II. Boston College, McMullen Museum of Art: Manuscripts for Pleasure & Piety

Universities came to rival monasteries as centers of learning, and lay workshops began to overtake monastic centers of production. Over time, the anonymity that had prevailed in preceding centuries gave way to an increasing number of artisans whose names are recorded in colophons, signatures, inventories, and tax rolls. Although the most lavish books were still made on commission, others were produced for sale in ways that anticipate the advent of the printed book. While one cannot speak of true mass production, increasing specialization and collaboration enabled booksellers to meet the market with novel efficiency. Different groups of readers generated different types of books, each exhibiting its own relationship of making to meaning. The sheer variety of formats, materials, layouts, decoration, subject matter, and visual strategies exhibited by late medieval manuscripts testifies to the imagination and creativity of medieval scribes and illuminators as they adapted their centuries-old craft to the demands of diverse patrons, genres, and functions.

Medieval society had traditionally been divided into three groups: the oratores (those who prayed), the bellatores (those who fought), and the laboratores (those who worked). Always an idealization, this threefold categorization began to break down in the twelfth century as cities and towns across Europe, magnets for wealth and talent, increasingly sought to carve out exemptions from both ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority. It is within such urban contexts, where there was ample scope for craftsmen of various kinds to flourish, that most of the manuscripts in this section were made. Although hardly representative of the entire spectrum of medieval society, the manuscripts nonetheless offer a conspectus of the aspirations and ambitions, hopes and fears, skills and talents, not to mention the tastes, of diverse and often rival groups within a culture undergoing profound and continuous change.

Not all of these books, which date principally from the thirteenth through the early sixteenth century, would have belonged to members of the laity. All, however, come from contexts that would have had a significant impact on their various routines. Some they would have encountered only in church or in the hands of confessors. Others, however, belonged to their mothers, teachers, doctors, and lawyers. Some of the most beautiful and ornate they acquired for themselves, not simply for the purposes of piety, but also for edification and entertainment. Some were commissioned and collected as works of art, which is not to say that they did not also serve some practical purpose. A few of these books were custom-made for monarchs and princes, a larger number for aristocratic patrons. Others yet would have been acquired on the open market by well-to-do patricians and professionals whose ranks increasingly populated the urban centers where the majority of illuminated manuscripts were made.