Parergon

This extraordinary collection of studies is by a group of twelve scholars, each of whom is a leader in their own field, most of whom have worked together in an environment of collaboration and mutual respect at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) for many years. Initially conceived as a one-day symposium at the UAB but cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this book joins its two related predecessors as a paean to the humanities. Like the two earlier books, La Sibila: Sonido. Imagen. Liturgia. Escena (Editorial Alpuerto, 2015) and El Juicio Final: Sonido. Imagen. Liturgia. Escena (Editorial Alpuerto, 2017), this volume was conceived and edited by Maricarmen Gómez Muntané. (The two earlier books were reviewed in Parergon, 36.1 (2019), 200–02.) All three of the books in this series are ‘interdisciplinary’ by virtue of each of the contributors working within (or starting from) their primary discipline and producing a collection that speaks [End Page 261] to the humanities in the broadest sense. However, as this third book demonstrates, each of the authors, while starting within their primary discipline, moves beyond it. While, technically, the contributors can be identified simply as art historians, textual scholars, and musicologists, their material stretches boundaries to address issues of the veneration of saints, movement of relics, architectural history, liturgical and/or sacred space, music, images, iconography, and texts. Indeed, this book, whose subtitle ‘Sounds, Images, Liturgy, Texts’ suggests four separate but complementary strands, leads the reader into a much richer and more complex landscape in which in each chapter some, or all, of the strands are intertwined.

The scene is set in this collection by the thoughtful ‘Prólogo’ by Joan Francesc Mira, and the extensive and informed ‘Introducción’ by the editor Maricarmen Gómez. The twelve chapters range in time from 844 (Daniel Rico, ‘Rabano Mauro: las reliquias romanas y sus inscripciones en verso’) to 2017 (Germán Gan, ‘La doncella de Orléans a escena. Observaciones sobre Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, de Arthur Honegger (y otras músicas in honorem Ioannae Arcensis)’). Additionally, several authors follow both saints and relics from Cappadocia (Manual Castiñeiras, ‘San Jorge, un santo transcultural del Mediterraneo: de Capadocia a Cataluña’) to many areas of Spain and elsewhere (Isabel De Riquer, ‘Pedro el Ceremonioso y Juan I en busca de reliquias: la cabeza de san Jorge y el cuerno del unicornio’; Anna Orriols ‘Certificando el prodigio: narraciones visuales y textuales del traslado y posesión de reliquias en el Medioevo’; Joan Duran-Porta, ‘La reutilización de objetos como contenedores de reliquias en el Medioevo’; and Carles Sánchez, ‘Domingo de la Calzada y los santos constructores: un modelo de santidad al servicio de la apertura de la ruta jacobea’).

It is as if each scholar, from the perspective of vast experience in their own discipline, has been able to draw together material and insights gathered over a career. Each chapter is characterised not only by a wealth of detail, but also by a broad interpretive view that in most cases transcends the conventional boundaries of each discipline.

As a result of this approach, it is impossible to fit each of the twelve chapters neatly into only one of the four strands of the subtitle. For example, the chapter by Maricarmen Gómez, ‘Música y reliquias: de la capilla real de Francia a la capilla real de Aragón (1237–1437)’, moves between music, liturgy, images, and texts. Eduardo Carrero, in ‘San Lesmes, su capilla y su monasterio de San Juan, a las puertas de la ciudad de Burgos’, takes us into the world of liturgy, images, and sacred space in his role of art/architectural historian. In her chapter ‘Relicarios de representación antropomorfa de san Valero en Aragón: bustos y brazos de orfebrería’, art historian Carmen Morte discusses images, relics, and liturgy as she sets the scene for David...