Speculum Spotlight: Child’s Play and the Provenance of the Bodley Alexander (McNamer, O’Mara)

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In this episode of The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast, producer Reed O’Mara sits down with Professor Sarah McNamer about one of the most playful and beloved medieval manuscripts of all time, the Bodley Alexander ((Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264 [Part A, fols. 3–208]). Widely recognized as one of the great treasures of the Bodleian Library, this manuscript has not lacked for scholarly attention. But a fundamental

question remains: For whom was it made? Through a new reading of the bas-de-page scenes and the detection of an embedded game hidden within the decorative program, McNamer’s article builds a case that the book was made for a young prince—specifically, for Lionel of Antwerp (1338–68), son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault. This theory of the manuscript’s origins has implications for genre and for book history: it suggests that the volume can be identified not only as a multimodal speculum principis for a boy, but as a medieval version of a search-and-find children’s activity book.

Sarah McNamer is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Georgetown University, where she has also served as Director of the Global Medieval Studies Program. McNamer’s current research focuses on medieval affect and aesthetics, the Pearl Poet, and literary and cultural patronage at the court of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault.

Reed O’Mara is a PhD candidate and Mellon Foundation Fellow in the joint art history program between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the 2025–27 Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Reed's research focuses on the arts of medieval Germany, and her primary research interests lie in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and Gothic architectural sculpture.

Episode transcript (Note: For a time-dynamic transcript, access the episode through a free podcasting platform such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify.)

Barbara Newman: Greetings. I’m Barbara Newman, the editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Welcome to Speculum Spotlight, our quarterly podcast in collaboration with the Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast. Each episode takes you behind the scenes of an article in our current issue. This month, we feature Professor Sarah McNamer of Georgetown University speaking about her article, “Child's Play and the Provenance of the Bodley Alexander.” This is a deluxe, lavishly illustrated manuscript of Alexander romances. It was undoubtedly produced for a king, but which one, and why? Sarah McNamer offers a remarkable new hypothesis about the patron of this manuscript, proposing it as the first example of a child's activity book in medieval art. The host and producer of this episode is Reed O’Mara, a PhD candidate in the joint art history program between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Reed is currently a Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

Reed O'Mara: Welcome to the Multicultural Middle Ages. I’m Reed O'Mara, and today I'm joined by Sarah McNamer, who I'll be interviewing about a very famous and very luxurious manuscript known as the Bodley Alexander or MS Bodley 264. To begin, I'll set us up by reading the abstract of her article, which appears in the latest issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies.

“Of all the illuminated manuscripts concerning Alexander the Great to survive from late medieval Europe, the Bodley Alexander is the most sumptuous and celebrated. Widely recognized as one of the great treasures of the Bodleian Library, it has not lacked for scholarly attention. Yet a fundamental question remains: for whom was it made? Current scholarship posits that the volume was designed for one of three kings: David II of Scotland, Edward III of England, or Philip VI of France. Through a new reading of the bas de page scenes and the detection of an embedded game hidden within the decorative program, this article builds a case that the book was made not for a king but for a young prince, specifically for Lionel of Antwerp, who lived between 1338 and 1368, and who was the son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault. This theory of the manuscript's origins has implications for genre and for book history. It suggests that the volume can be identified not only as a multimodal speculum principis, or mirror of princes, for a boy, but as a medieval version of a children's activity book in the search-and-find vein.”

To that end, I'll turn now to Sarah. Thank you so much for being here today. Let's dive right into the questions. I think a good way to start us off is to take a look at the manuscript. Maybe you could describe it, what is the Bodley Alexander, and why is it so fascinating to scholars? And also in this vein, how did you come to it?

Sarah McNamer: So, it is a truly magnificent manuscript. Magnificent in its size, in this use of the finest parchment and vibrant colors, a lot of gold leaf. It's beautifully copied and just filled with illustrations of three kinds. One is a set of full-page illuminations of scenes from the Alexander the Great romances, and then many border illustrations with birds and faces and vines.

And then, and this has been the most, uh, uh, you know, celebrated part of the manuscript, these lively bas de page scenes featuring medieval games and pastimes. Um, and they’re just very delightful. So that element of delight is partly what drew me in and kept me looking at this manuscript for quite some time.

