In paradise there are no books. Words and images are unnecessary because one can apprehend immediately without intermediate signs. So Dante tells us in the “Paradiso,” where Beatrice and the other spirits read his mind and where Dante himself, as he ascends, develops the ability to understand intuitively. Thus in Paradiso 22:145-150, astronomical perplexities are instantly unknotted for him. In heaven, Dante writes, “we shall witness what we hold in faith, / not told by reason but self-evident, / as men perceive an axiom here on earth” (Par. 2:43-45).
For some of us, who have been surrounded by books since birth and who have spent a substantial part of our waking hours reading them, it is difficult to imagine an afterlife without books, just as it was for C. S. Lewis to imagine a heaven without one’s beloved cat or dog. Much more unsettling, because more immediate, is the prospect of the book’s becoming an “obsolescent technology” (in the words of inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist Raymond Kurzweil) right here on earth. Reading the now-fashionable obituaries for the book is rather like being told that our sun will burn out and grow cold, not in the unimaginable span of millions of years (“Really? Now where’s the sports page?”), but sometime in the twenty-second century. Meanwhile, bibliophiles can take consolation in the prodigious output of books about books. If the future of the book is uncertain, the history of the book is enjoying a rich and unprecedented flourishing.
While the study of the book has a long history, its modern phase may be dated from 1958, when Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin published “L’Apparition du livre” (“The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing” 1450-1800, 1976). Febvre and Marc Bloch were the founders of the French Annales school, which concentrated on mentalites, the way that individuals and groups thought and the forces that shaped a particular intellectual milieu. Since the appearance of Febvre and Martin’s work, traditional bibliographic study that focuses on how books are made (analytical bibliography) or on what has been published by a particular press, individual, or region, or on a specific subject (enumerative bibliography) has not been neglected, but even such works now usually include consideration of social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history.
In a recent work translated into English as “The History and Power of Writing,” Martin surveys the “reign of the book” in the larger context of the development of writing. From cuneiform to the computer, the history of writing–and thus the history of the book–traces fundamental changes in the organization and transmission of knowledge, opening a window into the ways in which people have made sense of the world.
Consider such a mundane matter as alphabetical arrangement. Martin observes that, although it was not unknown to the ancients, alphabetical ordering was generally disparaged and used only for very restricted purposes until well into the Middle Ages. Why? As Mary and Richard Rouse explain in “Ancient Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts” (1991),
Scholars in the Middle Ages found it more natural to organize things in accord with their logical interrelationships: God had created a harmonious universe, and thus its parts must logically and harmoniously relate to one another. An author who arranged materials on the illogical, or rather nonlogical, basis of the alphabet seemed either to deny the logical relationships, or to confess himself incapable of perceiving them.
In the thirteenth century, however–largely in response to an increased demand for preaching tools–biblical concordances and other alphabetically arranged handbooks proliferated. The result, Martin concludes, was “a real revolution in scholars’ working methods that is in some ways comparable to the revolutionary effects that electronic data banks have had on scholarship today.”
The titles listed here represent an almost surreal accumulation of specialized scholarship. Do you wish to know when parish priests in France first began keeping registers noting baptisms, marriages, and burials? Martin can tell you (“The first known parish registers in France are those of Givry, near Chalon-sur-Saone, covering burials from 1336 to 1357 and marriages from 1344 to 1348”). But then much of the appeal of this field of study lies in its sturdy factuality, its attention to questions too easily passed over amid airy theorizing:
What physical form(s) did early Christian writings take, for example? How and by whom were they transcribed? By what means was a text published and made known to a readership? Once published, how were these books duplicated and disseminated? . . . How were they transported, stored, collected, and used? Who, in fact, read them, and in what circumstances and to what purpose?
Those are some of the questions addressed by Harry Y. Gamble in “Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Church Texts.” As Gamble observes, in what might be a manifesto for historians of the book, “The failure to consider the extent to which the physical medium of the written word contributes to its meaning–how its outward aspects inform the way a text is approached and read–perpetuates a largely abstract, often unhistorical, and even anachronistic conception of early Christian literature and its transmission.”
