Using early manuscripts at Houghton

Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University's Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area institutions, this catalog provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as a guide to its production, illumination, functions, and readership. Also available digitally at beyondwords.org

In the late 1980s, Laura Light undertook the monumental task of bringing the catalogue descriptions of the Houghton's medieval manuscripts--more than 1,300 in all--up to the standards of modern scholarship. Among the fruits of that project was an exhibition in the Library of twelfth century Biblical manuscripts. Light's catalogue catches the culture of the medieval book at its height, not only in Bibles but in breviaries, lectionaries, commentaries, and works of the Doctors and Fathers of the Church.

Wieck's catalogue carefully describes the extraordinary collection of graduals, breviaries, books of hours, and works of classical and vernacular literature assembled over the decades at Houghton Library.