Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts Collection June 29, 2008

When Pierpont Morgan acquired his first medieval manuscripts at the end of the nineteenth century, he laid the foundation for a collection whose quality would rank among the greatest in the world. Since Morgan's death in 1913, the collection has more than doubled. Spanning some ten centuries of Western illumination, it includes more than eleven hundred manuscripts as well as papyri. To this should be added the Glazier, Heineman, Buhler, Stillman, and Wightman manuscripts, which include more than two hundred more items. Although the collection was formed to illustrate the history of manuscript illumination and includes significant masterpieces from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, there are also some important textual manuscripts.