PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

August 2021

The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century

Studies and Texts 225; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 9 • xxvi, 302 pp. incl. 150 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-225-3 • Cloth • $100

This book argues that the images devised to accompany medieval commentaries, whether on the Bible or on classical texts, made claims to authority, even inspiration, that at times were even more forceful than those made by the texts themselves. Paradoxically, it was in the context of commentaries that modern concep­tions of independent authorship first were forged. 

April 2021

Beyond Words: New Research on Manuscripts in Boston Collections

Studies and Texts 221; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 8 • xxxii, 362 pp. incl. 291 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-221-5 • Cloth • $150

In the fall of 2016 an international scholarly conference accompanied the exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. The speakers were chosen because of their expertise and because they were known to have research underway pertaining to important manuscripts in the exhibition. The aim of both exhibition and conference was to provide a broad overview of the history of patronage and book production over the course of the High and late Middle Ages, to the extent that the eclectic holdings of Boston-area institutions permitted. Most of the papers delivered at the conference have been collected as essays in this abundantly illustrated volume which, while still linked to the exhibition, now has an independent purpose.

April 2019

A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae

Studies and Texts 210; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 6 • 2019 • xviii, 354 pp. incl. 245 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-210-9 • Cloth • $150

The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence houses an extraordinary manuscript: an anthology of devotional texts and images called the Supplica­tiones variae, dated 1293 and made for use in Genoa, that ends with a remarkable series of full-page illustra­tions. Although the Supplicationes does not include or illustrate Bonaventure’s seminal text, The Soul’s Journey into God, the manuscript is effectively the site for performance of a spiritual pilgrimage, for it is through the Franciscan theologian’s mystical and poetic concepts that the deeper meanings of its images can be discerned.

March 2019

Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250–ca. 1450

Studies and Texts 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 7 • 2019 • xviii, 194 pp. incl. 94 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-215-4 • Cloth • $95

This is not a book about miraculous images of the Virgin Mary (be they icons, sculptures, altarpieces, or reliquaries) but about their representations in French illuminated manuscripts from ca. 1250 to ca. 1450. Most of these depictions of the Virgin Mary cannot be identified even tangentially with particular surviving images (such as the Virgins of Rocamadour, Soissons, Chartres, and Laon). Rather, these illustrations point to the ubiquity of local miraculous Marian images in devotional practices from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in French-speaking regions. This book analyzes depictions of material images and the animated miracles they perform, and traces their evolution from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in Old French to texts and images produced at the Burgundian court of the late Middle Ages.

April 2018

Painting the Page in the Age of Print: Central European Manuscript Illumination of the Fifteenth Century

Translated by David Sánchez

Studies and Texts 208; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 4 • 2018 • xxxiv + 330 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-208-6 • Cloth • $110

The history of the book in the late Middle Ages is associated especially with Gutenberg’s momentous invention of printing with movable type. Printing, however, hardly replaced the manuscript book overnight; in respect to content, materials, format, decoration, dissemination, and technique, the fifteenth century in German-speaking lands witnessed an extraordinary range of innovation and experimentation. Nonetheless, over a century of scholarship has tended to dismiss the illuminated manuscripts produced in central Europe between 1400 and the Reformation, the vast majority of them unknown beyond a small group of specialists, as mediocre manifestations of a culture in decline. This book – originally published in German to accompany a series of exhibitions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from 2015 to 2017 – was written to challenge these prejudices and the weight of tradition they represent.

February 2018

Optics, Ethics, and Art in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Looking into Peter of Limoges’s Moral Treatise on the Eye

with the assistance of Arthur J. Russell

Studies and Texts 209; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 5. 2018. xiv + 212 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-209-3 • Cloth • $95

This volume examines afresh the various ways in which the introduction of ancient and Arabic optical theories transformed thirteenth-century thinking about vision, how scientific learning came to be reconciled with theological speculation, and what effect the results of these new developments had on those who learned about them through preaching.

May 2016

Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination

Studies and Texts 186; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 1. 2014. xii, 212 pp.

New in Paperback (2016): ISBN 978-0-88844-426-4 • $45.00
Casebound: ISBN 978-0-88844-186-7 • $85.00

The Italian priest Opicinus de Canistris fell ill in 1334 and had a divine vision that inspired drawings of continents and oceans transformed into human figures; these beautifully strange drawings relate to contemporary maps and seacharts, religious iconography, medical illustration, and cosmological diagrams.

January 2016

Art in a Time of War: The Master of Morgan 453 and Manuscript Illumination in Paris during the English Occupation (1419–1435)

Studies and Texts 197; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 3. xxviii, 388 pp., including 253 colour images. 2016. ISBN 978-0-88844-197-3 • Cloth • $130

Art in a Time of War seeks to fill an important gap in our knowledge of painting in fifteenth-century France. Focusing on the work of “the Master of Morgan 453,” an accomplished, if unnamed, manuscript illuminator, Clark identifies, compares, and analyzes all extant books that can be attributed to the painter and reconstructs his career on the basis of a wide range of liturgical as well as art-historical criteria.

June 2015

Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England

Studies and Texts 194; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 2. xviii, 242 pp. 147 colour and b&w images • 2015 • 8x10 in. • ISBN 978-0-88844-194-2 • Cloth • $100

The later Middle Ages was a time of profound connection between the spheres of bureaucracy and art. By discussing the two together, this book argues that art-historical methods offer an important contribution to diplomatics, and that works of art are important sources for the cultural reception of documentary practices. Documents are also an important model for representation, and an understanding of the paradigmatic role of the document suggests alternative dimensions to the interpretation of late-medieval art.