Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age. Recovery and Reconstruction.

Evanston, IL: Block Museum of Art, 2001,

First Edition. quarto, wrappers. 359pp. Block Museum of Art, New. Item #10934

This book examines attitudes toward and treatments of medieval manuscript illumination in France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in early twentieth-century America. Each chapter takes as its title a word used in a particular period to define manuscript illumination: Curiosities, Specimens, Reproductions, Revivals, and Reconstructions. Trends and developments examined include the Enlightenment assessment of medieval miniatures as barbaric playthings, the nineteenth-century growth of a market for medieval art, the impact of reproductive technology on taste for illumination and the early twentieth- century importation of medieval manuscripts to the United States as a means through which to appropriate the history and culture of a European past.

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