Jeweled Bookbinding - History

History

Treasure bindings were a luxury affordable only by wealthy elites, and were commissioned by wealthy private collectors, churches and senior clergy and royalty, and were often commissioned for presentation by or to royal or noble persons. The earliest reference to them is in a letter of Saint Jerome of 384, where he "writes scornfully of the wealthy Christian women whose books are written in gold on purple vellum, and clothed with gems...". From at least the 6th century they are seen in mosaics and other images, such as the 6th century icon of Christ Pantocrator from St Catherine's, Mount Sinai and the famous mosaic of Justinian I in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. The ivory panels often placed in the centre of covers were adapted from the style of consular diptychs, and indeed a large proportion of surviving examples of those were reused on book covers in the Middle Ages. Some bindings were created to contain relics of saints, and these large books were sometimes seen suspended from golden rods and carried in the public processions of Byzantine emperors. Especially in the Celtic Christianity of Ireland and Britain, relatively ordinary books that had belonged to monastic saints became treated as relics, and might be rebound with a treasure binding, or placed in a cumdach.

Byzantine and Western medieval treasure bindings are often not entirely unified in style. Apart from being completed at different times, and sometimes in different countries, elements were also removed and readapted for other volumes or reset with new pieces as time passed. For example the covers now on the Lindau Gospels come from different parts of South Germany, with the lower or back cover created in the eighth century (earlier than the book they now adorn) while the upper or front cover was completed in the ninth century; both incorporate gilded metal ornamented with jewels. It is not known when they were first used on this manuscript.

Outside the monasteries, the emerging bookbinders’ guilds of the Middle Ages were often restricted by law with quantitative limitations on the application of jewels. Though this did not significantly affect the craft of decorating books, it did mandate the number of jewels allowed depending on the position or rank of the commissioner of the work. Hardly any early medieval English treasure bindings survived the dissolution of the monasteries and the English Reformation, when ecclesiastical libraries in England were rounded up and treasure bindings removed under an act to ‘to strip off and pay into the king’s treasury all gold and silver found on Popish books of devotion.’ Comparable depredations were not as thorough in the Continental Protestant Reformation, but most bindings survive from Catholic areas that avoided later war and revolutions.

Despite the commoditisation of book production due to the printing press, the artistic tradition of jewelled bookbinding continued in England, though less frequently and often in simpler designs. Luxury bindings were still favoured by the English Court, which is evident from the records on the private library of Queen Elizabeth I, who favoured velvet bindings. On a visit to the Royal Library in 1598, Paul Hentzner remarked on the books ‘bound in velvet of different colours, though chiefly red, with clasps of gold and silver; some have pearls, and precious stones, set in their bindings.’ Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the style evolved to be one using velvet, satin, silk, and canvas in bookbinding decorated less with jewels and more with embroidery, metal threads, pearls, and sequins.