Chretien de Troyes was France's great medieval poet inventor of the genre of courtly romance and popularizer of the Arthurian legend. The forty-four surviving manuscripts of his work (ten of them illuminated) pose a number of questions about who used these books and in what way. In "Sealed in Parchment," Sandra Hindman scrutinizes both text and images to reveal what the manuscripts can tell us about medieval society and politics."

This book presents the exceptional group of illuminations in the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The miniatures and cuttings from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in this collection represent the major schools of illumination that flourished in Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Robert Lehman (1892-1969), one of the great private art collectors of the twentieth century, collected these illuminations as an extension of his remarkable collection of early European paintings and drawings.

Among the works catalogued here are a...