Illuminated Manuscripts and Their Makers

Illuminated Manuscripts and Their Makers PDF Author: Rowan Watson
Publisher: Victoria & Albert Museum
ISBN: 9780810966062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The magnificent pages of medieval missals, books of hours, breviaries, and bibles sparkle with detail illuminating the world in which they were created. This splendid volume, featuring some of the finest illuminated masterpieces from the exceptional collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, details the remarkable collaboration and craftsmanship that went into the creation of these delicate treasures. Close-up details show the intricacies of the various techniques used to create these fragile and rarely seen works. By helping the reader to appreciate the individual elements of illumination--the initials, borders, illustrations, script, and binding--Rowan Watson brings the world of the scribes, illuminators, and book dealers to life, and sheds light on the cooperative religious communities in which many of them worked. Watson also looks at the survival of illumination after the printing press and its revival in the 19th century in the hands of such pioneering designers as Owen Jones and William Morris.

Illuminated Manuscripts and Their Makers

Illuminated Manuscripts and Their Makers PDF Author: Rowan Watson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Illumination- the art of 'lighting up' a page through the use of illustration to break up text and make it more comprehensible. Illuminated Manuscripts and their Makers describes the extraordinary collective skill and artistry that went into the making of these medieval masterpieces and features pages from the finest examples in the collections of the V&A, some never published before. Illuminated manuscripts are widely recognised as among the most beautiful objects of the western world. This is a book about their making- about the many talents involved in producing the missals, books of hours, brevaries and bibles that astonish us still with their richness and beauty. Illuminated manuscripts were collaborative productions, with different specialists contributing script, initials, borders, illustration, and binding to any work. Rowan Watson's study is both scholarly and rich in anecdote; he not only brings individual scribes adn book dealers vividly to life but also throws light on the commercial and religious environments in which they worked, and on the cooperative working practices devised for their production. The illustrations are drawn from the exceptional and largely unpublished collections of the V&A, and the text offeres us an entirely new look at the subject, treating illumination as a key to the history of the period as much as an expression of medieval and Renaissance (and neo-Gothic) styles and sensibilities.

Hidden Hands

Hidden Hands PDF Author: Mary Wellesley
Publisher: riverrun
ISBN: 9781529400946
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
'This book is an expression of love... Sublimely conceived and beautifully written' Gerard DeGroot, The Times 'Immersive, conversational and intensely visual' Helen Castor ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Manuscripts teem with life. They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded. Hidden Hands tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and the wider European culture of which it is part. Without manuscripts, she shows, many historical figures would be lost to us, as well as those of lower social status, women and people of colour, their stories erased, and the remnants of their labours destroyed. From the Cuthbert Bible, to works including those by the Beowulf poet, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas Malory, Chaucer, the Paston Letters and Shakespeare, Mary Wellesley describes the production and preservation of these priceless objects. With an insistent emphasis on the early role of women as authors and artists and illustrated with over fifty colour plates, Hidden Hands is an important contribution to our understanding of literature and history.

Toward a Global Middle Ages

Toward a Global Middle Ages PDF Author: Bryan C. Keene
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 160606598X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
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.

Image on the Edge

Image on the Edge PDF Author: Michael Camille
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780232500
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.

Manuscript Production

Manuscript Production PDF Author: Enluminures (Firm)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780991517220
Category : Illumination of books and manuscripts, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description


The Gilded Page

The Gilded Page PDF Author: Mary Wellesley
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541675096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII “A delight—immersive, conversational, and intensely visual, full of gorgeous illustrations and shimmering description.” –Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author’s status—part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer’s writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people—the grinders, binders, and scribes—in their creation and survival. The Gilded Page is the story of the written word in the manuscript age. Rich and surprising, it shows how the most exquisite objects ever made by human hands came from unexpected places. “Mary Wellesley is a born storyteller and The Gilded Page is as good as historical writing gets. This is a sensational debut by a wonderfully gifted historian.” —Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars

Renaissance Illuminators in Paris

Renaissance Illuminators in Paris PDF Author: Richard H. Rouse
Publisher: Harvey Miller
ISBN: 9781912554287
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Series statement and numbering from Brepols Publishers website.

Beyond Words

Beyond Words PDF Author: Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Publisher: PIMS
ISBN: 9780888442215
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
In the fall of 2016 an international scholarly conference accompanied the exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. The speakers were chosen because of their expertise and because they were known to have research underway pertaining to important manuscripts in the exhibition. The aim of both exhibition and conference was to provide a broad overview of the history of patronage and book production over the course of the High and late Middle Ages, to the extent that the eclectic holdings of Boston-area institutions permitted. Most of the papers delivered at the conference have been collected as essays in this abundantly illustrated volume which, while still linked to the exhibition, now has an independent purpose. Just as the essays cover a wide range of topics, all relating to the history of the book, but also, inter alia, to the history of law, liturgy, literature, and libraries as well as to devotion, theology, and art, so too the approaches adopted by the contributors are as varied as the materials they study, ranging from paleography, codicology, and provenance research to painstaking reconstructions of historical patterns of patronage and the interpretative strategies of authors and artists. What results is not simply a wealth of fascinating insights into individual illuminated books, their makers, and their readers, but also an indication of how much remains to be learned about the materials to which the exhibition served as no more than an introduction.

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts PDF Author: Christopher de Hamel
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698163389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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Book Description
An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts. Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize. A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick! Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too. In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell). From the earliest book in medieval England to the incomparable Book of Kells to the oldest manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, these encounters tell a narrative of intellectual culture and art over the course of a millennium. Two of the manuscripts visited are now in libraries of North America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts allows us to experience some of the greatest works of art in our culture to give us a different perspective on history and on how we come by knowledge.