And I should say I came to this project kind of by accident. I had a sabbatical leave in the fall of, of 2021, and I spent it in Oxford, and my mission was to really get a good start on the book that I’m working on, which is on the Gawain poet or the Pearl Poet, and I’m exploring the possibility that this poet wrote for the court and even the family of Edward III. So, I had a long list of manuscripts I wanted to see that might have some connection with the court or family of Edward III, and this was on it. So, I would say that I, I came to it thinking about the question of, well, was this made potentially for Edward and his family? But one reason I took it further is partly the availability of both the fully digitized manuscript, which became available in 2018, but also this beautiful facsimile published by Treccani in 2014.

And mere mortals are not allowed to touch the manuscript itself because—

Reed O'Mara: Of course.

Sarah McNamer: —it’s such a great treasure. But the availability of this gorgeous facsimile that sought to replicate the size, the colors, even the feel of the parchment, just made this into a kind of guilty pleasure. So, at the end of every day, when I was done with doing my other work, I would turn back to this facsimile, and I got completely immersed in it and started seeing things that I think, others hadn’t quite seen before.

Reed O'Mara: That's wonderful, and I think we’ll get into some of the insights from that close looking and your prolonged, uh, observation of the manuscript, in just a little bit. But, to return to this sort of “aha” moment perhaps in your research about trying to figure out who may have owned this manuscript, who may have been its viewer, um you have noted in your article that the manuscript was hampered, and I’m using your words here, hampered by a fundamental problem, and in this case, it’s that the origins and its purpose are unclear. And this is despite actually having really clear dates about when the manuscript was made, if I'm, if I'm not mistaken, because it has a really nice colophon. So, when you started exploring, I suppose, who might have made it, who are the figures that everyone seems to have attributed this manuscript ownership to? Like who have people linked it to?

Sarah McNamer: Right. So, it is beautifully dated, and 1338 was when the copyist signed off on it. And then in 1344, one of the illuminators wrote in these shimmering gold letters, “I have finished this in 1344.” It's wonderful. It's a beautifully dated manuscript. So that was at the outset of what would become the Hundred Years’ War, and this seems to have been produced for a king to previous scholars.

That's really the dominant theory, because it's so beautifully produced. It would've been very costly to produce. Mark Cruse, who's done a lot of wonderful work on this manuscript, estimates that it would have cost as much as building a chapel. So really extravagant and beautiful. And also because Alexander the Great was seen as a model king, it’s, you know, the field has been narrowed to kings.

But which of those kings? It was made in the Low Countries and then ended up in England by the end of the century. We know from an inventory of Thomas of Woodstock, who was the youngest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault. It appears to be the book referenced in an inventory of his belongings in 1397. So it's been suggested that it was made for one of three kings: David II of Scotland, because his heraldic device seems to be similar in some ways to that of the fictive heraldic device of Alexander in the manuscript; Edward III for various reasons, not least that his youngest son ended up with it. And then an interesting argument has been made by Mark Cruse that it may have been made for the French king, and that argument is based primarily on the belief that it was made in Tournai, which was loyal to the French king at the outset of the Hundred Years’ War. So those are the possibilities. But when I began looking at it, I noticed two categories of visual evidence that to me were gesturing not towards a mature king as the target audience, but a young boy. So, I began to investigate this possibility that it was made for a young prince.

Reed O'Mara: Yes, and I think it is a very convincing discovery. Before we get into some of the weeds about these different possibilities and how you've positioned this manuscript in the hands of a little boy, a prince, I was wondering if we could go back a little bit and discuss the contents of the book. As you've pointed out, the manuscript program does not just include images illustrating the text of the Alexander romance. There's a lot of other marginal scenes, and we're talking about them being in the bas de page for the most part, which is the lower part of the manuscript page.

Sarah McNamer: Well, first, the Alexander romances themselves are quite remarkable because the main text is the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre in a Picard dialect, but interleaved and interwoven into that very long romance are five shorter romances about Alexander.

So it creates a kind of super Alexander romance, or as Keith Busby has put it, the Bodley Alexander is kind of the ultimate Alexander romance, a kind of verbal and visual Summa Alexandriana. And to say that is to say something really significant because there are gorgeous illuminated manuscripts of the Alexander stories, not only in Europe, of course, but when we’re talking about the multicultural Middle Ages, there are gorgeous Persian manuscripts and even Ethiopian manuscripts having to do with Alexander. So, there's a lot of investment in this figure and what he represents through the Middle Ages. So the visual program is partly, illustrations of scenes from the Alexander romances and then border imagery. But in the bas de page, again, these, these scenes have to do with action, and that's one thing that really, is very striking when you look at these compared to even other copiously illustrated, manuscripts, that these are people on the move.

