Celebrating Word and Image 1250–1600: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Kerry Stokes Collection by Margaret M. Manion and Charles Zika (review)

There are – unsurprisingly – relatively few medieval and early modern manuscripts in Australian public collections. The State Library of Victoria and the University of Sydney Library have the largest holdings, and there are important individual volumes in the National Gallery of Victoria, the State Library of South Australia, and the Art Gallery of Ballarat, among others.

The twelve manuscripts acquired for the Kerry Stokes Collection in 2005 and 2006 are an interesting and important addition to this body of rare material. Kerry Stokes’s remarkable collection of books, maps, objects, and art works relating to the European discovery and settlement of Australia is already well known and has been on display in a number of major exhibitions over recent years. Medieval and early modern manuscripts are a new area of collecting for him: he explains that it is ‘the beauty of this handmade art form that has attracted me’.

This volume serves as the catalogue for the first public exhibition of these manuscripts, held at the Western Australian monastic town of New Norcia between October 2013 and March 2014. It is also an attractive and scholarly work in its own right. The Introduction by Margaret Manion, Australia’s leading manuscript researcher, gives an overview of medieval manuscripts aimed at a non-specialist audience and is accompanied by a glossary of specialist terms.

Eleven of the manuscripts cover a range of familiar types of books: a missal, a breviary, graduals, an antiphonal, a calendar, and three different books of hours, together with leaves from a Bible and from a Summa de laudibus Mariae. They date from the second half of the thirteenth century through to 1606. Manion’s detailed catalogue entries for each manuscript are accompanied by a generous selection of colour images which reveal the extensive illuminations.

The exception is the Schembart Buch – a lavishly illustrated sixteenth-century record of the Shrovetide carnival at Nuremberg, which was last held in 1539. This is the earliest surviving account of this extravagant celebration, with depictions of the costumes and floats of the carnival parade. Charles Zika’s accompanying essay brings out the significance of this fascinating manuscript.

These manuscripts from the Kerry Stokes Collection are a major addition to Australia’s holdings, and the exhibition and its catalogue provide a beautifully produced and scholarly introduction to them. It is especially good to see these examples from a major private collection so well described and illustrated.