Gamble accepts William Harris’s estimate, presented in “Ancient Literacy” (1989), that the vast majority in the classical world could not read. While the literacy rate varied, overall only some 10 to 20 percent of the inhabitants of the Roman empire were literate. Yet, as Claude Levi-Strauss and Jack Goody have noted, the impact of literature is not limited to those who read. Diocletian understood the importance of books for Christianity: in 303 he ordered the confiscation and destruction of Christian books as part of his effort to suppress the religion.
The church also recognized the important status of the book–preeminently, of course, the Bible. In the East the reader of Scripture in church was considered a member of the clergy, and even in the West he was regarded as a church official. (The rendering of anaginoskein in Revelation 1:3 in many contemporary translations underscores the importance of the public reader and the public context in which Scripture was read: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it … ” [NRSV, emphasis supplied].) Not infrequently, reverence shaded into magical practices. Scriptural amulets were popular; Augustine allowed sufferers of headache to sleep with the Gospel of John under their pillows to relieve their pain; and bibliomancy–the use of books, in this case, Scripture, for divination–was common.
Gamble illustrates how in most respects the bibliographic facets of Christianity derived from Greco-Roman and Jewish practices. His study therefore illuminates not just Christian bibliography in the early centuries a.d. but the entire ancient world. Yet he also shows that Christianity was largely responsible for the shift in the form of the book from roll to codex (that is, a volume of manuscript pages, bound by stitching). Gamble argues that Paul’s letters were the inspiration for this evolutionary change. Only the codex allowed for Paul’s letters to be conveniently contained in a single “book”; a scroll with all or even most of the epistles would have been unwieldy and difficult to use even if it could have been produced. The motivation behind collecting Paul’s epistles in a single volume was in part to emphasize their universality, to show that in writing to seven churches-seven being the number of completeness–Paul was addressing the church at large. (Gamble hypothesizes an early edition of Paul’s letters presented as “letters to seven churches,” with the pastoral epistles excluded.) The codex was also more convenient for those seeking related passages from diverse locations. The codex’s practicality guaranteed its ultimate triumph for secular texts as well, though the roll did not immediately disappear.
Thomas Cahill’s “How the Irish Saved Civilization” provides another account of the nexus of Christianity and the book; the two are inseparable throughout the Middle Ages. Cahill’s well-written, beautifully produced volume examines how with the collapse of the Roman Empire the outmost boundary of Western civilization became central to its preservation.
Never occupied by Rome, Ireland in late antiquity was even more isolated than the ultima Thule seen by Agricola’s fleet in its circumnavigation of Britain. According to Cahill, when Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, he also brought the book and the Roman culture that had fused with the religion. Patrick thereby created an outpost of literacy even as civilization was being erased by barbarian invasions on the Continent. Monasteries arose throughout Ireland and then in the islands of the Irish Sea, most notably Iona and Lindisfarne, as well as Scotland and northern England.
Irish monks also established monasteries, and hence scriptoria for copying texts, at Saint Gall (Switzerland), Bobbio (Italy), Fulda, Mainz, Vienna, Taranto, and Salzburg. Susan E. von Daum Tholl’s “The Cutbercht Gospels and the Earliest Writing Center at Salzburg,” one of the 14 essays in Linda R. Brownrigg’s “Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production,” discusses the Irish influence here. In 743 the Irish priest Virgil traveled from Iona to the court of Pepin the Short. Pepin sent the cleric to Salzburg, where Virgil served as bishop until his death in 784. Virgil brought with him the Irish model of monastic administration and manuscript illumination as well as an interest in science apparent in the books executed at Salzburg under Virgil’s aegis.
“The Book of Kells,” a collection of essays edited by Felicity O’Mahony, examines every aspect of that great insular manuscript while noting that its date and place of manufacture remain matters of debate. The opening essay, Donnchadh O Corrain’s “The Historical and Cultural Background of the Book of Kells,” suggests that Cahill may have overestimated Patrick’s role in Romanizing Ireland. Though Ireland never was a Roman province, Roman influence may have come from Britain, and literacy may not have been lost there prior to Patrick’s mission. Still, the Irish contribution to Western civilization was great. Farflung Irish scholars spread as far as Kiev. Astonishingly, Cahill reports, “More than half of all our Bible commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen.”
In “The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration, and Use,” Richard Gameson reminds readers that not all insular Gospel Books were as luxurious as the “Book of Kells.” Most were less elaborate–and more readable. Not only would the “Book of Kells” have been expensive, it would have required a long time to complete. To supply the need for texts, scriptoria had to create volumes more quickly and hence with less ornament.
