The volume investigates the roofing systems of Italian churches from the Middle Ages to the early modern period through a multidisciplinary approach combining architectural history, art history, archaeology, archaeometry, and conservation studies. Despite the fundamental role played by timber roofs, vaults, and domes in shaping medieval sacred architecture, these structures have received relatively limited scholarly attention, particularly within the Italian context.

Bringing together contributions from specialists working across the Italian peninsula, the book offers the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of medieval roofing systems at a national scale. It explores both well-known and lesser-known case studies, highlighting the technological, artistic, and symbolic dimensions of these complex structures while also proposing future directions for their study, protection, and valorisation.

The publication forms part of the CaMeRoofs (Cataloguing Medieval Roofs) project, coordinated by the University of Cyprus and funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Grant Agreement No. 101104788).

The publisher’s page is available here: https://www.lerma.it/libro/9788891334305

As the volume derives from a HORIZON project funded by the European Commission, it is also freely available in Open Access through ZENODO: https://zenodo.org/records/18742052

Preserved between the covers of books, textiles offer a remarkable glimpse into how the local production of books was connected to vibrant global trade networks from late antiquity through the early modern period. Textiles appear in manuscripts in many forms: as a delicate overlay used to adorn or protect a precious painted illumination; as silk robes wrapping sacred texts; as the sturdy fabric that supports an intricately sewn binding; as a repurposed bit of cloth, taken from a liturgical vestment, concealed within the volume to convey sacrality. This volume brings together a range of experts to unpack the vivid and surprising history of textiles in manuscripts, ranging from practical uses to the ornamental and beyond. The historical account they offer is both local and global: local, in that each chapter is tightly focused on a single tradition, or even a single book; global, in that together these chapters illuminate the rich web of interconnections that link the cultural and craft centers of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

• New research on Syriac, Armenian, Byzantine, Ethiopian, Chinese, Mongolian, Islamic, and Hebrew manuscripts from late antiquity through the early modern period
• Production, trade, and exchange of books in a global perspective
• With contributions of book historians, textile scholars, conservators, art historians, and codicologists

Contributing authors: Hagos Abrha Abay, Carolina Almenara-Melis, Katherine Beaty, Jody Beenk, Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia, Rachel Bissonnette, Georgios Boudalis, Joy Boutrup, Aaron M. Butts, James Canary, Rosemary Crill, Eyob Derillo, Sarah Fee, Michael Gervers, Paul Hepworth, River Hobel, Bryan C. Keene, Hrair Hawk Khatcherian, Sylvie L. Merian, Alison Ohta, Kristen Pearson, Karin Scheper, Noam Sienna, Thelma K. Thomas, Nancy K. Turner, Michelle C. Wang

Author / Editor information

Melissa Moreton is a codicologist and scholar of the history of the book, who is particularly interested in material culture and the development and exchange of manuscript technologies across Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. She has published on a range of book history topics relating to medieval scribal practice, codicology, and traditional care practices for books. Moreton is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and works on projects relating to global book history (1000–1700) and Indigenous language and cultural revitalization.

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of Medieval Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ). Her books are on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil), European views of Islam (Idols in the East), travel literature (Marco Polo), Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages), and somatic history (The Ends of the Body), plus How We Write and How We Read. She recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer and Practices of Commentary: Medieval Traditions and Transmissions.

Find out more about this new publication on the De Gruyter Brill website. 

The catalogue of the Museo Civico’s illuminated manuscripts and cuttings has been realised thanks to a joint project between Palazzo Madama and Turin University, named “Miniature Rivelate”. The project started in 2020 and lasted five years, bringing together art historians, incunabula scholars, paleographers, liturgy specialists, chemists, photographers. This rich collaboration is reflected in the volume, which has contributions of 33 authors.

The collection counts twenty manuscripts and eighty-four fragments (almost all unpublished), dated between 1270 and 1510, seven illuminated incunabula and three pastiches. Among them, there are works by well known Italian illuminators, such as Nicolò di Giacomo, the Master of the Book of Hours of Modena (Tomasino da Vimercate), Francesco Marmitta; and, by French and Flemish artists (Antoine de Lonhy, Jean d’Ypres). But the collection also retains the only surviving manuscript by Jan van Eyck, the so called Heures de Turin-Milan: a collective masterwork, that combines illuminations by Jean d’Orléans, Jan van Eyck and his followers. Moreover, within the cuttings’ collection it has been possible to discover medieval fragments realised in Italian regions generally less well known to studies, such as Friuli, Genoa, and the Abruzzo.

The book also dwells on the theme of the “fortuna dei primitivi” in the XIXth century, between Italy and Europe. As is known, at the end of the nineteenth century the interest in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, evident in many artistic and cultural fields, also invested illuminated books. Following the Napoleonic suppression of the religious orders (1810), all the ancient volumes, until then preserved in monastic libraries, were alienated and often dismembered. The illuminations, cut out and placed on the antiques market, were in fact sought after by many collectors. It was precisely in this period that the manuscripts and fragments illustrated in the catalogue entered the Museo Civico of Turin, almost all acquired between 1863 and 1897.

