This catalogue of illuminated manuscripts in the V&A's National Art Library provides a history of an art form over eight centuries.

It documents not only the practice of medieval and Renaissance illumination, but also the survival of medieval book-making crafts alongside printing in the post-Renaissance period -and their revival in the nineteenth-century. Its three volumes bring together for the first time works such as the St Denis Missal of 1350 and the Chambord Missal of 1844, the Sanvito Petrarch of 1463-64 and William Morris's Book of Verse of 1870. Catalogue descriptions discuss in detail each work, and pay particular attention to the changing ways in which they have been evaluated and used through the centuries.