And as I was looking at them it occurred to me that really it, it had been said that these are figures from the lower classes, and we’re kind of trained to think of the relation between the center and periphery on the manuscript page as one of binary opposition or contradiction or conflict with the bas de page often being a site for transgression or subversion. And so because this is a manuscript that has courtly ideology in the central scenes, those bas de page scenes have been read often as scenes that were subversive. And here we could bring in Michael Camille, who obviously—

Reed O'Mara: Of course!

Sarah McNamer: —is the, the, the genius who really, opened our eyes, I think, to, ways of reading, which are amazing. But he did tend to see subversion almost everywhere in, in, you know, in the bas-de-page.

Reed O'Mara: Truly, truly everywhere.

Sarah McNamer: So, so including in Bodley 264. So, for example, there's one page where, he describes a scene in the upper level where there are courtly figures dancing. He describes a scene of dancers in the bas de page as village folk who are performing this dance wearing animal masks as a kind of transgressive or subversive version of what the courtly figures are doing in their dance in the image above. And so he describes it that way, but when I was looking at this, I thought, “Well, first of all, wait, are these really village or peasant folk? They're wearing very fancy clothing, of the kind that we think of as aristocratic garb.” Stella Mary Newton has written, in Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince specifically about this manuscript, and described in detail these fashions, which are aristocratic or royal fashions. So that's one thing that I was questioning. Are these really peasant folk? And the other thing I noticed, and I'm going to kind of come clean here in a way I didn't in the article itself, and say that one of my advantages, I'm going to put it, in coming to this manuscript, is that I have children, and I am a mother, and I—

Reed O'Mara: I wanted to ask, but I didn't want to ask, because I felt like the article really showed, like, I was like, "She is, she has been around little children and little boys."

Sarah McNamer: So—yeah. So I have actually been around little children and little boys, and I have, daughters myself, but they were very bouncy when they were young, as bouncy as boys, and up to antics and playing games, and on the move all the time. So, I began to see this kind of unifying principle in the bas de page scenes, and that was that this is really theme and variations of boys at play. It’s generally been said to represent a very diverse range of medieval people, but to me, it really is mostly boys at play, and then more specifically, posh boys at play. Um, noble boys, aristocratic boys, and royal boys, um, playing various kinds of games, including a kind of game that has to do with chivalric play. So that’s how I started getting into this and into the possibility that this was made for a young prince.

Reed O'Mara: Thank you. I think this really is quite a revelation in the importance of returning to even popular works of art that maybe have been, quote-unquote, “solved” or, you know, maybe they’ve been interpreted one way, and everyone has taken that way to be fact, when in fact it is still interpretation and may be informed by what is going on at the time. For example, the nineties and an interest in social history. And this is another way to enrich our understanding of this manuscript, but it's also a reminder to always look and look again. I'm very familiar with this manuscript, and I think it is easy to have that Michael Camille lens on some of those dancing figures, but the attention to detail of looking at their fashion, what are the specific games they're playing, what are the connotations of those games and the gestures and behaviors is, is so key with medieval art of this period. So it's really a, as I said, it's a revelation to then look and look again and go, "Oh, wait, I see what she's talking about."

Sarah McNamer: Yeah. Well, I couldn't agree more with that, with looking again, because, you know, we can call it standpoint theory or bring to it what we will, but I think people are situated differently and will see differently and continue to see new things even in the most pored-over manuscripts.

Reed O'Mara: Absolutely.

I think this leads us to a good way to talk about these specific chivalric games that are being depicted, and one of the close readings you do is pointing out that there is a stark difference between the representations of, let's say, adults versus adolescents and boys and girls.

And could you talk a little bit about that just, in greater detail, about how when we remove the lens of class, we see that there really is quite a attention paid to dividing the age of the figures?

Sarah McNamer: I was not the first to see most of these figures as boys because M.R. James did the beautiful facsimile back in the early twentieth century, and a folio-by-folio description where he essentially says, boy, boy, jumping over a hoop. Boy, shooting a, a, you know, a whatever. Adolescents too, youth, playing the drum. Um, and he just is very straightforward about it. So I had backup support for that, that, uh, belief that it was really age rather than social class that was the distinction between what was going on in the bas de page and the main text and the main illustrations.

But because there had been, multiple perspectives on this, I thought, “Well, we can't just assume that they're boys. How do we take that further?” And what I then looked more closely at body-to-head proportions. I mean, how do artists depict boys if, if there are, especially if there are no adults in a particular scene? Sometimes there are adults in scenes, and so the boys are just simply shorter and smaller. But when there are no adults present, you can tell that they're boys because of their head-to-body ratio, which is just going to be larger heads for boys than for grown men. Beardlessness, almost all of these figures in the bas de page have no beards, and that was understood to be the defining, physical marker the adult male face.

