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

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity.
 
Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages.
 
Featuring 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.
 

• Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa
• Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies)
• Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World
• edited by: Collecting and Empires: The Impact of Empires on Collections and Museums from Antiquity to the Present (Collectors and Dealers)
• The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
• Book Parts
• What is 'Islamic' Art?: Between Religion and Perception
• Making Medieval Manuscripts
• The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
• The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East