Luces del norte. Manuscritos iluminados franceses y flamencos de la Biblioteca Nacional de España

The Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) houses a collection of 156 French and Flemish illuminated manuscripts from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries which are of huge historical and artistic interest. This book, the result of the systematic cataloguing of these holdings by specialist Samuel Gras, provides a thorough codicological description of the manuscripts and a wealth of new information about the attribution of the miniatures and the provenance and dating of the manuscripts. The research has made it possible to clarify the reasons why these manuscripts – some from the French court or brought from Sicily by the viceroys of Naples – found their way into major Spanish collections and to establish the involvement of a few prestigious workshops of which no extant examples were known until now. Prominent among the works studied are several eleventh-century codices, the collection of thirteenth-century Parisian bibles, some copies of the Roman de la Rose, legal manuscripts from southern France and a group of fifteenth-century books of hours.