From around 1250 to the close of the fifteenth century, the most important and original work being done in secular illumination was unquestionably in French vernacular history manuscripts. This volume celebrates the vivid historical imagery produced during these years by bringing together some of the finest masterpieces of illumination created in the Middle Ages. It is the first major publication to focus on exploring the ways in which text and illumination worked together to help show medieval readers the role and purpose of history. The images enabled the past to come alive before the eyes of medieval readers by relating the adventures of epic figures such as Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, and even the Virgin Mary.Presented here are approximately fifty-five manuscripts from over twenty-five libraries and museums across the United States and Europe, supplemented by medieval objects ranging from tapestries to ivory boxes. Together they show how historical narratives came to play a decisive role at the French court and in the process inspired some of the most original and splendid artworks of the time. Additional contributors to this volume include Élisabeth Antoine, R. Howard Bloch, Keith Busby, Joyce Coleman, Erin K. Donovan, and Gabrielle M. Spiegel. An exhibition of the same name was on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from November 16, 2010, through February 6, 2011.

• Foreword, David Bomford
• Lenders to the Exhibition
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Notes to the Reader
• Introduction
• Essays
  • From Sacred to Secular: The Origins of History Illumination in France, Elizabeth Morrison
  • Vernacular Literature and the Writing of History in Medieval Francophonia, Keith Busby
  • The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century French Historical Writing, Gabrielle M. Spiegel
  • Reading the Evidence in Text and Image: How History was Read in Late Medieval France, Joyce Coleman
  • Presenting the Past: Visual Translation in Thirteenth- to Fifteenth-Century France, Anne D. Hedeman
• Catalogue
  • Part One, Dawning of the Vernacular 1250–1315
  • Part Two, Collecting the Past 1315–1400 – Part Three, Enriching History 1400–1500 – Part Four, Beyond French Manuscripts
• Bibliographies for the Catalogue Entries
• Textual Editions
• References
• Index of Names and Texts
• Index of Works of Art
• Illustration Credits
• About the Authors

Élisabeth Antoine is curator of the Gothic Collection in the Département des Objets d’art of the Musée du Louvre, and teaches as well at the École du Louvre. She has organized the exhibition Sur la terre comme au ciel. Jardins d’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge (2002) and co-organized several exhibitions at the Cluny Museum and the Louvre. Her publications include La tapisserie du Jugement dernier (2007) and the second volume of the Corpus des Emaux Méridionaux (2010).

R. Howard Bloch is Sterling Professor of French and was previously chair of the Humanities Program at Yale University. In addition to his work at Yale, he has been awarded visitorships at institutions, including the École des hautes études in Paris, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the Collegium Budapest. His wide-ranging publications on medieval French literature and culture have covered topics ranging from medieval fabliaux (1986), to misogyny in the Middle Ages (1991), to a study of the Bayeux tapestry (2006).

Keith Busby is Douglas Kelly Professor of Medieval French Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been Visiting Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the École nationale des chartes, Paris, among other visiting appointments. His numerous publications include a study of Gawain in French Arthurian romance (1980), a translation (with Glyn Burgess) of the Lais of Marie de France, a critical edition of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval (1993), and the two-volume Codex and Context (2002). He is currently working on vernacular manuscripts and regionalism in medieval Francophonia.

Joyce Coleman is Rudolph C. Bambas Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma. She has published extensively on late medieval literary reception, performance, and patronage, with publications including Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge UP, 1996) and articles in anthologies and in journals such as Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Philological Quarterly, Cahiers de Littérature Orale, and The British Library Journal. Her current focus is on the “iconography of authorship,” the cultural conceptions of literature encoded in images of authors writing, presenting, and reading books.

Erin K. Donovan received her PhD in medieval art history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writing a dissertation titled “Imagined Crusaders: Livres d’Eracles in Fifteenth-Century Burgundian Collections.” She also worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Department of Manuscripts as a curatorial assistant. Her publications include several museum collection catalogue entries in Krannert Art Museum, Selected Works (2009) and an essay on Flemish illumination in Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe (14th–17th Centuries) published by the Ohio State University Press.

Anne D. Hedeman is Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor in the department of art history at the University of Kansas, and specializes in the art of the book in late medieval and northern Renaissance France. She was previously professor of art history and medieval studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Among her publications are two books on secular illustration, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France (1991); Of Counselors and Kings: Three Versions of Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues (2001); Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s “De casibus” (2008); and Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe (14th-17th Centuries) (2011), co-edited with Karen Fresco. Her current research concerns illuminated manuscripts collected by or produced under the supervision of notaries and secretaries in order to map their place in the highly visual culture of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Elizabeth Morrison is senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. During her tenure at the Getty, she has curated such exhibitions as The Family in the Middle Ages, The Glory of the Gothic Page, and Images of Violence in the Medieval World. She was also an author and contributor to the award-winning 2003 exhibition Illuminating the Renaissance. She has published articles on both Flemish and French illumination, as well as written popular works such as Medieval Beasts (2007). Most recently she has been working on the origins of secular illumination in thirteenth-century French vernacular manuscripts.

Gabrielle M. Spiegel is Krieger Eisenhower Professor of History and previously dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in historical writing in Latin and Old French in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. Her publications include The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey (1978); Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (1993); and The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (1997), as well as other books and articles on contemporary theories of historiography.