Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts and Modern Cultural Identities in England and Flanders

The desire to claim medieval books as objects of historic cultural significance helped to shape both collections and scholarship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This chapter explores how events in Flanders and England in the first quarter of the 20th century informed narratives about illuminated manuscripts as objects that could be associated with modern nation states. The approach taken here is Anglocentric, but it is ironic that an emphasis on English medieval manuscript illumination as distinctive from that produced on the Continent emerged, in part, in reaction to exhibitions in... Mehr ...