This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns' libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book."

In the 1790s the sculptural decoration of many French cathedrals was destroyed, and monastic churches were stripped of their royal and noble tombs. As a result, modern art historians have remained largely unaware of the link between architectural sculpture and monumental tomb sculpture. Some years ago, Anne Morganstern recognized the hand of a master sculptor who worked at Chartres in the little-known tomb of a nobleman. This connection prompted the author to investigate the relationship between the two. In High Gothic Sculpture at Chartres Cathedral, the Tomb of the Count of Joigny, and the Master of the Warrior Saints, Morganstern offers a new study of the sculptor whom Louis Grodecki associated with a group of stained-glass windows that he attributed to the "Master of Saint Cheron." Morganstern proposes that the windows reflect the designs of the sculptor whom she calls the "Master of the Warrior Saints," whether or not he was their designer. She also shifts the chronological framework associated with the south transept porch back approximately twenty years, a move that has broad implications for scholarly consideration of the development of French High Gothic sculpture.

Covering the arts of Ireland and England with some incursions onto mainland Europe, where the same stylistic influences are found, the terms "Insular" and "Anglo-Saxon" are two of the most problematic in medieval art history. Originally used to define the manuscripts of ninth- and tenth-century Ireland and the north of England, "Insular" is now more widely applied to include all of the media of these and earlier periods. It is a style that is closely related to the more narrowly defined Anglo-Saxon. Stretching from the sixth or seventh centuries possibly to the late eleventh century, these styles are two of the most innovative of the Middle Ages. The studies in this volume, which were undertaken by some of the most eminent scholars in the field, highlight the close interaction between the two worlds of Ireland and England in the early medieval period. Studies deal with topics as diverse as the Books of Kells and Durrow, the high cross, reliquaries, and shrines as well as issues of reception, liturgy, color, performance, and iconography.

The contributors are Herbert R. Broderick III, Michelle P. Brown, Carol Farr, Peter Harbison, Paul Meyvaert, Lawrence Nees, Nancy Netzer, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, eamonn o Carragain, Neil O'Donoghue, Jennifer O'Reilly, Heather Pulliam, Jane Rosenthal, Michael Ryan, Ben C. Tilghman, and Benjamin Withers.

Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson's "The Likeness of the King" challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as "the first modern portraits."

Unwilling to accept the anachronistic nature of these claims, Perkinson both resists and complicates grand narratives of portraiture art that ignore historical context. Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways. Through an examination of well-known images of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century kings of France, as well as largely overlooked objects such as wax votive figures and royal seals, Perkinson demonstrates that the changes evident in these images do not constitute a revolutionary break with the past, but instead were continuous with late medieval representational traditions.

"A lively, well-researched, and insightful work of scholarship on late-medieval portraiture and its cultural and intellectual context. "The Likeness of the King" provides a strong account of late-medieval aesthetics and specific, concrete examples of image-making and the often political needs it served. It offers smart handling of literary, philosophical, and archival sources; close and insightful reading of images; and a willingness to counter received ideas."--Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago