Power, Patronage, and Production: Book Arts from Central Europe (Ca. 800-1500) in American Collections (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780888442420)

Power, Patronage, and Production complements and extends the project of Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, 800-1500, held at The Morgan Library & Museum from October 2021 to January 2022, the first exhibition in the United States to chart the history of manuscript illumination within the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire from the Carolingian period to the eve of the Reformation. The volume gathers scholars from Europe and North America, bringing historical and art-historical perspectives to case studies that explore a key period in book history, while shining a light on understudied material.

The essays demonstrate the eclecticism and variety of genre, media, subject matter, and social contexts that characterize the corpus of medieval manuscripts from Central Europe. From prestigious commissions linked to the imperial court or produced at imperial monasteries, to works made for the newly empowered urban patriciate of the late Middle Ages, the books studied here reveal the changing role of the codex in medieval and early modern culture. These shifting patterns of patronage in turn reflect the diverse functions of illuminated manuscripts, which in the period served variously as objects of collective ritual, vehicles of gift exchange, projections of political propaganda, instruments of edification and entertainment, and focal points of individual prayer.

In highlighting the range and depth of this corpus, the fifteen contributions to this volume make clear how integral such material has proved to the formation of American collections of medieval manuscripts, contributing both to our picture of visual cultures of the past and the ways they come down to us. The collection histories these studies illuminate, together with their focus on material that previous scholarship has overlooked, form a signal part of the book's achievement.