This two-volume work by Lawrence Nees is a remarkable survey of one hundred early medieval manuscripts and their illuminations, illustrations, decorations, scripts, and layouts. It will certainly fulfill his ambition to support and stimulate further research. The publication, containing 331 high-quality images, does indeed provide an impressive window into the multifaceted panorama of early medieval manuscript and book culture.
By taking this panoramic view, Nees tries to posit diverse aesthetics of early medieval art as conscious and original choices of early medieval scribe-artists, illustrators, illuminators, decorators, and painters. This objective is already apparent in Nees’s discussion of his title, Frankish Manuscripts. The choice is not based on any effort to define the core features of a Frankish art but rather to evade the labeling of these products as Merovingian and Carolingian, titles that carry with them a long history of value judgments about product quality. As he makes plain...
University of California Press