Reading Texts And Images
Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage

This book is a collection of specially-commissioned art-historical essays on the theme of manuscript studies by some of the world's leading art historians and curators of manuscripts. It is expected to be even more successful and well-received than the comparable volume from University of Exeter Press, The Art of the Book: Its Place in Medieval Worship, edited by Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir.

The contributors are writing on their particular area of manuscript study, with the Wharncliffe Hours and the Book of Kells among the important manuscripts discussed. Their essays are written in honour of Margaret M. Manion, Professor Emeritus, Department of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne. Margaret Manion has an international reputation for her work in the field of art history. Her many publications include a facsimile edition of The Wharncliffe Hours (Thames & Hudson) and Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts in Australian Collections (with Vera F. Vines, Thames & Hudson).

Contributions by
Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Janet Backhouse, Dagmar Eichberger, Christopher de Hamel, Thomas Kren, Joan E. Barclay Lloyd, Louise Marshall, Nigel J. Morgan, Bernard J. Muir, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Peter Steele, John Stinson, Rodney Thomson and Gerard Vaughan

Contents: Margaret Beaufort's Italian Manuscript of the Name of Christ Devotions, Janet Backhouse; The Dance of Death in Art - Visual Representations of Men, Women and Children in Renaissance Society, Dagmar Eichberger; Towards Interpreting the Iconography of the Gospel of St Luke in the Book of Kells, Bernard Muir; The River of Life in the Apse Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome, Joan Barclay-Lloyd; A Scribe and a Prayerbook - a New Approach to the Wharncliffe Hours, Thomas Kren; The Illustration of the Psalms in Fourteenth-Century English Manuscripts - The Case of the Bohun Family Psalters, Lucy Freeman Sandler; The Rimini Antiphonal - palimpsest music and Renaissance liturgical practice, John Stinson; Reading the Body of a Plague Saint - Narrative Altarpieces and Devotional Images of St. Sebastian in Renaissance Art, Louise Marshall; Minor Manuscript-Decoration from the West of England in the Twelfth Century, Rodney Thomson; Patrons and Devotional Images in English Illuminated Manuscripts of the International Gothic, Nigel Morgan; New Observations on the Dutch Bible (c.1419) in Auckland Public Library, Christopher de Hamel; Sacred and secular in the Wharncliffe Hours, Jonathan Alexander.

Bernard Muir is Reader in Medieval Language and Literature in the English Department, University of Melbourne. His publications include The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter) and A Pre-Conquest English Prayerbook (Boydell).