This book reconstructs and studies the music, liturgy, and illustrations of a twelfth-century manuscript from the Austrian monastery in Lambach. The manuscript was taken apart in the fifteenth century and subsequently sold to various collectors in the twentieth century. The pages are here brought together (albeit photographically) for the first time since the original manuscript was dismantled five centuries ago. The book includes a black-and-white facsimile of the recovered portion of the manuscript. Charts and tables are used to demonstrate how it compares to other twelfth-century liturgical manuscripts.

From its beginning in 1854 as a traditional German shul to its current status as the largest Reform synagogue in New England, Temple Israel has been an important force in Boston and American Jewish life. The congregation's ongoing efforts to adapt to changes in American society while preserving balance--between tradition and innovation, between acculturation and distinctiveness--exemplify the transformations in religious worship practices, education, and social justice that mark modern American Reform Judaism. This volume, based on hundreds of archival documents, demographic data, and oral histories, and illustrated with more than 200 images, brings to life the stories of the men, women, and children who have built and maintained this vital Jewish community for more than 150 years.

This volume presents the first comprehensive study of the Chronique Anonyme Universelle, a lavishly illustrated scroll history of the world from Creation to the fifteenth century. Working in a French noble library around the year 1410, the anonymous compiler of the Chronique told the story of humanity - nearly six thousand years by his reckoning - by editing historical texts at his disposal, arranging them in parallel columns on a vertical scroll, and filling the inter-columnar space with complex genealogical diagrams. The Chronique reflects a particular and particularly French self-image and worldview that become increasingly apparent as the reader traverses its direct and unbroken line from the Bible, Egypt, Greece and Troy to the histories of the Papacy, the Roman and Holy Roman Empires, the Crusades, and the royal houses of France and England. The present volume includes an extensive study of the sources, origin, transmission and illustration of the Chronique along with a critical edition, facing translation, and the entire miniature cycle of manuscript W (ca. 1465, now in private hands). Using an innovative image-annotation platform, the DVD insert provides access to a complete digital facsimile of the manuscript, giving the user wide-ranging search and browsing functionality along with complete access to the manuscript, transcription, translation and genealogical diagrams.

Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University's Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area institutions, this catalog provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as a guide to its production, illumination, functions, and readership. Entries by eighty-five international experts document, discuss, and reproduce more than two hundred and sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little known before now. Beyond Words also explores the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste. Of broad appeal to scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike, this catalog documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ever to take place in North America.