Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World Through Illuminated Manuscripts

Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts showcases a kaleidoscopic and multifaceted premodern world though decorated books of many kinds. That variegated world, stretching from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia to Austronesia, is offered to the reader through extraordinary images and thoughtful essays that delight, instruct, and surprise us.

With imagination and verve, Bryan C. Keene curates a selection of essays and images that attest how book arts, in conceptualizing and depicting the lived and imagined worlds of their time, played a complex role in forging early globalisms. Those of us who research, teach, and study a Global Middle Ages (gratifyingly, this volume's editor, unlike many scholars, is alive to the problematic character of this now-popular term for naming the past) are richly rewarded by the perspicacity and diversity exhibited in this sumptuous, magnificent volume.

This book should be on everyone's shelves.

--Geraldine Heng, founder and director of the Global Middle Ages Project and Perceval Professor at the University of Texas at Austin

"A book with real intellectual (and literal) heft. . . . Toward a Global Middle Ages does an admirable job at showing some of the ways the medieval world was much bigger than we tend to think."
-- "Times Higher Education"
"A nuanced and balanced study of the interconnectedness of reading, writing and illustrating in the world before printing."
-- "The Art Newspaper"
"This exciting and handsomely produced volume offers 22 studies, by an international team of authors, addressing what a "global Middle Ages" might mean for the study of illustrated manuscripts. . . . All essays are annotated, and the cumulative bibliography, which includes studies from many disciplines, is a goldmine. Seldom has this reviewer learned so much, and with such pleasure. This is a challenging first attempt at an overview and a great achievement. . . . Highly recommended."
-- "Choice"
"Toward a Global Middle Ages covers unique aspects of visual culture during this time period with overall thoughtfulness, while acknowledging how complicated it is to record some of these histories in a traditionally published text. Color figures and captioned images illustrating the text, together with endnotes, improve the readability of the book and make it easy for the reader to build context and access additional information. . . . It is recommended for undergraduate art history collections, particularly those emphasizing interdisciplinary approaches to visual culture, art, architecture, religious studies, colonialism, travel, trade, and area studies."
--Virginia L. Moran "ARLIS/NA"
"Offers a timely response to a swiftly changing field. . . . Keene presents an open-ended book that speaks to the vibrancy, energy, and aspirations of medieval studies today."
--Sarah M. Guérin "Speculum"
"The book . . . serves as a compact, essentially non-European, medieval encyclopedia. . . . Abundantly illustrated with excellent color illustrations, this volume is as handsome as it is intellectually stimulating."-- "Art de l'enluminure"
"The volume is particularly strong on reconceptualizing "book(s)." Far more manuscripts survive from Europe than from any other part of the world. . . . One can compensate for the lack of material outside Europe by expanding the definition of books: Byron Ellsworth Hamann uses M. T. Clanchy's definition of "memory-retaining objects," which extend beyond books to include "bones of the saints encased in gold, Gospel books studded with gems, charters and seals wrapped in Asiatic silks, finger rings, knives symbolizing conveyances, and so on" (73)."
--Valerie Hansen "Journal for Manuscript Studies" (1/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)
"Compelling. . . . Embraces a diversity of individuals, objects, stories, cultures, and traditions, and engages the reader in an inspiring conversation about illustrated books and globality."--Sabina Zonno "Renaissance Quarterly" (3/29/2021 12:00:00 AM)