Robert A. Maxwell's The Memory of Past Acts: Picturing Presence, Loss, and History in Illuminated Cartularies, c. 1050–1220
August, 2026
Robert Maxwell's latest book The Memory of Past Acts: Picturing Presence, Loss, and History in Illuminated Cartularies, c. 1050–1220 is now available.
For much of the Middle Ages, agreements over properties, rights, and obligations were recorded on individual sheets of parchment. Cathedrals, monasteries, and royal chanceries accumulated hundreds of such records, or charters. Increasingly by the eleventh century these institutions took to recopying them into manuscripts, or cartularies. Copied collections of legal agreements would not seem to invite decoration or embellishment; yet around three dozen illuminated cartularies survive from the period from around 1050 to 1220. This book offers the first sustained analysis of some thirty surviving such works from across western Europe and their highly inventive imagery.
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