Art in an unsettled time

Thirteen studies in English and German show the diversity of production of illuminators' workshops at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, when Prague book painting reached the top European level, and examine how the reform movement and the great socio-political changes of the Hussite period influenced the form of manuscript books. Scholars focus on the relationship between image and text, the function of depiction, the decoration of the widely copied treatises of Wycliffe, and ask what Hussite iconography is. Particular attention is paid to astronomical, astrological and biblical manuscripts. The volume introduces some previously unpublished or little-known bohemian relics, such as a magnificently decorated leaf of an antiphonary purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.