Illuminating the Charles : collecting manuscripts in Boston -- Part 1. Harvard University, Houghton Library. Manuscripts from church & cloister. The monastic scriptorium -- Authors & readers -- Guides for good living -- Songs of praise -- Part 2. Boston College, McMullen Museum of Art. Manuscripts for Pleasure & piety. Making & meaning -- Holy writ -- Before the book of hours : the psalter & other prayer books -- Minding time : books of hours -- Love & death : the art of devotion -- Public worship -- The rise of professions : medicine & law -- Secular pleasures : edification & entertainment -- Part 3. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Italian Renaissance books. The Florentine humanist book -- Italian princely libraries -- Manuscripts of the classics -- Humanist texts -- Renaissance liturgical books -- Italian books of hours -- Book decoration & the advent of printing

Published in conjunction with a collaborative exhibition of the same neame 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. Entries by eighty-five international experts document, discuss, and reproduce more than two hundred and sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little known before now. Beyond Words also explores the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste. Of broad appeal to scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike, this catalog documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ever to take place in North America

Includes bibliographical references and index

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