About this Book

Beyond Words is published in conjunction with a collaborative exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum featuring illuminated manuscripts from eighteen Boston-area institutions. By virtue of the diversity of collections in the Boston area, the catalogue provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as well as a guide to its production, illumination, functions, and readership. Detailed entries, written by eighty-five international experts, document, discuss, and reproduce two hundred sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little-known or not previously published. The catalogue also treats the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste. Designed to appeal to the general public as well as a scholarly audience, the catalogue documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval manuscripts ever to have taken place in North America.