William Blake: Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures


Book Description

In 1809 the little-known artist William Blake held an exhibition of 16 paintings in a private house in Soho in the west end of London. Works inspired by Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and John Milton's "Paradise Lost" sat alongside biblical scenes and Arthurian legend. The exhibition was not a success; the only review in the press was extremely unfavourable and few of the public came. One of those who did was the poet Charles Lamb, who later described the pictures as 'hard, dry, yet with grace', and the catalogue that accompanied the show as 'mystical and full of vision'. It is this catalogue that Tate Publishing are once again making available. In it, the scale and range of Blake's ambition are made plain, along with his theories on painting, his unsparing critiques of other artists and some extraordinary insights into the working of his mind. The only detailed writing on art that remains to us by Blake, it throws light on all his subsequent artistic enterprises, including the illuminated books for which he is perhaps most famous. Part commentary and part manifesto, his catalogue is as radical as it is in places eccentric (he claims at one point to have been transported in a "vision" back to the classical world). Fully illustrated in colour with reproductions of surviving works originally in the exhibition, the book includes an illuminating essay by leading authority on British art Martin Myrone, Lead Curator of Pre-1800 Art at Tate Britain, making it an essential purchase for all of those wanting to know more.




A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Merton College, Oxford


Book Description

Descriptive catalogue provides a crucial guide to one of the most important repositories of medieval manuscrips. Merton College, Oxford, one of the oldest colleges in the University, was founded in 1264. Its library contains some 328 complete medieval manuscript books (plus several hundred fragments in, or extracted from, the bindings of early printed books), dating from the ninth to the late fifteenth century. Most of them came to the College before the Reformation, and are the remains of its medieval collection, part of which was chained in the library, part in circulation amongst the Fellowship. Together with the College's surviving medieval archive, which includes no fewer than twenty-three book-lists, this material provides an important window on intellectual life at the University of Oxford between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the manufacture, acquisition and use of the books that supported it. This first catalogue of the medieval manuscripts since 1852 offers full and detailed descriptions of each item, supported by a colour frontispiece, 50 colour plates, and 107 black and white plates. Its introduction provides the first detailed history of Merton's medieval library, including an account of the building anddesign of the College's 'Old Library', built in the 1370s, western Europe's oldest library room still in use today; and the volume is completed with four appendices (including a comprehensive set of extracts from the College's medieval account rolls referring to its books and library) and two indexes. RODNEY M. THOMSON is Professor of History and Honorary Research Associate in the School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania.







Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive scholarly publication of the rich holdings of Greek manuscripts and miniatures in Princeton, New Jersey, housed in the Firestone Library and the art museum of Princeton University, in the Scheide Library, and in Princeton Theological Seminary. This important material represents both a broad range of time--from the early Byzantine period through the mid-nineteenth century--and a broad range of content, from Byzantine copies of classical texts to Gospel books, Lectionaries and patristic homilies, hymns and texts of the liturgy, medical books, and Holy Land pilgrimage guides. Among the manuscripts are some spectacularly illustrated works, key monuments in the history of Byzantine illumination: an eleventh-century codex of John Klimax's Heavenly Ladder with vivid and unusual depictions of monastic life; evangelist portraits from a number of artistic periods and centers; extraordinary pages of pure ornament; and fine examples of post-Byzantine liturgical illustration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the most significant texts are a sixth-century palimpsest with Greek hymns in an extremely early form of musical notation, and a thirteenth-century copy of Aristotle's Organon, heavily annotated by the renowned Byzantine scholar and teacher John Chortasmenos (ca. 1370-1430). The collection also includes a fascinating eighteenth-century genealogical chronicle--a 45-foot-long roll with 562 illustrations of biblical events and personalities from the Creation to the Ascension of Christ, a work that was probably produced in the area of present-day Romania. This collection offers insight into many aspects of the artistic and intellectual life--theological, monastic, scholarly, ecclesiastical--of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world. It also contributes to the history of Greek philology and the development of the Greek book over more than a millennium, from the earliest centuries of manuscript production down to the period when, long after the appearance of printing, liturgical texts continued to be copied by hand and lavishly illuminated. The catalogue provides codicological and art-historical analysis of all 64 manuscripts and leaves, along with detailed information on their content, provenance, and bindings; extensive bibliographies; and ample plates, almost all of them in color.



















The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle


Book Description

Richard Rolle (d. 1349)--Yorkshire hermit, religious writer, visionary, and mystical wanderer--was widely recognized in the later English Middle Ages as a major spiritual author. Though still an enigma for most scholars, Rolle was a prolific writer who authored over 120 volumes in his lifetime, many of which are central to our understanding of the sacred culture of his period. This volume assembles the breadth of his writings together for the first time in an author-based bibliography, accompanied by an introduction to the context and significance of his writings, providing invaluable data for Rolle scholars, as well as for others working on medieval religious literature and culture.