Scribes and Illuminators by
Illuminated manuscripts survive in great numbers from the Middle Ages. They are often beautifully preserved, enabling us to appreciate the skilled design and craftsmanship of the people who created them. Christopher de Hamel describes each stage of production from the preparation of the vellum, pens, paints and inks to the writing of the scripts and the final decoration and illumination of the book. He then examines the role of the stationer or bookshop in co-ordinating book production and describes the supply of exemplars and the accuracy of texts. He follows the careers of a number of specific scribes and illuminators who emerge not as anonymous monks but as identifiable professional lay artisans. He also looks at those who bought the completed books, why they did so, and how much they paid. His survey ranges from the eleventh century through the golden age of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the luxurious manuscripts existing at the invention of printing.
French Books of Hours by
The Book of Hours was a 'best-seller' in medieval and early modern Europe, the era's most commonly produced and owned book. This interdisciplinary study explores its increasing popularity and prestige, offering a full account of the Book of Hours as a book - how it was acquired, how it was read to guide prayer and teach literacy and what it meant to its owners as a personal possession. Based on the study of over 500 manuscripts and printed books from France, Virginia Reinburg combines a social history of the Book of Hours with an ethnography of prayer. Approaching the practice of prayer as both speech and ritual, she argues that a central part of the Book of Hours' appeal for lay people was its role as a bridge between the liturgy and the home. Reinburg describes how the Book of Hours shaped religious practice through the ways in which it was used.
Studies in Manuscript Illumination, 1200-1400 by
The author is Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History emerita at New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, and a leading authority on English medieval manuscript illumination. This volume brings together twenty-eight of Professor Sandler's studies, focusing on illustrated manuscripts produced in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly on the illuminated psalters. They are arranged under four headings, 'Marginalia and Word Imagery, ' 'Devotional, Visionary and Self-Images, ' 'Illustrated Encyclopedias and Scholarly Texts, ' and 'Studies of Individual Manuscripts, Artists and Themes.' The marginal illustrations in the psalters are a topic of particular interest, and there are a number of iconographic studies derived from this material. A second section features essays that look at the effect of manuscript imagery on its viewing, reading, and meditating audience. The third section deals with the illustrated encyclopedias of the period, particularly the Omne bonum, a fourteenth-century manuscript compiled and written by James le Palmer, a scribe in the London Exchequer. A final section deals with a number of manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in particular East Anglian works such as the Peterborough and Ramsey Psalter
The Medieval Book by
For centuries philologists, linguists, and historians have read medieval books to study the language of a given work or to establish an accurate and readable text. Art historians also have considered illuminated manuscripts as important repositories for works of art. But in recent decades new interest has developed in the over-all physical format of the medieval book and its historical context - how manuscript books were made and how they have deepened our understanding of the intellectual and social milieu of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. One of the richest storehouses of early manuscripts is Yale University's Beinecke Library. Its collection provides the basis for Barbara Shailor's fully illustrated study of the medieval book and its place in society. Shailor first examines the manuscript books as an archaeological artifact of a period when mass-production was unknown and every volume had to be written and assembled by hand. She then groups books by genre - both religious and secular - to show how the contents of a volume and its function within society influenced its physical appearance and the way in which it was produced. A brief look at the transition from manuscript to printed book concludes the survey. Originally published by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1988, this work has quickly become an indispensable guide for scholars in a wide range of medieval studies.
Introduction to Manuscript Studies by
Providing a comprehensive and accessible orientation to the field of medieval manuscript studies, this lavishly illustrated book by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham is unique among handbooks on paleography, codicology, and manuscript illumination in its scope and level of detail.
Unfinished by
A groundbreaking investigation into the evolving concept of the unfinished, from the Renaissance to the present day This groundbreaking book explores the evolving concept of unfinishedness as essential to understanding art movements from the Renaissance to the present day. Unfinished features more than 200 works, created in a variety of media, by artists ranging from Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cézanne to Picasso, Warhol, Twombly, Freud, Richter, and Nauman. What unites these works, across centuries and media, is that each one displays some aspect of being unfinished. Essays and case studies by major contemporary scholars address this key concept from the perspective of both the creator and the viewer, probing the impact that this long artistic trajectory--which can be traced back to the first century--has had on modern and contemporary art. The book explores the degrees to which instances of incompleteness were accidental or intentional, experimental or conceptual. Also included are illuminating interviews with contemporary artists, including Tuymans, Celmins, and Marden, and parallel considerations of the unfinished in literature and film. The result is a multidisciplinary approach and thought-provoking analysis that provide valuable insight into the making, meaning, and critical reception of the unfinished in art.
Books of Hours Reconsidered by
For over three hunderd years, more Books of Hours were made than any other type of book, even the Bible. From c. 1225, when the first Books of Hours began to appear, to 1571, when during the Counter-Reformation Pope Pius V prohibited the use of all existing Books of Hours, nearly every European family of a certain means owned a Book of Hours. Books of Hours Reconsidered presents recent research on this medieval bestseller in twenty-one essays written by international scholars. The scholarship in this volume helps instill Books of Hours with new life and give them new meaning at a moment when interest in Books of Hours is on the rise.
The Art of Devotion, 1330-1500 by
One of the mainsprings of the revolution in art that took place throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages was the growth and development of individual piety or "private devotion." The movement began among monks, in the cloister, but soon spread to the castle and to patrician houses in the rich cities as clergy and laity alike sought to achieve personal salvation, often using beauty as an aid to achieve "nearness" to the divinity. In this book, filled with color reproductions of devotional art across many media--ivory, manuscript illumination, painted panel, wood sculpture--by artists ranging from Ambrogio Lorenzetti to Mantegna and Memling, the authors demonstrate how the movement affected both the iconography and style of European art between 1300 and 1500. This book is among the first to explore in-depth the accepted disciplines and aids to prayer that circulated in the late Middle Ages and bring them into the context of surviving art works. Individual works of art are studied to see how they functioned for their owners as activators of the imagination, as focal points for their special devotions, as vehicles to the "real" other world of God and the saints. Combining acute sensitivity to the individual work of art with a broad grasp of its historical context, this book is reminiscent of the contributions made by Erwin Panofsky and Sixten Ringbom to this area of art history.
