PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

The essays demonstrate the eclecticism and variety of genre, media, subject matter, and social contexts that characterize the corpus of medieval manuscripts from Central Europe. From prestigious commissions linked to the imperial court or produced at imperial monasteries, to works made for the newly empowered urban patriciate of the late Middle Ages, the books studied here reveal the changing role of the codex in medieval and early modern culture. These shifting patterns of patronage in turn reflect the diverse functions of illuminated manuscripts, which in the period served variously as objects of collective ritual, vehicles of gift exchange, projections of political propaganda, instruments of edification and entertainment, and focal points of individual prayer.

In highlighting the range and depth of this corpus, the fifteen contributions to this volume make clear how integral such material has proved to the formation of American collections of medieval manuscripts, contributing both to our picture of visual cultures of the past and the ways they come down to us. The collection histories these studies illuminate, together with their focus on material that previous scholarship has overlooked, form a signal part of the book’s achievement.

Contents

List of Figures  •  vii
Contributors  •  xxiii

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Beatrice Kitzinger, and Joshua O’Driscoll  •  Central European Illuminated Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in American Collections: An Introduction  •  1

Patronage Lenses
1  •  Heidi C. Gearhart  •  Anonymity Rules? An Unknown Abbot in the Martyrology and Rule of Gladbach (Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.563)  •  7
2  •  Shirin Fozi  •  The Helmarshausen Psalter in Baltimore: Thinking Beyond Henry the Lion  •  27
3  •  Andrea Worm  •  Devotion and Reflection in the Claricia Psalter (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W.26)  •  45

Interregional Networks, Intellectual Networks
4  •  Arthur Westwell  •  The Local Lives of a Liturgical Manuscript: St-Amand and Chelles in the History of the Franco-Saxon Sacramentary in The Morgan Library and Museum  •  71
5  •  Francesca Pistone  •  Astronomy, Book Painting, and the Intellectual Network between Lake Constance and the Loire  •  95
6  •  Martin Roland  •  Illuminated Charters in Public Space: A Case Study and Perspectives  •  113
7  •  Marina Bernasconi Reusser  •  From Engelberg, Switzerland to Conception, Missouri: Fragments as Vehicles of History and Culture  •  133

Vernacular Experiments
8  •  Nina Rowe  •  Nero’s Pregnancy and the Body Politic in Late Medieval Regensburg  •  147
9  •  Anna Boreczky  •  King Apollonius of Tyre in Augsburg and Ulm: Early Modern Illustrations of a Late Antique Tale and the Use of Reused Images  •  163
10  •  Laura Ackerman Smoller  •  The Illustrated Book as Textual Commentary: Sebastian Brant’s Edition of the Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius  •  181

Spotlight I. The Prayer Book of George of Poděbrady
11  •  Jan Dienstbier  •  The Prayer Book of George of Poděbrady and the Advent of the Late Gothic Style in Prague: Reevaluating “Valentin Noh”  •  193
12  •  Jessica L. Savage  •  Queen of Hearts: Patronage and Personalization in the 1466 Prayer Book of George of Poděbrady  •  213

Spotlight II.The Washington Giant Bible
13  •  John Jefferson  •  The Fruit of Reform: How the Bursfelde Movement Yielded One of the Most Sumptuous German Bibles of the Fifteenth Century  •  229
14  •  Christoph Winterer  •  The “Giant Bible” in Washington, DC: Perspectives from Art History and History of the Book  •  245

Spotlight III. Central Europe as Ashkenaz
15  •  Adam S. Cohen and Sharon Liberman Mintz  •  Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Ashkenaz to America  •  259

Notes  •  285
Index of Manuscripts  •  365
Index of Incunabula, Early Printed Books, Broadsides, and Single-Leaf Woodcuts  •  369
General Index  •  372

Editors

Jeffrey F. Hamburger is Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University. The author of numerous works, his most recent publications include Spaces of Knowledge in Medieval Diagrams (2025) and Flesh and Fabric: The Raiment of the Passion in a Crucifixion by Pietro Lorenzetti (2024), and, as co-editor, The Ladies on the Hill: The Female Monastic Communities at the Aristocratic Monasteries of Klosterneuburg and St. George’s in Prague (2024) and Wir Schwestern: Die vergessenen Chorfrauen von Klosterneuburg (2024). He was awarded the Gutenberg Prize by the city of Mainz and the International Gutenberg Society in 2022.

Beatrice Kitzinger is Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. The author of The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age (2019), she has co-edited, with Joshua O’Driscoll, After the Carolingians: Re-defining Manuscript Illumination in the 10th and 11th Centuries. With Kathryn Starkey and Fiona Griffiths, she is also a founding editor of the interdisciplinary series, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Literary and Material Culture.

Joshua O’Driscoll is Associate Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. With Jeffrey Hamburger, he co-curated Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, 800–1500 (2021–2022). He has also organized several other exhibitions, including The Book of Marvels: Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages (2024), Sing a New Song: The Psalms in Medieval Art and Life (2025), and Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions (2026).

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