The Book of Cerne (Cambridge University library, MSLLL10) reveals a complex interplay of text, script, and image. It offers a fascinating insight into Insular culture and is the only surviving illuminated manuscript that can be firmly attributed to the powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. At the time of its production, around 820-840, princes and prelates were vying for power and the Vikings were knocking, less than politely, at the door.

The Book of Cerne is a prayerbook (meditating upon the themes of salvation and the communion of saints) made for a patron...

M.R. James was prompted to characterize the Egerton Genesis as 'the most puzzling, and also, in view of the wonderful qualities of its drawing and colouring, one of the most fascinating' of all manuscripts he had ever seen. Questions of date, iconographical and stylistic character, artist's training, provenance, purpose, and patronage, largely unanswered since James' time, surround this manuscript.

The Egerton Genesis is a pictorial narrative of the biblical Genesis, supplemented by legendary material. It was commissioned in the fourteenth century for the entertainment of a...

The Murthly Hours consists of two parts: a book of hours of the end of the thirteenth century preceded by twenty-three slightly earlier miniatures of Old and New Testament scenes surviving from another book, probably a psalter. It is therefore one of the earliest books of hours, written before the greater standardization of text and decoration during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The book was a special commission and reflects the interests and devotions of its first owner, a lady apparently from the Worcester area whose portrait appears in one of the initials. The choice of...

Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions is a new, wide-ranging and generously illustrated study of manuscript herbals produced between 600 - 1450. The book examines the two principal herbal traditions of Classical descent: the Dioscorides manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, and Latin and the Latin Herbarius of Apulcius Platonicus. It shows how, from 1300, the illustrations of the de herbis Traetatus treatises, the first of which was British Library, MS. Egerton 747, showed a new observation of nature, paving the way in the fifteenth century for French Livres des Simples and the magnificent...