And then their, their faces are more rounded, and they have often this mop of curly hair framing the face to make it look even more rounded. The other, aspect of asking who are these figures and what are they doing, is that they're so manifestly playing, and often that is how identity is indexed in medieval manuscripts and art. You know, what is the figure doing? Someone preaching is a preacher; someone plowing is a plowman. So, if they're playing, who are they? They are children, or they're meant to be children or boys, because play was understood to be the most characteristic pursuit of children.

Reed O'Mara: Absolutely. This is great, and it leads me to the question about how do you figure that all of these scenes of play, and particularly as we've discussed, chivalric play, the play of posh boys, how does that comport with the contents of the manuscript, that it is an Alexander that has, as its main miniatures scenes of battle or encountering fantastic people and beasts from the far reaches of the world? How do these things mesh together?

Sarah McNamer: That's a good question. In some ways they don't mesh, but what's happening in the bas de page, I think, is not just that boys are being noble or royal boys (because some of the boys are wearing crowns. We have images of the kind of crowned figure surrounded by boy companions.) They're not just representations of boys, they are invitations to action. Often when I encounter artifacts, I, I'm asking, "Well, who used them?" or, "Who are they designed for?" And here it seems that these are not only depicting boys but were designed for boys to emulate the actions in the bas de page.

So, coming back to this unifying theme of boys at play, it seems to be that these are figures who are modeling for aristocratic boys different kinds of play they can engage in, and the kinds of toys and props they have are ones that only would've been available to the wealthiest or to boys at court. They have puppet theaters. They have fancy traps for catching butterflies. They have all kinds of gear. But one category of play that I see unfolding in these pages is something called chivalric play, and one sign that that’s present is the kinds of bows and arrows and catapults and other military gear that the boys are playing with, including a hobby horse or a quintain. We see for example, a few naked boys clustered together tilting at a quintain. And, you know, one can ask, are those being represented for someone to observe? Not really. They’re I think, meant to inspire the boys looking at this to say, “Hey, wouldn't it be fun to get naked and tilt at a quintain?”

And chivalric play was certainly a concept from the Middle Ages that’s advocated in advice to kings about how to raise their princes. How should a young prince be raised? Well, you should give him a sword to play with when he’s five, and so on. And we know that, that young princes, including the young Plantagenet princes of the sons of Edward III and Philippa, were given these things. For example, I think when the Black Prince would’ve been about six, there are 14 hobby horses that were made for the Christmas festivities—

Reed O'Mara: Oh my!

Sarah McNamer: —apparently for, for him and his companions. So there’s a kind of way that boys, a boy coming to this or a boy and his companions would be seeing all these possibilities for play that then would feed into the education of a young prince who's going to become a knight. And so it's an inculcation into the practices and behaviors of the knights who then enter into the Alexander story.

So the Alexander legend itself is meant to have a kind of exemplary, power. Even at the beginning of the Roman d’Alexandre, the author says, “Hey, listen up all you young boys, because this is where you're going to get a really good model of prowess.” And there's a lot of emphasis in the beginning of the Roman on how precocious young Alexander was as a child learning to tame the fierce Bucephalus and learning how to fight and learning how to do this and wrestle and so on. So these young boys are being asked to imitate Alexander. And so there's an aspect of chivalric play that I was especially, delighted to come across, which I think is a set of images that has the boys in the bas de page playing Alexander. It's especially evident on page, I think it's 67 verso, where a there's a full-page miniature of Alexander, and it depicts, among other things, Enoch bathing in the fountain of immortality against Alexander's orders, because now Alexander himself will not be immortal because Enoch has beaten him to that. So, in the bas de page, that scene is replicated, and those who have viewed this manuscript before call the figures in the bas de page, “Oh, here's Alexander again with Enoch,” and so on. But when I was looking at this again, I thought, “That isn't Alexander. Those are boys playing Alexander.” Because for one thing, Alexander in the, central image is bearded, but there's a beardless, figure in the bas de page, so that seems to be a boy playing Alexander. And then there's this really delightful image of Enoch with dripping hair, but it's clearly a boy with dripping hair riding a pony. So here are these boys riding ponies acting out the story that's depicted in the scenes above. And so that happens there. It also happens in a really lovely series of illustrations around when Alexander is dying, and in the central images, Alexander is surrounded by his men who are wearing his livery, and they're all beginning to mourn for, mourn his death. And in the bas de page, we have these lovely, sweet images of boys, again, short figures with larger heads, they're boys, wearing Alexander's livery and mourning Alexander very expressively, like wiping their eyes and frowning. And, and it so—it seems like an invitation to action, an invitation to boys reading this to not only see these boys playing Alexander, but to participate in that, to imitate. There's a kind of imitatio Alexandri being performed here, and working almost like devotional images do in inviting the readers and viewers of the manuscript to participate affectively in the story.

