The Image, the Knife, and the Gluepot

This is the story of a Beghard in Maastricht who, around 1500, collected more than 130 single-leaf woodcut prints and engravings and glued them into an elaborate book of hours.  This is also the story of a curator who, in 1861, cut the prints out of the manuscript in order to mount them, according to style or ‘school’, thereby giving them a completely different function. Finally it is the story of an entire group of books that straddled the old and new technology, books made the old-fashioned way (by writing by hand) that nevertheless used the new technology of printmaking to introduce images. These books stood along the transition from the handwritten to the printed book, a transition that was anything but smooth. This study is about innovation, about failed experiments, and about the communities of nuns and monks responding to the easy products of the masters of the new technology.

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