Renana Bartal, Gender, Piety, and Production in Fourteenth-Century English Apocalypse Manuscripts. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, xv, 181 pp., 4 color plates, 79 b/w ill.

Abstract

The late Middle Ages witnessed a tremendous growth in interest concerning the end of all life, the apocalypse. This found most vivid expression in relevant illuminated manuscripts, three of which Renana Bartal discusses in her study here: Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 1803; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 38; and Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS II 282, all of them produced in England at the end of the fourteenth century. All of them have already received extensive coverage by previous scholarship, and Bartal simply continues with that tradition, trying hard to offer new perspectives, which are, to be honest, hard to come by now.