Reed O'Mara: That's brilliant. This affective way of understanding a manuscript or interacting with a manuscript, I think is, is really of the time, and certainly in such a luxurious and sophisticated manuscript, I think it's very intentional. And just for our listeners, we will be putting a link to the digitized manuscript so that if you want to follow along and look at some of these images, you can.

I think that thinking about these mirrors between what's going on in the bas de page and what's going on in the main image, this idea of playing Alexander, playing all these chivalric games, is very evident, and sort of hidden within the manuscript, you've also found another game that maybe is not so obvious at first, but I think once you see it or once you've read your article, I think it becomes really clear that it's there, and it's a game that you call “Find the Lions.” So I wanted to ask you about, this game that you found and about this manuscript as being an activity book.

Sarah McNamer: So that was really, a fun aspect of working on this project. And when you asked earlier about aha moments, I think about a few days into looking at this manuscript, I had this aha moment where I noticed a lot of imagery of lions, in the background of the scenes or realistic lions, around the borders. And I started seeing how [00:25:00] very many there were, just lion after lion, and began just taking stock and starting to count them. I got up to something like 600 lions in, like, the first however many. And then again, from this experience of, reading picture books with my daughters, I thought, "Could this be a kind of game?" Because it's not only that there are so many lions, but some of them are hidden. You know, without actively looking for them, you would not find them. Some of them are kind of hiding in plain sight, but others are just really hard to find. I began to think that this might be like a search and find game, like Where’s Wally? or Where’s Waldo? or the I Spy books or even Goodnight Moon, which has this little mouse who keeps appearing, right? And obviously I was very skeptical of that because I thought, “Yes, that's my twenty-first-century experience. How can that be possible in the fourteenth century?" And yet, I persisted with that, and I had an amazing research assistant, Madeline Tirschwell, who’s now in art history at Case Western, and I handed this project over to her at a certain point, “Please, please count and find the lions.” And Madeline found amazing instances of hidden lions, where in the architectural facades in some of the main illustrations, there are just lions who are crouching or painted with the faintest white paint, so you would not find them unless you were looking for them.

But there's one example on folio 20 verso, that exemplifies what I would say is the hiding in plain sight aspect of the lion imagery and it's the first full-length miniature, so it has a really important, status in the manuscript as a whole as the very first sort of tone setting. It depicts the floating fort at Tyre, so it’s a fascinating image, and your eye is drawn to Alexander on the left, and then there’s a kind of rhetorical ductus which leads you through the water and the grisly fish swimming in the water, and then you see the floating fort, and it’s a very busy image with lots of interesting angles, and then you see a pretty face looking out the window at this and that. And it’s only when you've been looking at it for a while that you see, oh, what’s going on there in the red background or the red sky? And then there are all of these lion faces painted very faintly with black ink. And altogether there are seventy images of lions on this page, a page that you would not think, looking at it for the first time, had any images of lions. And so it’s clearly that they're there, I think, for the delight of discovery. They have no mimetic purpose there. They don’t have anything to do with the Alexander legend or the story. So it’s really that delight in discovery that I see operating there, and it’s a kind of set of instructions for reading after that, too, that if you like this first page, look more. And it goes all the way through.

So there have been four artists identified here. Well, could this be a quirk of a particular artist? Was it just one of them having fun? But no, even when there’s a change of artists, this is clearly a continuing and consistent part of the decorative program, even up to the very last image of the book, which, is after Alexander’s death, so it doesn’t have anything to do with Alexander, who was said to have the heart like a lion. There are these tiny little pale lion faces looking out from folio 204; the lions have a, a kind of puzzling status here as something extra seemingly extra, that’s woven into the manuscript very consistently, so it’s both extra and essential somehow. My thought there was, well, someone cared enough about getting all these lions in there to have it be a really important part of the decorative program. And I think it does operate as a search-and-find game. And obviously anyone who reads this article can either be persuaded or not by that argument, but Madeline and I have put together an online appendix that lists every example of the lions that we’ve found. And I think that matches up with this idea that it was made for a very young prince who's preliterate. One way to lure children into the world of literacy and books is by giving them games to play, especially these search-and-find games for preliterate readers who can experience pleasure and delight in discovery in that way. So, I think, again, if this was made for a young prince who didn’t even know how to read yet, it would be something that would associate the process of reading and books themselves with delight.

