Product Description: In the 1470s, one of the most innovative artists working in Bruges illuminated a Book of Hours for Jean Carpentin, lord of Gravile and prominent citizen of Normandy. Known as the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book after one of his other masterpieces, this artist and members of his workshop enriched the pages of Carpentin’s manuscript with miniatures, historiated initials and boldly colored borders in which human figures, monsters and monkeys are framed by twisting branches of acanthus...read more

Product Description: The New York Public Librarys collection of nearly three hundred Western European illuminated manuscripts is one of the largest in America but also one that is very little known. Dating from the turn of the tenth century unto well into the period of the Renaissance, these works give vivid testimony to the creative impulses of the often nameless craftsmen who discovered ever-new ways of animating the contents of hand-produced books through inventive and sometimes exuberant manipulations of all the elements of the book: form and format, layout, script, decoration, illustration, and binding...read more

Hand-painted books produced in the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages are dazzingly inventive, widely admired both in their own time and today. The makers of Flemish illuminated manuscripts experimented, sometimes flamboyantly, with all aspects of their design, manipulating elements of their format, layout, script, decoration and illustration in radically new and challenging ways. In this book, James H. Marrow discusses prominent features of many of the most exuberant illuminated manuscripts created by leading Flemish illuminators of the 15th and the 16th centuries, considering both the playful ways in which the makers of these books reconfigured their design and the ways they exploited these innovations to define and convey the meaning of their contents more effectively. Marrow considers how the designers of these manuscripts broke down the barriers between the different components of the book; how the shapes of some manuscripts became a kind of image; how script sometimes became decoration or one of several illusionistically treated elements or fields on the page; and how decoration and illustration were intermixed in diverse, witty, and provocative fashions. In this final stage in the evolution of the medieval book, leading Flemish illuminators fundamentally changed the structural dynamics of the page, enlarging its fields of visual and pictorial interest and exploiting novel juxtapositions of subject matter and scale, of viewpoint and different kinds of illusionism, to guide viewers beyond the here-and-now, to evoke multiple and alternative levels of truth, and to effect profound transformations of understanding. This is an incisive study of the course of these developments in the Low Countries and of some of the important ways in which they engaged issues central to the function of the visual arts.

Product Description: Book by Robert Gary Babcock, Lisa Fagin Davis, Philip G. Rusche

Product Description: This volume reproduces for the first time the full complement of miniatures and a selection of text pages from The Book of Hours of Margaret of Cleves. Produced in Holland probably in the closing years of the 14th century, the manuscript is one of the founding documents of a sustained, indigenous tradition of Dutch book illumination...read more

'A selection of 262 significant laws, beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and concluding with the Department of Homeland Security Act of 2002, these congressional acts are explained in detail and with historical context. The entries are well written and accessible to students and the general public. Contributors include legal scholars, practicing attorneys, economists, and political scientists. Same-page definitions of terms, sidebars and illustrations illuminating historical events, a glossary, and a timeline enhance this useful ready-reference work.'--'Reference that rocks,' American Libraries, May 2005.