Those who have had the chance to hold a medieval manuscript in their hands cannot fail to have been impressed by the feeling of being in touch with a long-passed epoch. Back when a book was a true handicraft and every copy the result of a laborious process, the object was more a work of art than a volatile commercial product. The Mega Square Illuminated Manuscripts puts the reader in touch with amazing medieval illustrations and unique adornments, which document the imaginative power of their creators.

Illuminated manuscripts are among the most beautiful, precious and mysterious works of Western art. Before the printing press was invented, books were produced by hand and their illustration using brightly coloured pigments and gold embellishments was a labour of love and an act of piety in itself. The results are stunning. The works emanating from the scriptoria of monasteries were mainly religious texts, including illuminated bibles, psalters, and works for private devotion known as books of hours. Illuminated Manuscripts describes the origin and history of illumination in the Middle Ages, covering the artists and their techniques, and the patrons who commissioned them. It explains the subject matter found in medieval works, such as saints and Bible stories and the use of ornamental flourishes, and is illustrated with many fine examples of the genre including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells.

The Getty Museum’s collection of illuminated manuscripts, featured in this book, comprises masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance art. Dating from the tenth to the sixteenth century, they were produced in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, England, Spain, Poland, and the eastern Mediterranean. Among the highlights are four Ottonian manuscripts, Romanesque treasures from Germany, Italy, and France, an English Gothic Apocalypse, and late medieval manuscripts painted by such masters as Jean Fouquet, Girolamo da Cremona, Simon Marmion, and Joris Hoefnagel. Included are glistening liturgical books, intimate and touching devotional books for private use, books of the Bible, lively histories by Giovanni Boccaccio and Jean Froissart, and a breathtaking Model Book of Calligraphy.

This book examines a cultural revolution that took place in the Scandinavian artistic landscape during the medieval period. Within just one generation (c. 1340?1400), the Augustinian monastery of Helgafell became the most important centre of illuminated manuscript production in western Iceland. By conducting interdisciplinary research that combines methodologies and sources from the fields of Art History, Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript studies, codicology, and Scandinavian history, this book explores both the illuminated manuscripts produced at Helgafell and the cultural and historical setting of the manuscript production.00Equally, the book explores the broader European contexts of manuscript production at Helgafell, comparing the similar domestic artistic monuments and relevant historical evidence of Norwich and surrounding East Anglia in England, northern France, and the region between Bergen and Trondheim in western Norway. The book proposes that most of these workshops are related to ecclesiastical networks, as well as secular trade in the North Sea, which became an important economic factor to western Icelandic society in the fourteenth century. The book thereby contributes to a new and multidisciplinary area of research that studies not only one but several European cultures in relation to similar domestic artistic monuments and relevant historical evidence. It offers a detailed account of this cultural site in relation to its scribal and artistic connections with other ecclesiastical and secular scriptoria in the broader North Atlantic region.

The twenty-eight essays in this collection showcase cutting-edge research in manuscript studies, encompassing material from late antiquity to the Renaissance. The volume celebrates the exceptional contribution of John Lowden to the study of medieval books. The authors explore some of the themes and questions raised in John’s work, tackling issues of meaning, making, patronage, the book as an object, relationships between text and image, and the transmission of ideas. They combine John’s commitment to the close scrutiny of manuscripts with an interrogation of what the books meant in their own time and what they mean to us now.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Known for their stunning displays of artistry and technique, Italian illuminated manuscripts have long been coveted by collectors around the world. The J. Paul Getty Museum holds the most recently formed institutional collection of its kind in the United States, yet it spans more than eight centuries and reflects many of the extraordinary achievements of the Italian tradition. Made up of whole manuscripts as well as leaves and cuttings, the Getty collection of Italian illumination contains nearly sixty works and includes the Montecassino Breviary, the Ferrarese Gualenghi-d’Este Hours, and the Roman gradual illuminated by Antonio da Monza for Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Other important acquisitions are one of the finest Bolognese Bibles of the thirteenth century; three leaves from the Laudario of Sant’Agnese, the most ambitious Florentine manuscript from the first half of the fourteenth century; and a missal once owned by the antipope John XXIII. This beautifully illustrated volume presents many splendid examples of Italian painting and illumination. Some are by noted artists such as Girolamo da Cremona, Pacino di Bonaguida, and Pisanello; others are attributed to artists known only by their works, such as the Master of Gerona, who is credited with one of the finest miniatures in the collection. This carefully crafted book is sure to become an essential resource for scholars, students, and collectors.

When one thinks of women in the Middle Ages, the images that often come to mind are those of damsels in distress, mystics in convents, female laborers in the field, and even women of ill repute. In reality, however, medieval conceptions of womanhood were multifaceted, and women’s roles were varied and nuanced. Female stereotypes existed in the medieval world, but so too did women of power and influence. The pages of illuminated manuscripts reveal to us the many facets of medieval womanhood and slices of medieval life—from preoccupations with biblical heroines and saints to courtship, childbirth, and motherhood. While men dominated artistic production, this volume demonstrates the ways in which female artists, authors, and patrons were instrumental in the creation of illuminated manuscripts. Featuring over one hundred illuminations depicting medieval women from England to Ethiopia, this book provides a lively and accessible introduction to the lives of women in the medieval world.

This ebook is the complete reproduction of the preserved Voynich Manuscript, formatted for high resolution color ebook reader displays. The Voynich manuscript, also known as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Much of the manuscript resembles herbal manuscripts of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript's script and language remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. As yet, it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a cause célèbre of historical cryptology. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels. None of the many speculative solutions proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified. Illustrations: The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. Following are the sections and their conventional names: Herbal: Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section. None of the plants depicted is unambiguously identifiable. Astronomical: Contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages. Biological: A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them strongly reminiscent of body organs. Cosmological: More circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages and contains a map or diagram, with nine "islands" or "rosettes" connected by "causeways" and containing castles, as well as what may possibly be a volcano. Pharmaceutical: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical; and a few text paragraphs. Recipes: Many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower- or star-like "bullet".