Illuminated Manuscripts from Italy, France, Bohemia, Moravia

A central issue for the humanities today is intellectual and cultural transfer in the Middle Ages and its crucial historical role in the creation of present-day Europe, in the surge in technical and scientific progress, and in the development of cultural identity and diversity. The proposed project is dedicated to two groups of fourteenth-century manuscripts in the University Library in Graz, which are appropriate for studies on the material side of this phenomenon: one group came to Graz via various monasteries in Styria and Carinthia, but comprises works originally produced in Italy, France, Bohemia, and Moravia; the second group came to Graz from the same institutions, was decorated in Austria but in the style of imported manuscripts. The assessment of this material will follow the established method for cataloguing illuminated manuscripts in Austria: the physical features and contents are described, with particular attention paid to the artistic decoration and its placement in the text. In a section on style and classification, it is attempted to make a grounded suggestion on the place and date of a works production, primarily on the basis of art-historical comparison. Books were an important vehicle for distributing complex matter over long distances, and, thanks to the almost universal use of Latin, were understood across Europe. The decorations, figural and ornamental, were also transported along these channels. Alongside constant adoption of individual motifs and certain structures from ornamental systems, which alone provides evidence of permanent exchanges, the works of the second group show that local artists attempted to imitate foreign decorative systems as a whole. To evaluate these illuminations, it will be necessary to ask whether the painters concerned concentrated on the works of particular regions, whether there was a temporal correlation with the arrival of certain import works, and whether such borrowings are particularly common in connection with certain texts or types of text. An aim of the project is to reach a better understanding of the development of manuscript illumination in the fourteenth century and to construct well defined models for comparison with related observations elsewhere. This way it is planned to contribute to a firm foundation for further investigation both within and beyond art history into the book as a medium for cultural developments and a vehicle for the transfer of intellectual and religious ideas across medieval Europe.

A central issue for the humanities today is intellectual and cultural transfer in the Middle Ages and its crucial historical role in the creation of present-day Europe. The project was dedicated to two groups of little studied and partly unknown illuminated manuscripts from the fourteenth century in the Special Collections of Graz University Library, which are appropriate for research on the material side of this phenomenon. One group came to Graz via various monasteries in Styria and Carinthia, but comprises works originally produced in Italy, France, Bohemia, and Moravia. The aim was to shed light on the background of the transfer associated with these books. The other group came from the same institutions, but was decorated in Austria in a style that clearly used and assimilated elements of the decoration found in the imported manuscripts. Among other things, the nature of the correlations was investigated. On the basis of more precise classifications, it was ascertained that the imports from Italy (mostly legal texts) and France (theological texts) were most intense at the beginning of the century and became rare after the 1330s. The books stayed in private possession at least until the fifteenth century and only then began to arrive in the monasteries. The manuscripts from Bohemia and Moravia, in contrast, turned out to have been made mostly in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. They were largely intended for use in liturgy and private devotion, and were not mass produced but made for certain ecclesiastical institutions, some of which it was possible to identify. The time and nature of their arrival in Styria or Carinthia varied from case to case. For the group produced in Austria but with non-regional decorative elements, it was demonstrated that motifs and ideas of different origins were fused together or used side by side especially at the beginning of the 14th century, when the imports reached a peek. Lower Austria was identified as the most productive region for this phenomenon. Our efforts to understand the stylistic development with reference to superregional transfer have led to the improvement of the methods used to classify these book paintings more precisely. The results were incorporated into the catalogue of illuminated manuscripts from the fourteenth century in the University Library of Graz - the major publication outlet for the project. The catalogue, which is in preparation for print, will also provide information on codicology, content, provenance, as well as quantity and placement of book decoration for each manuscript. The project has helped to reveal the value of the investigated objects for society by creating a more solid foundation for assessing their historical significance, which will be relevant also for other areas of medieval research.