Power, Patronage, and Production

Book Arts from Central Europe (ca. 800–1500) in American Collections

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Beatrice Kitzinger, Joshua O’Driscoll (eds)

Pages: approx. xxvi + 378 p.
Size:152 x 229 mm
Illustrations:232 col.

Language(s):English
Publication Year:2026

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ISBN: 978-0-88844-242-0
Hardback
Forthcoming (Jun/26)
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Subject(s)

BIO

Jeffrey F. Hamburger is Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University. The author of numerous works, his most recent publications include Spaces of Knowledge in Medieval Diagrams (2025) and Flesh and Fabric: The Raiment of the Passion in a Crucifixion by Pietro Lorenzetti (2024), and, as co-editor, The Ladies on the Hill: The Female Monastic Communities at the Aristocratic Monasteries of Klosterneuburg and St. George’s in Prague (2024) and Wir Schwestern: Die vergessenen Chorfrauen von Klosterneuburg (2024). He was awarded the Gutenberg Prize by the city of Mainz and the International Gutenberg Society in 2022.

Beatrice Kitzinger is Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. The author of The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age (2019), she has co-edited, with Joshua O’Driscoll, After the Carolingians: Re-defining Manuscript Illumination in the 10th and 11th Centuries. With Kathryn Starkey and Fiona Griffiths, she is also a founding editor of the interdisciplinary series, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Literary and Material Culture.

Joshua O’Driscoll is Associate Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. With Jeffrey Hamburger, he co-curated Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, 800–1500 (2021–2022). He has also organized several other exhibitions, including The Book of Marvels: Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages (2024), Sing a New Song: The Psalms in Medieval Art and Life (2025), and Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions (2026).

Summary

The arts of the book from central Europe often provide a mirror both for imperial aspirations as well as for the complex pluralities of societies on the ground. The essays in this collection explore material written in Czech, German, Hebrew, and Latin, made for both religious and non-religious contexts in the ninth, twelfth, and fifteenth centuries, highlighting the range and depth of the Central European corpus as well as how integral such material has been to the formation of medieval holdings in America.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures
Contributors

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Beatrice Kitzinger, and Joshua O’Driscoll
Central European Illuminated Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in American Collections: An Introduction

Patronage Lenses
1 Heidi C. Gearhart
Anonymity Rules? An Unknown Abbot in the Martyrology and Rule of Gladbach (Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.563)
2 Shirin Fozi
The Helmarshausen Psalter in Baltimore: Thinking Beyond Henry the Lion
3 Andrea Worm
Devotion and Reflection in the Claricia Psalter (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W.26)
Interregional Networks, Intellectual Networks
4 Arthur Westwell
The Local Lives of a Liturgical Manuscript: St-Amand and Chelles in the History of the Franco-Saxon Sacramentary in The Morgan Library and Museum
5 Francesca Pistone
Astronomy, Book Painting, and the Intellectual Network between Lake Constance and the Loire
6 Martin Roland
Illuminated Charters in Public Space: A Case Study and Perspectives
7 Marina Bernasconi Reusser
From Engelberg, Switzerland to Conception, Missouri: Fragments as Vehicles of History and Culture
Vernacular Experiments
8 Nina Rowe
Nero’s Pregnancy and the Body Politic in Late Medieval Regensburg
9 Anna Boreczky
King Apollonius of Tyre in Augsburg and Ulm: Early Modern Illustrations of a Late Antique Tale and the Use of Reused Images
10 Laura Ackerman Smoller
The Illustrated Book as Textual Commentary: Sebastian Brant’s Edition of the Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius
Spotlight I. The Prayer Book of George of Poděbrady
11 Jan Dienstbier
The Prayer Book of George of Poděbrady and the Advent of the Late Gothic Style in Prague: Reevaluating “Valentin Noh”
12 Jessica L. Savage
Queen of Hearts: Patronage and Personalization in the 1466 Prayer Book of George of Poděbrady
Spotlight II.The Washington Giant Bible
13 John Jefferson
The Fruit of Reform: How the Bursfelde Movement Yielded One of the Most Sumptuous German Bibles of the Fifteenth Century
14 Christoph Winterer
The “Giant Bible” in Washington, DC: Perspectives from Art History and History of the Book
Spotlight III. Central Europe as Ashkenaz
15 Adam S. Cohen And Sharon Liberman Mintz
Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Ashkenaz to America

Notes
Index of Manuscripts
Index of Incunabula, Early Printed Books, Broadsides, and Single-Leaf Woodcuts
General Index