The illuminated manuscript

The first manuscript featured here is the priceless Lindisfarne Gospels. It was written and illuminated at the end of the seventh century, when Europe was still largely heathen and the British Isles were on the outer limit of the known world. The last colour plate shows a map of the New World and dates from about a thousand years later when Europe was going through Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It is easy to forget that paintings in manuscripts far outnumber all other types of painting and decoration during this period. They are vital witnesses to the development of European art, but they were always conceived as book illustrations and always intimately connected with a text. Janet Backhouse also points out that illumination was a craft rather than an art in the twentieth-century sense, and that by the thirteenth century the production of books was a professional business. The popular belief that all manuscripts were made by monks toiling away in draughty cloisters can only be true of the early Middle Ages. The technicalities of manuscript production are clearly explained: the vellum for a single volume of the great Carolingian or Romanesque Bibles may be thought of in terms of a flock of between two and three hundred sheep. But it is the illuminations themselves and their variety both in style and content that are so amazing. All the plates, which are drawn from Bibles, Psalters, Bestiaries, Books of Hours, Lives of Saints, Romances and many other sources, are selected from the magnificent collection of the British Library. -- Inside jacket flap.