The Medieval Book Trade -- On Scripts and Scribes -- Decorative Initials -- Ornamental Flourishing -- Borders and Frames -- 'Sports of Fantasy': Grotesques -- Miniature Painting -- Working Methods -- Mass-Produced Medieval Books -- A Procession of Manuscripts -- The Survival and Revival of the Illuminator's Craft -- Manuscripts in a Museum of Art and Industry: the Victoria and Albert 'Illuminations' Collection.

Illuminated manuscripts are widely recognized as among the most beautiful objects produced in the medieval west. This book looks at the skills and people involved in making them, and features pages from some of the most notable examples held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is a book about the making of books, and about the many talents involved in producing the missals, books of hours, breviaries and bibles that astonish us still with their richness and beauty. Illuminated mansucripts were collaborative productions, with different specialists contributing script, initials, borders, illustration, and binding to any work. Rowan Watson's study is both scholarly and rich in anecdote; he brings individual scribes and book dealers vividly to life and throws light on the commercial and religious environments in which they worked, as well as on the cooperative working practices devised for their production. Having looked at the individual elements of the illuminated page, the author then turns his attention to a sequence of splendid leaves from some of the great illuminated masterpieces in the V&A's collection. He also discusses how early books were marketed and sold, and ends with a look at the survival of illumination after the advent of the printing press, and its revival in the nineteenth century at the hands of pioneering designers such as Owen Jones and William Morris. The wealth of illustrations are drawn from the exceptional collections of the V&A, and the text offers us an entirely new look at the subject, treating illumination as a key to the history of the period as much as an expression of medieval and Renaissance (and neo-Gothic) styles and sensibility.