Richly illuminated manuscripts nonetheless command more interest than less elaborate productions. Their appeal is manifest in Elizabeth B. Wilson’s “Bibles and Bestiaries: A Guide to Illuminated Manuscripts,” a beautifully illustrated work for young adults; in a handsome reprint of and commentary on the illuminations of the “Hours of Simon de Varie,” edited by James H. Marrow; and in two sumptuous and informative exhibition catalogues dealing with Italian books. In Tuscany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, virtually all illuminators also executed large-scale paintings, and the connection between the two art forms is the subject of “Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence,” edited by Lawrence B. Kanter et al. Economic growth and the establishment of new monastic houses as the Dominican, Franciscan, and Olivetan Benedictine orders expanded led to demands for new art, including religious texts, and virtually all the books discussed here belong to that category. The one exception is Dante’s “Commedia,” “the most widely illuminated book of medieval literature.”
“The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination, 1450-1550,” edited by J. J. G. Alexander, picks up the story of Italian illumination where “Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence” ends. First at the Royal Academy of Arts (London) and then at the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York), 137 manuscripts and printed books were displayed. Religious books and Dante continued to receive elaborate treatment during this period, but so did classical authors–a reflection of the revival of interest in the Greco-Roman world.
Surprisingly, the printing press, which reached Italy in 1465, did not immediately threaten illuminators. Indeed, because color printing was difficult, and presses produced many more volumes than scribes had created, illuminators were busier than ever in the late fifteenth century. By the 1490s, though, the woodcut was replacing hand-painted decorations, and miniaturists turned to designing woodcuts. The most beautiful illustrated printed book produced in Italy in the quatrocento is the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” (Venice: Aldus, 1499), the first vernacular text Aldus Manutius printed. Its woodcuts may have been designed by the miniaturist Benedetto Bordon. While avoiding an attribution, Martin Davies’s “Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice” notes the influence of Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, who may have illuminated a manuscript of Strabo’s Geography of about 1458-1459 included in “The Painted Page.”
Davies’s study, though not as full as Martin Lowry’s “The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice” (1978), provides a good introduction to the work of this important printer and vividly conveys the intellectual ferment of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Aldus was the first printer to embark on a program of publishing Greek texts. Despite a century of humanism, Greek remained little known in the 1490s. Aldus had to charge twice to three times as much for his Greek as for his Latin texts because the market for the former was limited. Still, he persisted.
By the time of his death in 1515, he had printed every major Greek author except Aeschylus, and his successors at the Aldine press filled this gap in 1518.
Davies credits Aldus with reshaping the intellectual map of Europe by making these Greek texts available. Aldus also rendered Latin works more convenient, though no less expensive, by issuing them in octavo volumes printed in italic–a format rapidly copied by competitors, who thereby further fostered the reading of the classics by an educated laity. Sir Thomas More attested to Aldus’s achievement when in his “Utopia” (1516) the protagonist, Raphael Hythloday, teaches the Utopians to print by using Aldine Greek texts as their models, the epitome of Western literature and technology.
In “The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Roger Chartier, one of the foremost contemporary historians of the book, looks at how the increased number of texts affected Western Europe in the period 1300-1800. Noting that changes in readership led to changes in format, Chartier observes that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, publishers increasingly divided their texts into paragraphs, echoing “the intellectual or discursive articulation of the argument in the visual articulation of the page” for the benefit of less sophisticated readers. By the eighteenth century, Chartier writes, “such visible signals as anticipatory headings, recapitulative summaries, or woodcuts that functioned as reading protocols” had become standard features.
Robert Darnton addresses this same phenomenon in “The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France,” examining what the French were reading in the decades just before the French Revolution. These best-sellers contained the subversive ideas of the philosophes but were packaged in ways accessible to new and unsophisticated readers. Therese Philosophe, for example, combines anticlericism and metaphysics with pornography. Just as Sharon Achinstein (“Milton and the Revolutionary Reader”) shows that the popular press was a major force in the English Revolution of the 1640s, so Darnton demonstrates its influence a century and a half later in France.
Chartier also notes how the concept of authorship changed over time, and how increased production of books was accompanied by a desire to organize them in a universal library. Chartier suggests that the computer may allow the dream of that universal library to become a reality, but Sven Birkerts (“The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”) is less sanguine about technology’s potential. Though Birkerts expects literature to survive, he fears that the computer’s elimination of gatekeepers (who offer a measure of quality control over what is available to read) and the destruction of a stable text through reader interaction will harm both reading and the book.
