The McCarthy Collection: Spanish, English, Flemish & Central European Miniatures
This is Vol. II. See Vol. I here. See Vol. III here.
This handsome catalogue is the second of a three-volume set exploring the McCarthy collection, arguably the largest and most important private collection of illuminated cuttings, miniatures, and leaves in the world. Volume I (published 2018) presented Italian and Byzantine entries; Volume III (forthcoming 2020) will be devoted to French entries. The present volume is dedicated to the holdings of single leaves and cuttings from Spanish, English, Flemish and Central European manuscripts from the 12th to late 15th centuries. Richly detailed with plentiful illustrations, it is a notable contribution to medieval scholarship.
Following the publication in 2018 of The McCarthy Collection: Italian and Byzantine Miniatures the second volume of the McCarthy collection covers medieval illuminated cuttings, miniatures, and leaves from the late 12th to the late 15th centuries. Sixty three items are described, divided between eight Spanish (and perhaps Portuguese) entries, eleven English ones, ten from the southern Netherlands, and finally thirty-four from across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Bohemia.
In many cases the recto and verso of each item is reproduced, as the verso often provides vital textual, palaeographical or art historical clues to the date and place of origin, or traces of their later provenance. Great efforts have been taken to trace and list sister leaves and cuttings, some of which are also reproduced, or parent volumes.
Volume I (published 2018) has eighty Italian and eight Byzantine entries; Volume III (forthcoming 2020) will be the largest volume, with approximately ninety-five French entries.
Peter Kidd
September 2019
Published by Ad Ilissvm
300 x 240 mm, hardcover
248 pages, 150+ colour illus.
ISBN: 978-1-912168-13-2
About the author
Peter Kidd is a specialist in medieval manuscripts, with a particular focus on cataloguing and provenance research of illuminated books, leaves, and cuttings. He has written catalogues for The Queen’s College, Oxford, the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, and the Library of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, as well as dealers and auction houses. He has contributed to the commentaries on a number of facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts, including the 12th-century English St Albans Psalter, and was Curator of a loan exhibition from the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to Washington, D.C., and New York
In the press
"First-rate collection" —Apollo
"Among the most accurate, systematic, and careful examples of their kind ever produced .. . a model of the genre." –Fragmentology: A Journal for the Study of Medieval Manuscript Fragments
"The McCarthy Collection ... deserves to be better known, as it certainly will be following the publication of this luxurious and extensively illustrated three-volume catalogue. Not limited to a single period or country, the collection offers a panorama of European illumination from the ninth century to the fifteenth ... These catalogues are an important addition not just to field of fragmentology, but to manuscript studies as a whole and will form an invaluable jumping off point to further research." —The Burlington