Reed O'Mara: Brilliant. And yes, anyone can go and play the game actually as well. Anyone can get on the—

Sarah McNamer: Yeah

Reed O'Mara: —digital facsimile and go through the manuscript, as I have, I will point out, and you really do just start seeing the lions. And as you point out in your article as well, the lions also give you the reward visually because they're usually looking at you. So, you get this immediate like, “Ha ha! I'm here!” And it’s really great.

Sarah McNamer: That actually was really important. And a lot of them are heraldic lions, so they’re facing to the side, but there's so many who are facing forward, and so eye contact is essential to my argument because again, you know, thinking skeptically, I thought, “Okay, yeah, there are also just lots and lots of birds in the manuscript, but they don't constitute a game in the same way. So, what is it about the lions that might invite the activity of a game?” And one of those things is absolutely eye contact, because when you do discover them, you're rewarded with this instant zing of connection, with a kind of agentic force when you see, “Oh, I see this lion, and the lion's looking at me.” And the lions often have interesting and funny expressions, so that—

Reed O'Mara: Yes.

Sarah McNamer: —is also is rewarding. There are quite a few that are cross-eyed or they're sticking out their tongues. We can never know really whether facial gestures meant the same thing in the Middle Ages, and I think Elina Gertsman especially has been quite good on this, that, okay, do facial expressions mean what we think they mean?

So, it’s important to be cautious about it. But there is evidence that in the Middle Ages, sticking out the tongue was thought of as a comic insult, and I think it’s a childish one. And so, for a child to be rewarded with the image of a lion who’s sticking their tongue out is, is, I think quite fun.

Reed O'Mara: Definitely. It does make you smile or giggle. Perhaps I’m childish, but it made me smile and laugh. And I think the great thing is that we have what clearly is a emphasis on lions across multiple artists, so it’s clearly a part of the commission in some way. And this leads you to a little prince named Lionel.

Sarah McNamer: Exactly. Exactly.

So, Lionel of Antwerp was born in the Low Countries, in Antwerp, of course, while Edward and Philippa were there with their young family at the outset of what would become the Hundred Years’ War. He was born in late 1338 and would’ve been five years old turning six the year that this book was completed. And so, he would've been at an age that would be very suitable for receiving this book. But also, I think there’s a lot of evidence for Edward III and Philippa as being the more likely commissioning agents of this book quite independently of the fact that they had a son named Lionel, but I think the very fact that they had a son named Lionel really, to me, is the chief sign that this was made for, for young Lionel. It’s an unusual name, and it signals that they were thinking in, you know... the two of them were, it seems, quite a, quite a fun couple. Mark Ormrod has written beautifully about them and the high-spirited and ludic ethos that they brought to court culture and to their family culture. And so, it's not out of keeping with that general ethos, to conceive of the two of them, but especially Philippa commissioning this playful book for a young prince. And so, Lionel was five or six when this would’ve been finished. And it seems very fitting that it would be made for him, and then that it ended up in the library of his brother in 1397, that just easy to kind of see how that could happen.

Reed O'Mara: Yeah. And, and sometimes, maybe the easiest path for a manuscript might be the correct one indeed. But even more so, the family, as you tease out a bit in the article, has a sort of self-fashioning related to Alexander, and then Lionel himself, as you point out, uses the imagery of a lion in his later life.

Sarah McNamer: That’s right. That’s right. There was quite a strong attachment to the figure of Alexander the Great by Philippa and Edward. Philippa had a poem commissioned on the death of her father in the same year, 1338/39, in which he’s compared to Alexander. And then the sprawling romance Perceforest, which is fascinating, which she somehow had a hand in the commissioning of, features Alexander in this unusual storyline where he gets shipwrecked and ends up in England and is somehow part of the lineage of the royal family in England.

Reed O'Mara: Okay. Yeah.

Sarah McNamer: So, but even, uh, you know, Edward had pillows commissioned with Alexander on them and so on. So, the family did have this as part of their, kind of family imaginary. And then Lionel signed documents “Leo” or “Lyon.” He is known to Chaucer scholars because it was in his household that we first encounter the young Geoffrey Chaucer. The first record for Chaucer is in the household of Lionel and his wife Elizabeth as a page, and Chaucer says that he wrote something called The Book of the Lion that has never been found, but that again is another suggestion that there was a way that Lionel played with that image of the lion later on.

