Luxury Bound

Illustrated Manuscript Production and Noble and Princely Book Ownership in the Burgundian Netherlands (1400-1550)

By (author) Hanno Wijsman

Book cover: Luxury Bound

Extent: 731 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Early Modern & Renaissance Studies, Medieval Studies

Series: Burgundica

Series volume number: 16

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(November 2010)

ISBN: 9782503525587

Price: $120.00

In stock

This interdisciplinary study presents a two-part survey of the production and ownership of luxury manuscripts in the late-medieval Netherlands. Part I analyses a corpus of 3,700 illustrated manuscripts produced between 1400 and 1550 in the Low Countries. The result is a cornucopia of information about many aspects of manuscript production: chronological, geographical and gender distribution, the genres of texts, the languages used, the dimensions of books, the number of illustrations, and the relationship between the making of hand-written and printed books. Part II examines the libraries of the pre-eminent owners of illustrated manuscripts in the Netherlands: the ducal family and the noble elite. The great bibliophile Philip the Good set an example of book collecting that was emulated by the nobles of the court, creating a typical ‘Burgundian’ fashion in book ownership by which a small elite demonstrated a well defined group identity. Luxury Bound charts this new vogue in books and reading, an important aspect of cultural change in the late-medieval Low Countries.

  • By (author) Hanno Wijsman