was a rare treat.

While we were engaged with this opportunity, standing over the manuscripts and talking softly (but excitedly), another reader in the room walked by, exclaimed with delight, and asked if she might look over our shoulders as well. Welcoming her, we described something about the manuscripts, their significance, and our plans to study their group in greater depth. Her interest as a newcomer, happy that she had chanced upon and been welcomed into the exceptional encounter with the manuscripts, in our company, remains a happy part of the memory.

I rejoice that the occasion of the 2025 RGME Session on Beatus Manuscripts, with their complex interworking and/or interplay between text and images, brings to the fore my long-standing interest in their characteristics. Preparing for the session, I can return to the books about them which helped to inform and guide the proposal of yesteryear. These books include a bilingual Latin–Spanish edition of the complete works of Beatus lent by my collaborator and the majesterial multi-volume set on The Illustrated Beatus by the expert who had (it would seem) reviewed and declined our proposal. Over the years since the work to complete the proposal for submission, I have consulted each of these works for various reasons, but now they come out together to join in the renewal of exploration about Beatus Manuscripts, with more to discover.

For example, with this digital image of an opening of the Morgan Beatus, MS M. 644, as an example, we might imagine the living process of beholding the opened book directly, while the pages might (with permission) be turned to reveal another and another, at a given moment in time and space.

Beatus, Saint, Presbyter of Liebana, -798. Commentary on the Apocalypse (MS M.644). Spain, San Salvador de Tabara, ca. 945. fol. 222v. MS M.644.