One thing that I think is just, is very interesting about this manuscript and kind of makes it even more remarkable than scholars have recognized, is that I think generically it’s two things. It’s a mirror for princes, so in a way that there was a lot of experimentation in the fourteenth century regarding what could work as a mirror for a prince. And of course, if we’re defining that genre very narrowly, we would say it’s a didactic work addressed to one who will rule, right? And so, Giles of Rome and others, but especially Giles, is a typical, or classic mirror for a prince. But in the fourteenth century, there's greater interest in other media. So, for example, there are wall paintings that function as mirrors for princes or romances and other forms. And so I think I like Matthew Giancarlo’s definition of this not as a genre, but a genre of genres. And I think this Bodley Alexander is functioning both visually and verbally as a mirror for a young prince.

And so to come back to the bas de page scenes, they’re not functioning in a subversive or transgressive way, but the ideology is absolutely consonant with how a young prince should be shaped according to mirrors for princes at the time. But also the image of the little lions—if the book was made for young Lionel—I think it's just delightful to imagine this young boy looking at these faces that are looking at him. So it’s a kind of delightful instantiation of the mirror of the prince. You know, one little lion looking at another little lion. It’s, it's just really sweet. And so it’s either too good to be true, um, um, or it’s actually something that might confirm the hypothesis I have advanced for this book.

Reed O'Mara: Yeah. I think it’s, it’s the end of your article that says, “If, if it wasn't made for him, it really should have been,” which—

Sarah McNamer: Exactly!

Reed O'Mara: —I think is the only time I've read an article and at the end gone, “Awe.” Like, where you’re like, “Oh, I hope so.” Um, yeah, no, it, it’s really great. And I think another aspect of this that we've, we've touched on, right, is that if it's for a little prince, if it’s for Lionel, it's pre-literacy, but as he goes into literacy, and so he probably would've encountered the manuscript first with a parent, a caretaker of some kind. And to that end, we might talk a little bit about the role of his mother, Philippa, who you've already mentioned here as somebody who is a patron of manuscripts. I'm curious about what you think her role in the commissioning of this book might have been, and also, her rearing of her children into this chivalric mode, this courtly ideal, as it were.

Sarah McNamer: Right. Well first, she is known to have commissioned very elaborate illuminated manuscripts, or not known, I mean, nothing is certain in the Middle Ages at all, right?

Reed O'Mara: If only. If only.

Sarah McNamer: But, but, but strong cases have been made by Katherine Smith, for example, of the Taymouth Hours delightful in its own way commissioned likely by Philippa for Edward’s sister Eleanor, and I myself am persuaded by that argument, but we also know that for Philippa’s wedding to Edward a very elaborate manuscript was commissioned. She would've been quite young at the time, but who knows? There’s a graphic beast fable in the middle of that manuscript, which is the Bibliothèque Nationale, Française 571. And there’s a depiction of Philippa handing a book or holding a book as if she's going to give it to Edward on the first folio. So, whether or not it was commissioned by Philippa herself as sole agent, which we might be a little skeptical of because she was so young, it’s presenting her as the one who commissions it or gives it to Edward. She is known for sure to have commissioned other illuminated manuscripts, prayer books and so on, but she was also obviously the patron of Froissart and Jean de la Motte.

Reed O'Mara: Mm-hmm.

Sarah McNamer: She’s known for importing Flemish fashion to her English court, and so the Flemish savor of the Bodley Alexander with the Picard dialect and with the, even the color palette that was used in the Low Countries would've been something that would be very fitting at her court. She also was very fashion-forward, and even literally with fashions in some of her dresses and so on. She had English mottos embroidered onto them. She wore a famously a squirrel suit that someone's written about. She’s, she’s just very, um, she was—

Reed O'Mara: She seems so fun.

Sarah McNamer: —Yes. And then I think there’s a very delightful set of they're called the Edinburgh Jousting Letters that were recently discovered, transcribed, and translated by Philip Bennett and Sarah Carpenter and I think Louise Gardner, and they also depict scenes of what seems to have been a set of performances for a Christmas feast that have all kinds of sexual innuendo and sort of—it’s, it’s very, very much a, a playful ludic ethos at work in what seem to be kind of scripts for performance at, a Christmas feast hosted by Philippa and her women. So, she seems to have been a lot of fun. She also had very extensive connections in the Low Countries. She was from Hainaut. Her mother was living there. So just practically speaking, how could somebody commission this in the Low Countries, she would’ve had all the connections needed for that.

Reed O'Mara: It’s a convincing case. And certainly she does seem like she would be great at a dinner party.

