Doctoral Candidate Britt Boler Hunter Co-authors Apocalypse Commentary with Dr. Rick Emmerson

In the summer of 2021, medieval manuscript facsimile publisher M. Moleiro printed The Picture-Book Life of St. John and the Apocalypse, a commentary edition authored by Professor Richard Emmerson and doctoral candidate Britt Boler Hunter with provenance researcher Peter Kidd.

The book is an holistic analysis of the British Library Additional 38121 Apocalypse manuscript and the long tradition of illustrated Apocalypses to which it belongs. The authors attribute the manuscript’s production to the court of the Burgundian Netherlands around the turn of the fifteenth century. Kidd’s discovery of a sixteenth-century inscription claiming ownership of the book by Tongerlo Abbey and Hunter’s analysis of the opulent style suggest that the manuscript was produced in circa 1400 Brabant. Most notably, Emmerson has carefully described and translated each individual miniature for reproduction in the commentary, making the book a most valuable resource for further study and analysis.

Having begun work on this project in the summer of 2018, Hunter and Emmerson are delighted to see the commentary finally come to print. They are especially pleased with the numerous high-resolution images throughout and the complete reproduction of BL Add. 38121 miniatures. They have donated a copy of the commentary to the Department of Art History’s Rose Library in the William Johnston Building.