A Thousand Words
The Beekeepers—Exultet Scroll
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
This scene of medieval beekeepers demonstrates that beekeeping has remained virtually unchanged for a thousand years. At the left, a man in a blue tunic and fancy striped hose has opened a box hive identical to ones used today and is cutting honeycomb into an extractor. Beside him, a helper in red catches the honey in a jug. To the right, two barefoot men are capturing a swarm: one cuts the branch on which they cluster, while the other entices them into a box with a jar of honey. Bees as big as songbirds fill all the blank spaces and bury their faces in bright red flowers. The beekeepers all have rosy cheeks, which mark them as the products of an eleventh-century Benedictine scriptorium; presumably the red dots signify the healthy glow that comes of the monastic combination of work and prayer.
The beekeepers are not, as one might suppose, an illustration of secular life, such as one might find in a later Book of Hours. Rather, they are an illustration of a verse of the Exultet, the great song of praise sung after the lighting of the Paschal candle at the Easter Vigil, the apex of the liturgical year. Towards the end of the prayer, the deacon offers the Paschal candle, symbol of the risen Christ, to the Father:
O holy Father, accept this candle, a solemn offering,
The work of bees and of your servants' hands.
Bees, who for the most part do lead chaste and industrious lives, were thought from the time of Virgil's Georgics to reproduce virginally, and thus became symbols of the Virgin's bringing forth of Christ into the world. (It is for this reason that beeswax candles are specified for liturgical use.)
These particular bees and their keepers come from a set of manuscripts special to the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and the surrounding area, dating from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Monte Cassino, the cradle of Western monasticism, was founded by St. Benedict in the sixth century but was destroyed by the Lombards shortly after its founding; it was then rebuilt, and sacked again by the Saracens in 884. For two centuries the region was buffeted by warfare between the Ottonians, the Normans, and the Byzantines, and only in the eleventh century was an ambitious program of rebuilding begun by the Abbot Desiderius, later Pope Victor III. Under his guidance, the scriptorium was restored, and the Exultet Scrolls came into being.
To Be Seen & Proclaimed Aloud
By that time, the scroll was already an antiquated format. The codex, the modern form of the book, offered compactness, sturdy portability, and easy access to any part of the text, and so it had largely replaced the scroll by the end of the fourth century. The scroll format was reserved for music, solemn liturgical and legal proclamations, and any important functions that were sung or spoken aloud. (Interestingly, it is around the fourth century that silent reading came into common use; Augustine remarks upon Ambrose's practice of silent reading as something quite out of the ordinary. Reading was assumed to be done aloud.) The Exultet Scrolls were meant to be proclaimed aloud, and to be seen as well.
Notice that the text and music accompanying the bee scene are written upside down. Another illustration on the scroll shows us why: as he sang the Exultet, the deacon unrolled the scroll over the edge of the pulpit or ambo so that the congregation could see the pictures right side up, while the upside-down text and music read correctly from the singer's point of view. The scrolls are quite large, so that the illustrations could be seen; no doubt the bees were drawn as big as they are for visibility from afar. Remaining examples of Exultet Scrolls range in size from about a foot to two-and-a-half feet wide, and could be as long as 27 feet.
Since the Exultet Scroll was new, artists had a certain scope for invention, and drew upon a variety of sources for their imagery. In addition to our beekeepers, the Vatican scroll shown here includes a more-or-less literal rendering of most of the verses (parts of the scroll are lost). We know that Desiderius hired artists from Byzantium, and in this scroll we find Mater Ecclesia and the crowds of angels wearing distinctly Byzantine vestments, while the Harrowing of Hell directly quotes the Eastern Anastasis (Figure 1).
"Rejoice, oh Earth," however, becomes a curious female figure rising up out of the ground and suckling an ox and a serpent, perhaps a figure taken from some Antique source (Figure 2). Other figures, like the deacon at the ambo and the beekeepers, must have been taken from life. I know of no imaginative precedent for the rendering of Adam and Eve: Eve takes the fruit from the serpent's mouth while he slily wraps his tail around her ankles, and she feeds Adam with a spoon while he guides her hand to his mouth. Still others, like the images of the emperor and the pope, are generalized portrayals: the pope is simply labeled "Papa," while the emperor's name seems to have been scraped out and replaced at least once with changing political fortunes.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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