Toward a Global Middle Ages – Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts (Getty Publications –) - Softcover

Keene, Bryan C

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160606598X ISBN 13: 9781606065983

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2019

Synopsis

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: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts' 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 over 160 colour 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.

About this title

Review:

Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts showcases a kaleidoscopic and multifaceted premodern world though decorated books of many kinds. That variegated world, stretching from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia to Austronesia, is offered to the reader through extraordinary images and thoughtful essays that delight, instruct, and surprise us.

With imagination and verve, Bryan C. Keene curates a selection of essays and images that attest how book arts, in conceptualizing and depicting the lived and imagined worlds of their time, played a complex role in forging early globalisms. Those of us who research, teach, and study a Global Middle Ages (gratifyingly, this volume's editor, unlike many scholars, is alive to the problematic character of this now-popular term for naming the past) are richly rewarded by the perspicacity and diversity exhibited in this sumptuous, magnificent volume.

This book should be on everyone's shelves.

--Geraldine Heng, founder and director of the Global Middle Ages Project and Perceval Professor at the University of Texas at Austin

About the Author:

Bryan C. Keene is associate curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum, contributing author to 'Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350' (Getty Publications, 2012), coauthor of 'Sacred Landscapes: Nature in Renaissance Manuscripts' (Getty Publications, 2017) and author of 'Gardens of the Renaissance' (Getty Publications, 2013).

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 160606598X
• ISBN 13: 9781606065983
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296