For these acquisitions, the museum did not follow stylistic criteria or artistic geography, but judged the illuminations – according to the positivist approach typical of the art and industry’s museums of the time –, as precious evidence of Medieval and Renaissance book art and possible useful models for contemporary graphic designers, illustrators and publishers. This explains the heterogeneity of the collection, formed by manuscripts and cuttings of many geographical provenances and chronologies. Given this course, it is more understandable that, once faded the utopia of influencing the modern craftsmanship, the Museum totally dropped the interest in book illumination, insomuch that – apart from a few exceptions – no acquisitions are recorded after 1897, and only in very recent years- since 2000 – a few books have again made their entrance into the collection.

The catalogue, counting 545 pages and lavishly illustrated, also has an appendix discussing the results of the non-invasive analyses carried out on all the illuminations. Both the diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry (FORS) and the X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) techniques, have allowed to analyze inks and gildings and, above all, to learn the composition of the pigments and dyes employed by the artists, thus giving extra clues about the prestige of certain miniatures.

The book can be ordered from Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/01J4pCiE or through this website: https://lartisticasavigliano.it/lartistica-editrice/ (ISBN 978-88-7320-493-0) 

From Miniature to Monumental: Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture honours the scholarly career of T.A. Heslop, Emeritus Professor of Visual Culture at the University of East Anglia, whose incisive analyses of works ranging from cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts to castles and seal matrices have greatly enriched the field of medieval art history. Inspired by Sandy’s longstanding commitment to situating such objects in their various political, social, and historiographical contexts, these twenty-three essays explore the entanglement of people, things, and ideas across time and space, providing a kaleidoscopic view of current research on the material cultures of medieval Britain (and beyond). 

All information available and how to order the book can be found on the Brepols website.

Table of contents

Introduction: Publications by Thomas Alexander Heslop to 2022

Part I

• Eric Fernie, The Anglo-Saxon Church of the Holy Trinity at Great Paxton, with Special Reference to Saint-Martin at Biesme
• Brian Ayers, The Eleventh-Century Norwich Timber Church: A Reassessment within its Anglo-Scandinavian Context
• H. F. Doherty, Ailsi the Burgess, Stephen the Protomartyr, and the Rebuilding of Launceston Minster
• Robert Liddiard, Castles and Courtliness: Elite Landscapes in the Long Twelfth Century
• Helen Lunnon, Some Thoughts on the Architectural Use of Worked Flint in Fourteenth-Century East Anglia

Part II

• Agata A. Gomółka, Death of the Virgin in Romanesque Wrocław
• Lloyd de Beer, The Foljambe Monument at All Saints, Bakewell, and the Alabaster Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket
• Jessica Barker, A Queen’s Vision of Lancastrian Kingship: The Monument to Joan of Navarre and Henry IV at Canterbury Cathedral
• John Mitchell, Preaching and Teaching: The Transformation of the Parish Church in Fifteenth-Century East Anglia
• Nich Trend, The Wheeled Angels of Wighton and Little Walsingham
• Sarah Cassell, Material Presence, Eternal Memory: Donors and Chancel Screens in Late Medieval East Anglia

Part III

• Jill A. Franklin (†), The Diptych of King David and St Alban at the End of the ‘Markyate’ Psalter: What did Matthew Paris See?
• Peter Kidd, Empty Spaces in an English Twelfth-Century Psalter-Hours (Paris, BnF, MS lat. 10433)
• Rosie Chambers Mills-Helterban, From Monument to Manuscript: The Guthlac Roll and its Relationship to Stained Glass Re-examined
• M. A. Michael, From Westminster to Bromholm: Searching for the Artist of the Dublin Apocalypse
  

Part IV

• Jessica Berenbeim, Form and the ‘Gothic Charter’
• Julian Luxford, A Lively Crucifix at St Chad’s Church, Shrewsbury
• Sarah Salih, John Lydgate’s Synaesthetics
• Zachary Stewart, Processions Real and Imagined: Place, Space, and Time in Roger Martin’s Account of Long Melford
  

Part V

• Matthew Sillence, Materiality and Agency in Medieval Seals and Sealing Practices
• Nicholas Vincent, The Walmer Castle Address (1935) and the Cinque Port Seal Matrixes: Medieval Authority in Action
• Jack Hartnell, The UEA Casts
• Veronica Sekules, Aping Humanity

This volume illuminates how the role of patron or acts of patronage bring attention to the bishop as a person around whom the community revolves.

The essays in this volume derive from the third and fourth installations of a conference dedicated to examining the ‘Power of the Bishop’ in the Middle Ages: ‘Bishops as Diplomats’ and ‘The Bishop as Patron’. Taken as a collection, the volume encourages us to seek the power of the bishop in his role as a fulcrum. The essays demonstrate how the medieval bishop was asked, and sometimes used, to balance institutional and individual forces as well as being a person around whom a community revolved. In each of the examples offered here, the acts and the duties of the bishops must be balanced against the needs and the expectations of their communities. This volume also takes into consideration how the community perceived and reacted to the patronage of the bishop, as he was understood to be an arbiter of power, favour, and influence. As patrons, clients, diplomats, allies, and adversaries, bishops were required to act or be acted upon in ways that aligned with, defined, or even defied historical, social, and personal expectations of the office.

All information available and how to order the book can be found on the Brepols website.