Larisa Grollemond, Kelin Michael, Elizabeth Morrison, and Joshua O’Driscoll

This fascinating volume explores an important fifteenth-century illustrated manuscript tradition that provides a revealing glimpse of how western Europeans conceptualized the world.

From the classical encyclopedias of Pliny to famous tales such as The Travels of Marco Polo, historical travel writing has had a lasting impact, despite the fact that it was based on a curious mixture of truth, legend, and outright superstition. One foundational medieval source that expands on the ancient idea of the “wonders of the world” is the fifteenth-century French Book of the Marvels of the World, an illustrated guide to the globe filled with oddities, curiosities, and wonders—tales of fantasy and reality intended for the medieval armchair traveler. The fifty-six locales featured in the manuscript are presented in a manner that suggests authority and objectivity but are rife with stereotypes and mischaracterizations, meant to simultaneously instill a sense of wonder and fear in readers.

In The Book of Marvels, the authors explore the tradition of encyclopedias and travel writing, examining the various sources for geographic knowledge in the Middle Ages. They look closely at the manuscript copies of the French text and its complex images, delving into their origins, style, content, and meaning. Ultimately, this volume seeks to unpack how medieval white Christian Europeans saw their world and how the fear of difference—so pervasive in society today—is part of a long tradition stretching back millennia.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 11 to September 1, 2024, and at the Morgan Library & Museum from January 24 to May 25, 2025.

I acted as the Art Director, providing relevant artworks and captions.

Humanitas Early Middle Ages is designed as a one-semester, high school history course. With the rise of Christianity and the foundering of Rome, the medieval period begins in crisis. The Early Middle Ages books move from pressing questions about the relationship between the Church and state to the establishment of a Holy Roman Empire. Students will discover that the medieval period, commonly known as “the Dark Ages,” was anything but dark as these books chart the maturation of the liberal arts, the advances of science and culture that accompanied a renaissance of learning, and the development of political theory and practice as various states and kingdoms are established. The 50 chapters include: - Accounts of religious developments - Documents from the court of Charlemagne that chart the spread of imperial power and the flowering of the Carolingian Renaissance - Historical chronicles that relate political developments in what will become England and France - Poetic and literary texts that help provide national identities

Customised Books in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400‒1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of alterations made by users to the physical structure of their book, through insertion or interpolation, subtraction or deletion, adjustments in the ordering of folios or quires, amendments of image or text. Although our primary interest is in printed books and print series bound like books, we also consider selected manuscripts since meaningful alterations made to incunabula and early printed books often followed the patterns such changes took in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century codices. Throughout Customised Books the emphasis falls on the hermeneutic functions of the modifications made by makers and users to their manuscripts and books.

This chapter, which came out of a conference paper in October 2021, addresses the transition of Hrabanus Maurus's "In honorem sanctae crucis" from manuscript to print, and then back again. It analyzes how the collection of poems was customized and the challenges presented by the unique format of the work.

The Materiality of Devotion: From Manuscript to Print exhibition provided visitors with the opportunity to explore a variety of objects, texts, and images that supported devotional practices in the medieval and early modern world. The items on display included traditional theological and biblical texts as well as musical scores, cityscapes, sculpture, and poetry. Furthermore, the items represented devotional practices from a variety of religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The exhibition invited visitors to consider both the form and the content of these sources as they were used by their historical viewers: how might candlelight impact the viewing of illuminated manuscript? When technical modes of “writing” change (scroll to codex or manuscript to print), how does that change the nature of reading and viewing?

It is important to be aware of the inherent artificiality of the “collection” presented here. These materials have been removed from their original contexts in a number of important ways. Manuscript leaves have been excised from books, books have been removed from their sacred or secular settings, and sculpture has been reshaped. Still, despite these limits, the exhibition offered a glimpse into the rich and endlessly multimodal world of premodern devotion.

The exhibition drew on Pitts Theology Library’s medieval manuscripts as well as its world-renowned early print collection, and also benefited from generous loans made by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library and the Michael C. Carlos Museum. We were thrilled that this truly collaborative exhibition included a number of materials on public display for the very first time.

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is a fount of major collections of art from some of the most renowned painters and sculptors of the American West. Holdings of artworks by titans such as Frederic Remington and Charles Russell number in the hundreds. The painter Joseph Henry Sharp, while claiming less space on the walls of the Center’s Whitney Western Art Museum, is represented by a substantial number of works that reveal his joy and devotion to the West and to its indigenous people. The Center also owns a set of Sharp’s papers, an extensive archive gifted by the artist’s primary chronicler, Forrest Fenn of Santa Fe. Fenn also donated Sharp’s Montana cabin, the “Absarokee Hut,” to the Center, thus collectively making the museum a focal point for Sharp studies.

This volume marks a fresh inspection of who Sharp was, how and where he was trained as a painter, why he selected the nation’s western Native population as a primary subject, what impact his imagery had on audiences across the continent, and how his production as a painter of  what he referred to as the “real Americans” differed from that of his contemporary peers.

Beyond the pages of this book, and in conjunction with its findings and insights about Sharp, the Center has produced an online catalogue of some 700 examples of the artist’s paintings held in public collections. The repositories of these works span the country from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles with an obvious wellspring held by institutions in the West and Midwest. Readers who avail themselves of this volume’s additional, electronic chapter will be rewarded with a vast and compelling compendium of Sharp’s treasured paintings from over fifty museums, foundations, and libraries around the country.

My contribution to this volume on the life and art of Joseph Henry Sharp explores how his artistic training, much of which was conducted in Europe, influenced his style and subject choices over his lengthy career.

This report for the International Center of Medieval Art’s quarterly newsletter surveys the exhibition Painted Prophecy: The Hebrew Bible through Christian Eyes, which was on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 9-May 29 2022 and curated by Larisa Grollemond.