Luxury Bound

This interdisciplinary study presents a two-part survey of the production and ownership of luxury manuscripts in the late-medieval Netherlands.

Part I analyses a corpus of 3,700 illustrated manuscripts produced between 1400 and 1550 in the Low Countries. The result is a cornucopia of information about many aspects of manuscript production: chronological, geographical and gender distribution, the genres of texts, the languages used, the dimensions of books, the number of illustrations, and the relationship between the making of hand-written and printed books.

Part II examines the libraries of the pre-eminent owners of illustrated manuscripts in the Netherlands: the ducal family and the noble elite. The great bibliophile Philip the Good set an example of book collecting that was emulated by the nobles of the court, creating a typical ‘Burgundian’ fashion in book ownership by which a small elite demonstrated a well defined group identity.

Part III draws together these various lines to offer conclusions about the book market and fashions in book ownership. Luxury Bound charts this new vogue in books and reading, an important aspect of cultural change in the late-medieval Low Countries.