Now available in paperback, this sumptuously illustrated book is about how they were made, and the range of skills and astonishing talent of the best illuminators and scribes of the day, in works ranging from books of hours to poetry and classical texts.
The objects are drawn from the exceptional collections of the V+A, and the book offers an original view of the subject, treating illumination as a key to the history of the period, as much as an expression of the medieval and Renaissance periods as the way illumination was used in the 17th and 18th centuries, before its rediscovery in the 19th century as part of the Gothic revival.
