In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000 by Michelle P. (edt) Brown Reviewed by Anthony Grafton
The New Republic Online
"The numinous objects displayed in 'In the Beginning,' the exhibition of Bibles from before the year 1000 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., are beautiful, and their arrangement helps the visitor to the show (and the student of its extraordinary catalogue) see important things in a new light. Beauty first: the archipelago of dimly lit vitrines that stretches through several dark rooms reveals handwritten Bibles as genuine works of art. These illuminated manuscripts really glow. The varied and elegant scripts, the wild decorations and superbly drawn figures that populate their pages, have all been set free for a time, after hundreds of years of incarceration between closed covers...." Read the entire New Republic Online review.