Going back to the manuscript, now that we have a sense of who may have commissioned it, its intended reader, as it were, could we talk a little bit more about multimodal reading and the ways in which a reader could have encountered this manuscript, or really I should say readers encountered this manuscript.

Sarah McNamer: So one thing to just clarify is that I don't believe this ever would've been put in the hands of a five or six-year-old boy and his companions unsupervised. I mean, it's just way too expensive for that. But like today, where typically young children read books with their parents it would've been supervised in various ways. It probably also would've been part of an occasion to bring out this beautiful book and allow not only the child, but others around him to read it. It would've invited attention from people of other ages and so on. When I talk about, the temporally layered reading, what I’m imagining there is that a young boy would’ve come into this with some set of ways of connecting purely to the verbal. He would’ve heard the story read aloud to him, but to the visual images. But I could imagine in adolescence a boy then gravitating towards the Roman d'Alexandre for other reasons, for what it says about statecraft or military exploits or jousting techniques or whatever it is. It offers something to every stage of a boy’s life through adulthood even.

Pragmatically, a mother would be thinking in those terms too, because what can he grow into, right? This is the kind of book that it’s not easy to see it as just a children’s book or children’s literature, and that's one thing that made me quite skeptical at the beginning, because typically we think of children’s manuscripts and how to identify them as manuscripts with large lettering that a child would pretty much grow out of fairly, fairly quickly, but this one seems to have that kind of sense of layered readings built into its very structure.

Reed O'Mara: Yes, absolutely. And making a manuscript, particularly an illuminated manuscript of this scale is an investment, so you don’t want it just for your child’s fifth and sixth birthday, as it were. You want it to be something, as you said, that can go through different stages of their life. And it sounds like this book not only is, in some ways, training in regards to, courtly behaviors, courtly ideas, chivalric ideals, this mirror of princes concept, but it’s also training about how to see, in as much as it’s how to encounter text and how to read.

I think, though, we have a really important question to ask you as we close out the podcast today, which is, do you have a favorite image or a favorite lion in this manuscript?

Sarah McNamer: Yeah. I think the favorite image I think would be of the bas de page scenes is folio 67 verso, where we're seeing Enoch being led very seriously off to prison because he’s, he’s got this dripping hair, but they're all riding these ponies, and it’s just so, so sweet. But the favorite lions, it’s really hard. I, I love the blue lion faces on 88 verso, where they’re just there in the background, but then you look closely, and they’re cross-eyed, they’re sticking out their tongues and so on. There are a couple of lions on 43 verso. There’s a lion Atlas, and then there’s a, a stork. Let’s see. I don't know where the stork is, but both of them are lions who, you know, they’re supporting somebody else. Above the lion atlas, there’s a, a very large hybrid woman blowing a trumpet. And the expression on the lion’s face as he’s looking at the, the viewer and just kind of saying, “Help, she's heavy!” You know, it's sort of a very expressive, face. Or there's a stork standing on a lion, and he's kind of raising his eyebrows, and he looks very surprised. And, um, so they're very expressive. But I, I think probably my favorite would have to be in the image of Alexander and Bucephalus in the storm, which is so sweet and expressive.

Reed O'Mara: Oh, I love that image.

Sarah McNamer: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s going to be on the cover of this Speculum issue. Alexander and Bucephalus look so sad and dejected. This is 65 recto. But then as you look more carefully, you see, oh, there’s a lion face on Bucephalus’s saddle, and he's sticking out his tongue and looking at me. So, there’s this kind of flash of delight. I really like Paul Binksi’s words about delight. So, he describes the beautiful immediacy, the instant flash of humor in which delight lies, and I think we have so much of that in this beautiful manuscript.

Reed O'Mara: Indeed. I think that’s really true, and I think that’s a great place to end.

So, thank you so much, Sarah. This has been a really wonderful and enlightening conversation. For anyone who wants to read the article, you can find it in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today, and I hope everyone goes and digitally clicks through this manuscript.

Sarah McNamer: Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Barbara Newman:  Many thanks to Sarah McNamer and Reed O’Mara for this fascinating conversation. Check out our July issue online and count the lions for Lionel. In addition, I want to thank the Speculum editorial staff, Ben Weill and Lily Stewart, and the Medieval Academy itself for co-sponsoring this podcast. Music for the MMA is by Anna O’Connell. I’m Barbara Newman, editor of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, published by the University of Chicago Press. If you join the Medieval Academy, you'll receive a subscription to both print and digital editions. Online, you can find us at journals.uchicago.edu. We’ll be back in October with the next episode of Speculum Spotlight.

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