Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages

Thames and Hudson, 1983 4to (28.5 cm), 341 pp. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket (dj slightly rubbed at extremities). "In this authoritative and innovative study, Professor Calkins has selected a variety of Bibles, liturgical books and devotional books for the laity to show the evolution of manuscript illumination throughout Europe. He ranges from the major monuments of Anglo-Irish or Insular illumination in the seventh to the ninth centuries to the Books of Hours which flourished until the end of the great age of illumination with the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. Showing how text and illumination worked together, he considers the aesthetic impact of a manuscript as a whole: he takes a close look at the visual effect of the two-page display of an open book, at the relationship of decorative accents to major divisions of the text, and at the sequence of illuminations which builds, as one turns the pages, into an appropriate decorative scheme for a particular kind of book. Superbly illustrated, his account is enriched with reproductions of all the illuminations from such masterpieces as the Book of Durrow (with its controversial origins in the seventh century), the Codex Aureus of St Emmeram (produced for the last great Carolingian Emperor) and the Windmill Psalter (from thirteenth-century Canterbury or East Anglia)." (from the publisher's synopsis)