Underscoring that the simulated objects play a commemorative function is that they are treasury objects, and what the parallels between the Bernward Gospels and Uta Codex further make clear is that by displaying a group of simulated objects, each highlighted for their precious and symbolic materials but only sparsely identified, these Ottonian miniatures deliberately translate a construct that would have been very familiar to medieval audiences: the treasury list. One such inventory from the Hitda Codex (Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, HS1640), dating to the first third of the eleventh century, provides a useful comparative example. The document (fol. 1v) lists objects added to the treasury of Meschede, in the Cologne diocese, by a certain Abbess Hitda.83
The wandering Hitda, guardian of this place, gave these offerings to God and Saint Walburga on behalf of herself and her own in accordance with a vow. Crosses: III, decorated with gold and precious stones and one out of gold and ivory. A statue of holy Mary made with gold and precious stones and wearing a small cloak. Book: I with gold and gems, and two golden. Golden censer: I. Banners: IV. Ampullas: III, one onyx, II crystal. Napkins: III. Chasuble: I with silk and a gold stole. III icons. Three caskets. Hangings: II. Curtains: III. One leather. Small vessels: II for the use of the sacrifice, one of precious stones and the other of ivory. Pillows: III scarlet ones for the purpose of carrying books. If anyone should remove or reduce any part from the holy use, let them be cursed.84
Hitda’s portrait follows just a few folia after this text (fol. 6r). There the abbess stands directly before Saint Walburga, supporting a proffered codex with both hands.85 The saint responds by grasping the book at its top edge with her right hand. The miniature portrays the two unusually close, standing in the same space and not only linked through their hold on the book but also through their gaze.
As in the Bernward Gospels and Uta Codex, the object that serves as the site of Hitda’s inventory also mediates her communication with the saint. In one of the better known miniatures of this codex, the painting of Christ in Majesty,86 the power of the manuscript to serve as material host in a reciprocal process of communication between earth and heaven is established by a titulus on the facing page: “this visible product of the imagination represents the invisible truth whose splendor penetrates the world through the two-times-two lights of the new doctrine.” The term “imagination” here (imaginatum in the Latin) implies a dynamic process in which the viewer moves from the image to the contemplation of the divine and back again.87
Hitda’s treasury list also illustrates a characteristic feature of such documents—the way in which their format serves to emphasize the treasury’s accrued value. Medieval inventories repetitively enumerate the number and type of objects along with their luxurious materials (in Hitda’s inventory: gold, gems, ivory, and silk). In so doing the texts convey the treasury’s formal qualities as a subtly varied group of related objects whose dominant characteristics are preciousness and material similarity. The dedicatory painting in the Bernward Gospels shares these formal features with Hitda’s text. Textile patterns decorate the painting’s background, serving to create flat surfaces of delicately varying colors that present the illusion of silken parchment.88 The effort to produce that effect is especially apparent on the left folio, where the choice of color and pattern in Bernward’s green chasuble causes the figure to blend somewhat into the green patterned ground. Over the opening’s silken surface accrues gold and silver, which create a shimmering and subtly varying effect. Together, these real and simulated materials contribute to the thesaurization of the page.89 By means of this display of accumulated wealth, the painting underscores the actual and symbolic value of the treasury, both of which informed how medieval donors and recipients understood the gift-giving process through which medieval treasuries were constituted.90
As a depository of both monetary and symbolic capital, the medieval treasury had the capacity to carry memoria. Yet the early medieval treasury was essentially a mass of miscellaneous gifts.91 Consequently, its commemorative associations depended on how the gifts’ recipients shaped the meaning of that mass. In 1967, Bernhard Bischoff edited 151 documents from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries that pertain to the treasuries of diverse religious communities.92 For the most part, the texts drafted for that purpose state that they record the treasury in its contemporary form, using variations of hic est thesaurus (this is the treasury) or, quite commonly, commemoratio, literally “commemoration” of the treasury. A few rare cases emphasize that the documents act as the testimony of a witness by using verbs for “to see,” videbatur (for example, no. 46), or “to discover/find” (no. 96). Some include formulas such as augmentabantur (augmented), indicating a subgroup of the treasury added under the most recent abbacy or episcopacy (nos. 17, 25, 44, 76).
All these documents also follow the conventions described earlier. They index objects in an abbreviated format that emphasizes the number and material for each category of object, underscores the treasury’s value, and only occasionally includes contextual information such as an object’s function or the name of a donor. Moreover, despite their claims to the contrary, these documents do not serve as unproblematic records. Rather, they are attempts to construct memory, especially by the Ottonian period, when treasury inventories were more commonly written by the treasury’s owners than in earlier times.93 These owners selectively list works from the treasury, in effect collecting them, and narrate the resulting group of objects in ways that serve the community’s contemporary purposes.94
Constantly in flux as communities received goods and then recirculated them, treasuries offered donors and recipients numerous opportunities not only for making but also for changing memory—a process that required the creation of a “record” of some kind. Although such records depended to some extent on objects’ actual preexisting commemorative associations, they also worked to structure those associations’ meaning, readily eliding, shifting emphasis, perhaps deliberately confusing, and even sometimes entirely inventing them.95 Donors had to understand that in that process, their commemoration hinged on the capacity of their gifts to project, fix, and stabilize their image and presence in the recipients’ memory not only in the present, but also in the future.
Such manipulations of the treasury record to shape memory relate closely both to medieval mnemotechnic and commemorative practices, the mental picturing of the thesaurus as an organizational system being a fundamental process in the creation of both types of memory and composition, inventio being memory’s most vital tool.96 Medieval records of the treasury and its donors thus employ a cognitive structure that, because it is reused, continuously performed, and linked to sacred objects, has the potential to fix communal memory. Yet that memory remains something that is inherently disorganized and unstable.97 Against that background, each new instance of creating a treasury list must be understood in two ways: first, as an attempt to establish and fix memory at a particular moment in time, and second, as a practice meant to maintain this memory in concrete things, objects that existed outside of the record itself. By picturing the treasury, the Bernward Gospels aimed both to create the memory of a moment of great personal significance to the bishop—the foundation of Saint Michael’s Abbey together with the offering of the gospels—and to prompt a commemorative response from the monks which might stabilize that memory.
In sum, the dedication painting explores multiple themes: from the praxis of memoria to the exegetical treatment of Christ’s Incarnation; from expectations about gift-giving to ideas about the Eucharist; and from views of the relationship between the earthly and the heavenly church to notions about the