Renana Bartal is Senior Lecturer in the Art History department at Tel Aviv University, Israel.
By interrogating difference rather than seeking similarities, this study offers a valuable new perspective on the later English Apocalypse tradition. It challenges perceptions of illuminators as rude craftsmen, highlights the cultural patronage and intellectual interests of a diverse range of fourteenth-century audiences, and explores the multiple textual, social, devotional and pastoral contexts in which fourteenth-century Apocalypse manuscripts can be sited with great insight and expertise. --Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture Bartal's contribution has immense value in that it turns a close, even microscopic lens on a group of little-studied manuscripts that, despite their restricted geographic scope, their shared pool of illuminators, and their less-than-luxurious production values, illustrate the sheer variability of devotional book production and consumption in one small region of Europe in the fourteenth century. --Studies in Iconography