Antipodean Early Modern: European Art in Australian Collections ed. by Anne Dunlop (review)

This collection of essays focuses on medieval and early modern objects from the Kerry Stokes Collection, some of which were featured in a 2015 exhibition at The University of Melbourne. The collection features some of Australia's most impressive medieval European manuscripts, including the Rothschild Prayer Book, a sixteenth-century book of hours that made international news after it was sold to Australian collector Kerry Stokes for US$15.5 million, much to the surprise of collectors and the media. Australia is not known for medieval and early modern art collections, a misunderstanding these essays seek to correct. Anne Dunlop writes that the goal of these essays is to make the Australian collections known to scholars and to encourage engagement with medieval and early modern holdings in Australia. The essays in this volume illustrate the broad range of potential research applications for early European collections, and the Stokes Collection in particular. While most of the essays are focused on books, material culture is featured in the form of a writing casket and a wedding cassone, and art in the form of an altarpiece, and a panel from Pieter Brueghel the Younger's Crucifixion.

Opening essays by Kay Sutton and Kate Challis feel representative of the approach taken in all of these essays—to contextualize items in the collection and demonstrate their research potential. Both chapters focus on the Rothschild Prayer Book and similar devotional texts as political and diplomatic tools. Sutton highlights the intimate relationships people had with their prayer books, and the ways in which they featured in private spiritual life, as well as the political and social use of lavish devotional texts. Challis approaches the Rothschild Prayer Book differently, tracing the book itself, from its likely beginnings to its reappearance in a Rothschild baron's private collection, to its theft by the Nazis, and the subsequent role it played in negotiating the recovery of stolen art.

The strength of this collection of essays lies its demonstration of the richness of possible studies that emerge from the objects in the collection. A copy of the Satires by Juvenal leads to its creators—who also happen to be the creators of the first printing press in Paris (the Sorbonne Press). Jan Fox brings the Sorbonne Press creators Heynlin and Fichet to life, illuminates the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding this new technology, and highlights the role of the book's 'presentation miniature' in the culture of patronage. Miya Tokumitsu examines a bronze writing casket that reveals the Renaissance fashion for 'scholarly' decor and intellectual pretensions. Dagmar Eichberger's chapter, 'Women who Read Are Dangerous', explores the reading habits of aristocratic women, Margaret of Austria in particular, using the Rothschild Prayer Book as an example of the kinds of devotional texts women read, commissioned, and gifted. Eichberger refers to the Rothschild Prayer Book and to the advice literature of the period in order to explore the reading habits and intimate reading spaces of noblewomen.

The stated goal of these essays is to draw attention to medieval and early modern collections in Australia, and the subtitle of this book is 'European Art in Australian Collections'. The items in this book are all part of the Stokes Collection. I am left wondering what other medieval and early modern pieces and collections are being overlooked in Australia. Perhaps that was the author's intention.