Medieval prayer books held not only the devotions and meditations of Christianity, but also housed, slipped between pages, sundry notes, reminders, and ephemera, such as pilgrims' badges, sworn oaths, and small painted images. Many of these last items have been classified as manuscript illumination, but Kathryn M. Rudy argues that these pictures should be called, instead, parchment paintings, similar to postcards. In a delightful study identifying this group of images for the first time, Rudy delineates how these objects functioned apart from the books in which they were kept. Whereas manuscript illuminations were designed to provide a visual narrative to accompany a book's text, parchment paintings offered a kind of autonomous currency for exchange between individuals-people who longed for saturated color in a gray world of wood, stone, and earth. These small, colorful pictures offered a brilliant reprieve, and Rudy shows how these intriguing and previously unfamiliar images were traded and cherished, shedding light into the everyday life and relationships of those in the medieval Low Countries.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1875 Edition.

Exploring issues of artist patronage, luxury craftsmanship, holy men and women, the decorated word, monasteries, secular courts, and the expressive and didactic roles of artistic creation, Lawrence Nees presents early Christian art within the late Roman tradition and the arts of the newly established kingdoms of northern Europe not as opposites, but as different aspects of a larger historical situation. This approach reveals the onset of an exciting new visual relationship between the church and the populace throughout medieval Europe, restoring a previously marginalized subject to a central status in our artistic and cultural heritage.

The Haggadot commissioned by wealthy patrons in the Middle Ages are among the most beautifully decorated Hebrew manuscripts, and The `Brother' Haggadah - so-called because of its close relationship to The Rylands Haggadah in the collection of the John Rylands Library, Manchester - is one of the finest of these to have survived. Created by Sephardi - or southern - artists and scribes in Catalonia in the second quarter of the 14th century, it sets out the liturgy and sequence of the Passover Seder, a ritual feast by which Jewish families give thanks for the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus. This finely produced facsimile edition begins with an introduction by medieval scholar Professor Marc Michael Epstein, who sets out the background to the Passover and provides an analysis of the manuscript's iconographic scheme. Following are essays on the provenance of The `Brother' Haggadah by Ilana Tahan, head of the Hebrew and Christian collections at the British Library, and on the Shaltiel family, former owners of the manuscript, by Hebrew scholar Eliezer Laine. The book also contains a translation of the poems and commentary in the manuscript by the late Raphael Lowe, former Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew at University College London, and a translation of the Haggadah liturgy.