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from about 990 to 1020.²⁰ The text consists of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with the preliminary matter proper to each (prefaces and chapter lists).²¹ At the beginning of the book (fols. 3v–9r) appear three out of the four standard Jerome prefaces, excluding the letter to Eusebius that starts “Ammonius quidem.” The number and order of these prefaces are shared by several Saxon manuscripts, of which some are attributed to Hildesheim and others to the imperial abbey of Corvey.²² A list of pericopes for the use of Saint Michael’s monks concludes the work (fols. 218v–231r); it notes the readings for the main feasts of the liturgical year. The pericopes’ inclusion suggests the manuscript’s potential function as a service book.²³

      With its peculiar combination of visual sophistication and naïveté, full of dramatically gesturing figures and covered in the saturated colors of densely ornamented surfaces, the Bernward Gospels is the most extensively decorated of the manuscripts produced for Bernward. Its decoration begins with a minium drawing that depicts Matthew as his symbol, the angel; a dedicatory painting follows. The codex also includes four author portraits of the evangelists, four title pages featuring elegant lines of Roman capitals, and one to two densely ornamented incipit pages per gospel—relatively standard fare for gospel books. More idiosyncratic are the twenty-four miniatures inserted into the codex that illustrate scenes from the New Testament.²⁴ The pictures are organized into four groups, each designed to introduce one of the gospels, yet their presence frequently disrupts the physical structure of the codex.

      An analysis of the manuscript’s codicology indicates the following collation: 1², 2⁸, 3⁶, 4–5², 6–15⁸, 16–17¹⁰, 18–20⁸, 21⁶, 22–24⁸, 25², 26–32⁸, 33² (see fig. 2 and appendix). Irregularities occur in all of the quires that contain paintings. The miniatures disturb the organization of the text throughout the manuscript and clearly created a challenge for the manuscript’s binder. Particularly infelicitous is the arrangement of the seventeenth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth quires, which contain illustrations for the gospels of Luke and John, respectively.

      The New Testament scenes in Luke form part of the seventeenth quire; these appear on the recto and verso of the second bifolium, marked today with the numbers 111 and 118. The first illuminated folio (fol. 111) interrupts the gospel’s chapter list (fols. 110 and 112–116), while a second group of pictures (on fol. 118, the other half of the bifolium) appears between the gospel’s incipit page and illuminated initial (fols. 117 and 119, respectively). The paintings’ location thus leaves the two sets of pictures separate from each other even though they are painted on the same piece of vellum. It also means that the gospel text is interrupted. The problem stems from the attempt to add a painted bifolium into the gospel of Luke at a relatively logical point in the text—somewhere between the prefatory material and the main text—where the scribe had not allowed for it with any quire break.

      The binder faced similar difficulties with the gospel of John. He responded by inserting the bifolium of figural scenes as an independent codicological unit that now forms the twenty-fifth quire (fols. 174–175). Consequently, all these miniatures appear in uninterrupted sequence. Yet they mark the shift from the gospel of Luke to that of John, appearing where we would expect to find the gospel’s prologue; this prologue actually starts on the following, twenty-sixth, quire (fol. 176r–v). The title page (fol. 178v) and illuminated incipit (fol. 179r) also form part of that quire. They follow the prologue to John and are thus separate from the rest of the gospel’s decoration. Again the binder seems to have worked unsuccessfully to organize a sequence as close as possible to a decorative scheme found in many Saxon gospel books, one that consists of an evangelist’s portrait followed by a title page and illuminated incipit. This sequence is disrupted because of the need to accommodate the additional historiated bifolia.

      Writing about the Bernward Gospels in 1909, Hans Heinz Josten assumed its codicological irregularities occurred during a later rebinding, while more recently Rainer Kahsnitz has attributed them to the first binding, citing the Hildesheim scriptorium’s inexperience with elaborate picture cycles as their cause.²⁵ Indeed there is evidence from the book covers of a twelfth-century intervention in the binding of the Bernward Gospels.²⁶ Yet several aspects of the codex’s physical appearance suggest that the plans for the Bernward Gospels changed during the course of its production, allowing it to expand from a modestly decorated work into a more ambitious and eclectically illustrated codex filled with unusual iconography.

      Codicological irregularities, likely already present in the first binding of the leaves, are due to a decision to expand the pictorial program at some point during production. If we remove the inserted painted bifolia from consideration and examine only the quires that include both decorated pages and plain text, the layout would allow for two to three sides of paintings between each gospel’s prefatory material and main text. This arrangement would have accommodated at least an author portrait and one to two title pages, which is consistent with the arrangement in other manuscripts produced at Hildesheim, such as the Guntbald Gospels (Hildesheim, DS 33), ca. 1011, and the Hezilo Codex (DS 34), variously dated to the late tenth or early eleventh centuries; it would also agree with the design of a group of closely related gospels produced in Corvey.²⁷ In this hypothetical layout, the decoration for Matthew, Mark, and Luke would start in each case at the end of a quire (quires 3, 12, and 17; fols. 15, 75, and 117), while the paintings for Luke would still appear within quire 17 (fol. 117v). Quire 17 would have the more usual (for the Bernward Gospels) eight leaves, or four bifolia, instead of the current ten.

      Because of the organization of the textual quires, adding the painted bifolia to the codex allows for only two possible binding schemes. The first option involves gathering the narrative scenes into a single quire, which would, however, separate these paintings from the author portraits and decorated text pages. The second option requires the bifolia to be inserted as close as possible to the prefatory material of each gospel, even where it means interrupting the text. The placement of the illustrations for the gospel of Mark suggests that the scriptorium chose the second solution and adopted it before completing the miniatures but after laying out the text. The miniatures in Mark appear not on independent bifolia but as an integral part of quires 12 and 13; each painted leaf therein is one part of a bifolium that has text on its other part and, as with the bifolia inserts, the paintings appear in the following sequence: first narrative scenes, then an author portrait, and finally, decorated title pages.

      What of the possibility that the codicological irregularities stem from the scriptorium’s inexperience working with narrative picture cycles? The scribe may have been using a model that had only limited decoration, and, tasked with incorporating a full pictorial program into the Bernward Gospels, may not have known how to modify the codex’s layout to accommodate more paintings. Yet before making the Bernward Gospels, the Hildesheim scriptorium had already produced the Guntbald Gospels in a very regular layout of quires of eight leaves that allowed five sides to illustrate each gospel; in its present irregular arrangement, the Bernward Gospels also has five to six sides available to illuminate each gospel. If the Bernward Gospels had been intended to carry an extensive pictorial cycle, a suitable model for its current appearance already existed in Hildesheim.

      The strongest evidence that the plans for the pictorial program evolved during the manuscript’s production is the full-page drawing that currently opens the pictorial cycle in Matthew (fol. 15r; fig. 3). The picture conflates the evangelist Matthew with his symbol and occupies a shorter but wider pictorial field than the other illustrations of the manuscript; unlike those, it also lacks a frame. The drawing’s composition differs substantially from the painted portraits of the evangelists (fols. 19r, 76r, 118v, and 178v; plates 6, 9, 13, and 17). Each of these is portrayed in the lower half of a divided pictorial field. The drawing’s style is both looser and

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