Review: The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice

Hegnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019

The Missing Pages dramatically begins with a lawsuit filed against the J. Paul Getty Museum. In 1994 the museum had purchased the “missing pages,” the beautifully illustrated canon tables from an Armenian medieval manuscript known as the Zeytun Gospels. After describing the beginning of the lawsuit, the author, an art historian, goes on to use the treatment of the Zeytun Gospels as a narrative frame for the history of what was lost in the Armenian genocide.

Watenpaugh looks at the use of the manuscript as an intact object and the “missing pages” as a separate object. The bound manuscript, while still whole and in the possession of the Armenian Church, was a “sacred and powerful object,” brought out on special occasions to an Armenian community, in a religious setting.  In contrast, the canon tables (the removed pages) are displayed all the time, seen by any museum visitor, in a public space shared with other works of art, not all of which are religious in content. These pages, Watenpaugh points out, are a summation of theological ideas, conveyed on the leaves through particular imagery. Their beauty, while appreciated in a museum setting, was intended to support the importance of the Armenian beliefs.

The missing pages became a symbol of all Armenian heirlooms and artifacts that were lost, stolen, or absconded with during the Armenian genocide. Because Watenpaugh views the Zeytun Gospels as a remnant of a medieval world that is lost forever, she sets out to very thoroughly relate the history of the Armenian people, their culture, and religion. Those not familiar with the Armenian genocide will learn a great deal from The Missing Pages.