The 14 essays collected in “Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices,” edited by John A. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, extend Chartier’s observations about the interaction between books and society into the Victorian era. Gerard Curtis’s “Dickens in the Visual Market” considers the importance of illustrations not just to make books more accessible to less skilled readers but also to sell products through literature, as evidenced in the advertisements that accompanied the serial publication of Dickens’s novels. Dickens’s Christmas books, beginning with “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, helped shape the modern idea of Christmas, and Simon Eliot shows that the emergence of the modern idea of Christmas in turn affected the publishing industry. Through the 1830s, spring marked the peak season of book production, but in the 1840s, publishers began to exploit the market for Christmas presents. By the end of the nineteenth century, the book industry had invented the three-month Christmas season, with peak production in October to guarantee adequate supplies for Christmas.
Several of the essays in this collection deal with women as readers and writers, reflecting their emergence as major consumers and producers of books. Catherine O. Judd’s “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England” offers a useful corrective to the notion that the nineteenth-century literary marketplace was so dominated by men that women had to take male pseudonyms to get published. Indeed, Judd cites Gaye Tuchman’s findings that “men were more likely than women to use a cross-gendered pseudonym.” (John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Algernon Charles Swinburne were among those who published under female noms de plume.) When women chose a male pseudonym (e.g., George Eliot), they did so not because they would otherwise have had difficulty finding a publisher or would not have been taken seriously by readers; rather, they sought to preserve a barrier between their public and private selves.
Kelly J. Mays’s “Reading and Victorian Periodicals” discusses the concern engendered by “the feminization of the reading public.” Mays cites Alfred Ainger’s “The Vice of Reading,” which appeared in “Temple Bar Magazine” in September 1874. Ainger worried that “women who would take a long walk on a winter’s day [or] grub in their gardens . . . do none of these things because they can sit over the fire and read a new novel or pore over a dreary journal. Thus they are defrauded of their proper amount of exercise, get their muscles relaxed and their health out of gear.”
Ainger’s speculation that “the craze for books [might] be a disease” may seem quaint at a time when the imminent demise of the book is being predicted. Reviewing Sven Birkert’s “The Gutenberg Elegies” in the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley lamented that the “demanding world of reading is being shoved aside in favor of the easy one of audio and video.” Yet, in warnings such as Ainger’s, common in the mid- and late-Victorian era, the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein finds hope for the present and future of the book. In “The End of the Book? Some Perspectives on Media Change” (“The American Scholar” 64 [Autumn 1995], pp. 541-55), Eisenstein surveys much the same ground as Mays, noting the fear that the proliferation of cheap printing–particularly the spectacular growth of the newspaper press-would drive books out of the market and make the serious reader extinct. Eisenstein concludes that current fears, like those of the Victorian era, are unwarranted: “Premature obituaries on the death . . . of the book are themselves testimony to long-enduring habits of mind.” Like the sun, the book is not likely to disappear any time soon (“Now where’s the book review section?”).
*********************
Given the ubiquity of the roll book in the Greco-Roman and Jewish traditions, one would expect early Christian books to have taken the same form. Remarkably, they did not. Almost without exception, the earliest Christian books known have the form not of the papyrus roll but of the papyrus codex, or leaf book, which is the model of the modern book.
-Harry Y. Gamble,
“Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Church Texts” (Yale University Press).
Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies’ heads. Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted culture of Europe.
And that is how the Irish saved civilization.
-Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (Doubleday).
Books themselves are life-giving. In his exposition of the Ten Commandments, Stephen Langton states that not lending your books to someone who asks for them is a form of homicide (and, in fact, the only form of killing he discusses). This question of lending books is a repeated question in thirteenth-century commentary. It tends to become fixed in questions of scandal: whether, since someone may be scandalised (i.e., led into mortal sin), if I do not lend him my book, I am held to do so. The basic answer is yes–on the grounds that one would be held to feed his corporeal body if he hungered, and so how much more must one feed the incomparably better spiritual body. And yet these academic commentators (Mendicants though many of them are) develop more and more elaborate occasions for circumventing the rules. William of Auxerre claims that it is just not to the common good to lend one’s books to anyone who asks. One is reminded of Peter the Chanter reporting the dictum that the brother who wishes to become librarian should not be allowed to take the job, since it will only bring out his most miserly qualities.
