Penned & Painted: The Art & Meaning of Books in Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts

The idea of the book was central throughout the western European and the eastern Mediterranean world in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

From the beginning, the word for ‘book’—sefer in Hebrew, biblia in Greek, and liber in Latin—was identified with sacred writings—the Holy Scriptures of Jews and Christians, who were known as ‘people of the book’. The centrality of the book to medieval thought is reflected materially in the countless images of books that appear in the manuscripts of the...