Product Description: How important a part did books play in the lives of successive English monarchs and their families? Besides Alfred the Great, Edward IV, Henry VIII, and George III, which kings cared for books? This well-illustrated volume presents a fresh and wide-ranging review of the material and documentary evidence for royal interest in handwritten and printed books...read more

Product Description: Before the introduction of printing to Western Europe during the mid-fifteenth century, all books were written by hand. As a result, manuscripts were extremely rare and expensive, particularly those that were illuminated. Decorated with illustrations of brightly colored pigments and burnished gold leaf, illuminated manuscripts were first made by monasteries for their own libraries, but later, as literacy increased, for the visual and literary entertainment of royalty and the wealthy elite...read more

Product Description: The discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai in 1859 was a major archaeological event. Created 1600 years ago, it contains the earliest complete copy of the New Testament, and, arguably, the entire Bible, making it the direct ancestor of all subsequent editions of the Bible...read more

Product Description: The period from 1400 to 1550 was a glorious era for European manuscript painting. Even after Gutenberg's invention of movable-type printing in around 1450, the demand for luxurious illuminated manuscripts continued well into the 16th century, with the leading studios in Italy, France and Flanders producing some of the finest works of art of the period...read more

Product Description: Illuminating the Book: Makers and Interpreters is published in honour of Janet Backhouse, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at The British Library, who retired in 1998 after a 35-year career at the British Museum and Library. Many eminent scholars and colleagues have contributed essays reflecting Janet's own research interests, particularly in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, and in the interaction between English collectors and continental book producers...read more

Product Description: This book reproduces in color all fourteen images from a fifteenth-century manuscript, now part of the J. Paul Getty Museum collection. One of the finest illuminated secular manuscripts produced in the Netherlands during the period, the manuscript features miniatures that illustrate important episodes from the short life of the legendary Macedonian general...read more