-Lesley Smith, “The Theology of the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Bible,” in “The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration, and Use,” edited by Richard Gameson (Cambridge University Press).
RECENT STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK
Sharon Achinstein, “Milton and the Revolutionary Reader.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 272 pp.; $35.
J. J. G. Alexander, ed., “The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination, 1450-1550.” New York: Prested, 1994. 274 pp.; $75.
Giles Barber, “Studies in the Booktrade of the European Enlightenment.” London: Pindar, 1994. 440 pp.; (pounds)95.
Nicholas A. Basbanes, “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.” New York: Holt, 1995. 638 pp.; $35.
Philippa Bernard, with Leo Bernard and Angus O’Neill, “Antiquarian Books: A Companion for Booksellers, Librarians, and Collectors.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. 461 pp.; $79.95.
Sven Birkerts, “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. 231 pp.; $22.95.
R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., “Future Libraries.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 159 pp.; $40; paper, $16.
Michelle P. Brown, “Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms.” Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the British Library, 1994. 127 pp.; $12.95.
Linda L. Brownrigg, ed., “Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production.” Los Altos Hills, Calif.: Anderson-Lovelace, 1995. 246 pp.; $95.
Thomas Cahill, “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” New York: Doubleday, 1995. 246 pp.; $22.50.
Roger Chartier, “The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. 126 pp.; $35; paper, $12.95.
Roger Chartier, “Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. 128 pp.; $28.95; paper, $12.95.
Robert Darnton, “The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789.” New York: Norton, 1995. 260 pp.; $32.50.
Robert Darnton, “The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.” New York: Norton, 1995. 440 pp.; $27.50.
Martin Davies, “Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice.” London: British Library, 1995. 64 pp.; $17.95.
Donald C. Dickinson, “Henry E. Huntington’s Library of Libraries.” San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1995. 286 pp.; $24.95.
Johanna Drucker, “The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination.” New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. 320 pp.; $45.
John B. Friedman, “Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late Middle Ages.” Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 423 pp.; $39.95.
Harry Y. Gamble, “Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Church Texts.” New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. 337 pp.; $32.50.
Richard Gameson, ed., “The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration, and Use.” Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 242 pp.; $64.95.
John A. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, eds., “Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices.” Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 338 pp.; $59.95.
Lawrence B. Kanter et al., “Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300-1450.” New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. 394 pp.; $65; paper, $45.
Barbara Kaye, “Second Impression: Rural Life with a Rare Bookman.” New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 1995. 350 pp.; $35.
James H. Marrow, “The Hours of Simon de Varie. Malibu,” Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1994. 255 pp.; $95.
Martin, Henri-Jean, “The History and Power of Writing.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 591 pp.; $39.95.
Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., “A Millennium of the Book: Production, Design and Illustration in Manuscript and Print, 900-1900.” Winchester, Eng.: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994. 196 pp.; $30.
David Olson, “The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading.” Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 304 pp.; $24.95.
Felicity O’Mahony, ed., “The Book of Kells: Proceedings of a Conference at Trinity College, Dublin, 6-9 September 1992.” Aldershot, Eng.: Scolar Press for Trinity College Library, Dublin, 1994. 603 pp.; $129.95.
David Pearson, “Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 326 pp.; $100.
Andrew Robinson, “The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs, and Pictograms.” New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. 224 pp.; $29.95.
Dennis E. Rhodes, ed., “Bookbinding and Other Bibliophily: Essays in Honour of Anthony Hobson.” Verona: Edizioni Valdonega, 1994. 363 pp.; $125.
Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern, “Connections: Our Selves-Our Books.” Santa Monica, Calif.: Modoc Press, 1994. 186 pp.; $18.
Robert D. Stevick, “The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts: Visual and Poetic Forms Before A.D. 1000.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. 279 pp.; $79.95.
Colin G. C. Tite, “The Manuscript Library of Sir Robert Cotton.” London: British Library, 1994. 116 pp.; $32.
Elizabeth B. Wilson, “Bibles and Bestiaries: A Guide to Illuminated Manuscripts.” New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. 64 pp.; $25.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
Volume 2, No. 2, Page 18
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