Fragmented Illuminations
The many lives of manuscript cuttings
Catherine Yvard (Author)
Series: V&A co-publications
Sweeping secularisation of Catholic Church property across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries brought countless medieval and Renaissance manuscripts into private hands. While the text of these books was often obsolete, their jewel-like illuminations appealed to collectors and the market for single leaves, miniatures, initials or ornamented borders cut out of illuminated manuscripts took off in the mid-1820s. Today, thousands of manuscript cuttings can be found in collections around the world: a global jigsaw.
With over 2,000 examples, the V&A has one of the largest collections of this kind, originally assembled to form a visual sourcebook for contemporary artists and craftspeople. Using this collection as a guiding thread, Fragmented Illuminations seeks to contextualise cuttings and chart their changing meanings and functions from the time of their making to their unexpected afterlives in the hands of private collectors and Europe’s museums of applied arts. To complete the picture, new interdisciplinary research revives the books they came from, alongside the artists and patrons involved in their making. In sum, the book demonstrates how these complex objects can only be understood by mobilising knowledge from many disciplines, including art history, codicology, liturgiology, musicology, and provenance research.
List of figures
List of tables
List of abbreviations
List of contributors
Foreword by Peter Kidd
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Rowan Watson and Catherine Yvard
Part I: Fragmenting
2 When are works by nuns Nonnenarbeiten? Collecting, critiquing, and fragmenting manuscripts in nineteenth-century Cologne
Helena Szépe, with an appendix by Anna de Bakker
3 From manuscript to album: the lives of a group of choir book initials between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries
Fergus Bovill
Part II: Collecting
4 Illuminations for the South Kensington Museum: acquisitions, losses, uses
Catherine Yvard
5 The V&A, private collectors, Sydney Cockerell and the 1908 Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts
William Stoneman
6 Competing with London: notes on some hitherto unnoticed miniatures at the Berlin Kunstbibliothek
Beatrice Alai
Part III: Reconstructing
7 The St Giustina manuscript cuttings: new perspectives
Matteo Cesarotto and Federica Toniolo
8 The part and the whole: recovering a lost Dominican antiphonary
Innocent Smith O.P.
9 Copy vs original: the reincarnations of two fifteenth-century miniatures
Catherine Yvard
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806552139
Number of illustrations: 80
Publication date: 01 November 2026
EPUB ISBN: 9781806552146
Catherine Yvard (Author)
Catherine Yvard has been Curator of the National Art Library Collections at the V&A in London since 2016. She is an expert in late medieval manuscript illumination and Gothic ivory sculpture, with an extensive knowledge of databases and manuscript cataloguing, acquired through work on major digitisation projects at the Chester Beatty Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Courtauld Institute of Art and Trinity College Dublin. From 2008 to 2015, she managed the Gothic Ivories Project at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She more recently curated the exhibition Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the V&A.
Related titles
Fragmented Illuminations
The many lives of manuscript cuttings
Sweeping secularisation of Catholic Church property across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries brought countless medieval and Renaissance manuscripts into private hands. While the text of these books was often obsolete, their jewel-like illuminations appealed to collectors and the market for single leaves, miniatures, initials or ornamented borders cut out of illuminated manuscripts took off in the mid-1820s. Today, thousands of manuscript cuttings can be found in collections around the world: a global jigsaw.
With over 2,000 examples, the V&A has one of the largest collections of this kind, originally assembled to form a visual sourcebook for contemporary artists and craftspeople. Using this collection as a guiding thread, Fragmented Illuminations seeks to contextualise cuttings and chart their changing meanings and functions from the time of their making to their unexpected afterlives in the hands of private collectors and Europe’s museums of applied arts. To complete the picture, new interdisciplinary research revives the books they came from, alongside the artists and patrons involved in their making. In sum, the book demonstrates how these complex objects can only be understood by mobilising knowledge from many disciplines, including art history, codicology, liturgiology, musicology, and provenance research.
