The objects discussed in this book are likely to surprise many people. Most of them were featured in an exhibition called An Illumination: the Rothschild Prayer Book and Other Works from the Kerry Stokes Collection, c.1280–1685, held at the University of Melbourne in late 2015. The sixty-one objects exhibited ranged from manuscripts to stained glass and panel paintings, and were drawn from one of the great private collections of European medieval art: the Kerry Stokes Collection of Perth, Western Australia. Many of the essays here began as public lectures associated with the exhibition, while others developed in response to the objects presented and their links to other artworks in local and national collections.

At the centre of the exhibition was one of the most extraordinary European manuscripts that has come down to us. The Rothschild Prayer Book runs to 254 folios and was written and illuminated by the most important Netherlandish artists of the early sixteenth century; individual leaves were done by Gerard David among others (Figure 1.1). The manuscript has been linked to the immediate circle of Margaret of Austria, daughter and sister of Holy Roman Emperors, Regent of the Netherlands, and an important patron of art in general and of manuscripts in particular. But its exact patronage and date of production are uncertain. It is one of a cluster of beautiful and lavish manuscript books created for the highest court circles of sixteenth-century Europe.