Reconstructing the Delbecq-Schreiber Passion (as part of the St Godeleva manuscript)

Manuscripts collided with printed images in the fifteenth century. For about half a century, scribes regularly pasted mechanically produced images into hand-written books. Nineteenth-century collectors and cataloguers largely disassembled prints from the manuscripts that had preserved them, which now frustrates attempts to study this intersection of media. Having removed the prints from their original contexts, they pasted them instead into albums. For the last ten years I have been sifting through collections of early prints in order to match them with the manuscripts that formerly housed them, with the aim of understanding the prints’ original context, embedded in manuscripts. Doing so reveals important facts about late medieval book culture, the audiences for prints, and print distribution and availability from ca. 1460-1510. Yet it can also tell us something about the shifting intellectual milieu in which the composite volumes were dismantled in the first place.