Repetition, opposition, and invention in an illuminated Meditationes vitae Christi: Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410

The Meditationes vitae Christi, now thought to have been written during the fourteenth century for an anonymous Poor Clare, is perhaps the best-known retelling of Christ's life to emerge from the later Middle Ages. The text invites readers to reconstruct the events in vividly imagined mental pictures. Analysis of one of the earliest illuminated manuscripts of the text, now Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, offers new insights into the role images played in the visually oriented practice of meditation that it prescribes. This article focuses on the pictorial program of MS 410, which repeats whole compositions and parts of compositions to suggest visual analogies and narrative or thematic oppositions. In response to these image-based devices, the reader-viewer of MS 410, possibly a Poor Clare herself, becomes much more than an empathetic beholder of the events of Christ's life; she is stimulated to memorize, to interpret, and, in effect, to invent the Meditationes anew with each reading.