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.

This collection of essays examines the various dynamic processes by which texts are preserved, transmitted, and modified in medieval multi-text codices, focusing on the meanings generated by new contexts and the possible reader experiences provoked by novel configurations and material presentation. Containing essays on text collections from many different European countries and in a wide range of medieval languages, this volume sheds new light on common trends and regional differences in the history of book production and reading practices.

This volume includes contributions presented at two conferences, in Mainz (Germany) and Jerusalem (Israel). The articles present a number of new discoveries of binding fragments in several European libraries and beyond.

The European manuscripts of the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library constitute the world's largest collection of Western manuscripts relating to India and South Asia. They comprise about 300 collectons of private papers of British statesmen, soldiers, administrators, scholars, explores, missionaries, businessmen and others, and some 3000 smaller deposits containing documents of historical importance or curiosity. This catalogue provides a complete summary of the Collections' holdings of European manuscripts.

This beautifully illustrated volume explores the richness of the J. Paul Getty Museum's holdings in German and Central European manuscripts from the ninth to the eighteenth century. This book showcases full-color reproductions of masterpieces from such works as Carolingian manuscripts of the ninth century; several sumptuously illuminated Ottonian texts from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries; two of the most celebrated examples of Romanesque illumination: the Helmarshausen Gospel book from the 1120s and the Stammheim Missal, made around 1170 for Saint Michael's monastery in Hildesheim; The Life of the Blessed Hedwig from 1353, and the only known illuminations by the Cologne painter called the Master of Saint Veronica, ca. 1400. It also illustrates many richly colored illuminations from such manuscripts as a luxury psalter made in Würzburg, dating from the mid-thirteenth century; a copy of Rudolf von Ems's Weltchronik, produced in the early fifteenth century; and chivalric and dynastic manuscripts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.