Presented at a symposium held in 1990 to celebrate the Getty Museum's acquisition of the only known illuminated copy of The Visions of Tondal, twenty essays address the celebrated bibliophilic activity of Margaret of York; the career of Simon Marmion, a favorite artist of the Burgundian court; and The Visions of Tondal in relation to illustrated visions of the Middle Ages. Contributors include Maryan Ainsworth, Wim Blockmans, Walter Cahn, Albert Derolez, Peter Dinzelbacher, Rainald Grosshans, Sandra Hindman, Martin Lowry, Nigel Morgan, and Nigel Palmer.

A discussion of the popular medieval story of a wealthy knight's dreamlike journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven.

This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including spiritual guidance texts, Lives of Christ and collections of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts’ frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.

Author Joni M. Hand sheds light on the reasons women of the Valois courts from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century commissioned devotional manuscripts. Visually interpreting the non-text elements-portraits, coats of arms, and marginalia-as well as the texts, Hand explores how the manuscripts were used to express the women?s religious, political, and/or genealogical concerns. This study is arranged thematically according to the method in which the owner is represented. Recognizing the considerable influence these women had on the appearance of their books, Hand interrogates how the manuscripts became a means of self-expression beyond the realm of devotional practice. She reveals how noblewomen used their private devotional manuscripts as vehicles for self-definition, to reflect familial, political, and social concerns, and to preserve the devotional and cultural traditions of their families. Drawing on documentation of women?s book collections that has been buried within the inventories of their fathers, husbands, or sons, Hand explores how these women contributed to the cultural and spiritual character of the courts, and played an integral role in the formation and evolution of the royal libraries in Northern Europe.

This volume celebrates the storied career of Stephen N. Fliegel, the former Robert Bergman Curator of Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Authors of these essays, all leading curators in their fields, offer insights into curatorial practices by highlighting key objects in some of the most important medieval collections in North America and Europe: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Louvre, the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Getty, the Groeningemuseum, The Morgan Library, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, and, of course, the CMA, offering perspectives on the histories of collecting and display, artistic identity, and patronage, with special foci on Burgundian art, acquisition histories, and objects in the CMA.

This is a lavishly illustrated survey of the J. Paul Getty's collection of illuminated manuscripts from Belgium and the Netherlands.

The concept of Purgatory in Middle English didactic writings is explored through examination of visions of the afterlife, sermons, homiletic treatises, and lyrics. Purgatory has been the focus of much literary and historical attention since Jacques Le Goff's important Naissance du Purgatoire(1981), but this is the first book-length study to trace its development, reception and influence in Middle English literature.Following a survey of the doctrine of Purgatory and its cultural reception, the book explores the two major Middle English genres in which it is discussed, visions of the afterlife, and didactic andhomiletic treatises on death. In a detailed examination of these, along with sermons and lyrics, the author argues that such writings tend to be structured around the dualism of salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, with no intermediary alternative; at the same time the efficacy of intercession in the alleviation of suffering is repeatedly stressed. The book goes on to suggest that the influence of Purgatory was to provide a more pragmatic and optimistic attitude towards death and the afterlife, as reflected in such poems as the Vernon lyrics. TAKAMI MATSUDAis Associate Professor in the Department of English and American Literature at Keio University.