To kick off the rich gathering of scholarly explorations into the global Middle Ages presented in Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, the editor Bryan C. Keene considers in his prologue the European story of Josaphat, the Indian prince who converted to Christianity after an encounter with a Christian monk while meditating under a tree. Following a brief survey of the complex web of linguistic, geographic, cultural, and religious translations that connected the medieval European figure to the historical figure of Buddha, a connection made as early as the sixteenth-century by the Portuguese humanist Diogo do Couto (ca. 1542-1616), Keene ties the story to material evidence represented by four illuminated manuscripts depicting scenes from the life of Josaphat or Buddha from Europe, Byzantium, the Middle East, and Asia, all produced within roughly one hundred years of each other from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century. The example of Josaphat is an apt reminder of the interconnections among seemingly disparate cultures that have inspired the global turn in medieval studies, and the global reach of the manuscripts referenced in the prologue remind us of the other important scholarly turn in recent years, that is, the turn toward object-oriented study to further probe the mechanisms of cultural production and transmission of knowledge. With its array of discrete studies of illuminated manuscripts--which here also includes the simply decorated--and related objects representing premodern manuscript and textual cultures around the world, Toward a Global Middle Ages comes close to offering the perfect textbook for an object-oriented, global medieval studies; a significant accomplishment considering the vast range of material that falls under this rubric and the difficulties inherent in creating and defining a single discourse or methodology to interpret and explain the world's shared but complicated cultural heritage.

While Keene's goal is not to create a textbook per se, his stated purpose for the collection of essays is to offer the reader "tools, methodologies, and frameworks for interrogating or testing the idea of the global Middle Ages" (31). And while the tools, methodologies, and frameworks presented in the essays are not necessarily intended for students (though many essays would work well in a classroom context), they are intended to push the scholarly work taking place in academic and cultural heritage institutions beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and methods to emphasize, in his words "the polycentric and multivocal entanglements of a world without a center through the vestiges of written and illustrated arts" (31.)

For this volume, Keene gathered an international group of twenty-six contributors, mostly but not exclusively art historians whose academic backgrounds cover manuscript cultures around the world, from both the Christian and Jewish traditions in Europe to Byzantium, the Islamic world, Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas. The twenty-two essays are organized into four thematic sections, each introduced by Keene to set the purpose and scope for the following essays. The above mentioned prologue and an expansive introduction by Keene, which masterfully summarizes the problems and challenges facing a global approach to the Middle Ages as well as its aspirations, and an epilogue at the end by James Cuno, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, frame the essays. Cuno's epilogue especially underlines the value of a global approach to historical inquiry and the role that cultural institutions play in enabling such inquiry. Indeed, the seeds of the book originated in two exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum,Traversing the Globe through Illuminated Manuscripts (2016) and Pathways to Paradise: Medieval India and Europe (2018), both curated by Keene. That the Getty has further supported the Keene's research and inquiry into the problem of global approaches to the study of illuminated manuscripts, and medieval studies in general, and supported the continued conversations among scholars that resulted in this volume is a testament to the commitment of the museum to encourage wider scholarly engagement and broader inclusivity among and for its audiences. The ideological framework provided by the introduction and the epilogue situate the essays within a larger conversation about contemporary global issues. These issues have only become more relevant and pressing as the present review has been undertaken during world-wide lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic while, at the same time, the consequences of an imperial and racist past (and present) threaten to unravel the political and social fabric of communities around the world. Considering and attempting to understand all the complex entanglements that bind, and have always bound, humanity together is an imperative that none of us can ignore any longer

With twenty-two essays on topics relating not just to books but to maps, scrolls, textiles, ceramics, pilgrimage badges, and poetry, essays which employ a range of methodologies and interpretive frameworks to their subjects, it is challenging to give a synopsis of all the contributions in anything but broad strokes and to acknowledge all of the many useful insights and contributions offered in the essays. For this reason, I will highlight select essays in an effort to summarize the main arc of each section.

The essays in the first section, "Glimpsing the Middle Ages," question the notion of what the Middle Ages means in relation to different parts of the world, both chronologically and geographically, a theme that arguably underlies all other sections as well. Taken together, the essays in this section set forth the main issues that confront global medieval studies. They both problematize the notions of what is "medieval" in geographical and chronological terms and challenge assumptions about center versus periphery. In his essay "World Views and the Map Maker's Craft," Jeremy Brotton considers how late medieval maps and atlases produced in Europe, the Middle East, and Korea bear striking similarities in the rendering of naturally observed details as coastlines and land masses, yet still betray cultural biases in emphasizing politically or culturally dominant forces, a theme that is also taken up in Susan Conklin Akbari's "Where is Medieval Ethiopia? Mapping Ethiopic Studies within Medieval Studies." Aleka Patel in "Stories and Pictures from All the World: South Asian Book Arts from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century," shows how close study of object, in this case illustrated manuscripts from northern South Asia, confront established paradigms based on nineteenth-century interpretations of the past to reconsider what constitutes the "medieval" in South Asia and the narrow definitions of cultural production that falsely center around Delhi and a community of elites who upheld these paradigms without question. Brian Ellsworth Hamann, in "The Middle Ages, Middle America, and the Book" and Alex J. West in "Manuscripts and the Medieval Tropics" propose arguments for including the cultures of pre-conquest America and cultures whose written record no longer exists before the fifteenth century due to unfavorable climates.

The second section, "Intermediality of the 'Book': Bound, Rolled, and Folded Textual Objects," focuses on questions about the various material forms of the written word across cultures and the relationship between books, broadly defined, and other media and visual traditions. A particularly strong essay among the five in this section is Megan O'Neill's "The Painter's Line on Paper and Clay: Maya Codices and Codex-Style Vessels from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Century." O'Neil demonstrates the explicit links between the few surviving Maya codices and a corpus of decorated clay vessels that share textual and iconographic commonality and a performative function in ritual contexts. She argues that due to the absence of surviving codices--a consequence of both the effects of a difficult climate and the systematic destruction of Maya documents by the Spanish--the vessels offer compelling witnesses to scribal and textual culture that would otherwise have disappeared. Other essays further probe intermedial relationships, such as Eyob Derillo's "Traveling Medicine: Medieval Ethiopian Amulet Scrolls and Practitioners' Handbooks" and Sylvie Merion's "Reproducing the Resurrection: From European Prints to Armenian Manuscripts."

The third section, "Identity: Finding One's Place in the Medieval World," examines how identities are constructed in the material text, especially through the eyes of the elite who constituted the intended audiences for many if not all illuminated manuscripts. The interconnected issues of race and otherness are examined in essays by Roland Betancourt, ("Imperial Brutality: Racial Difference and the Intersectionality of the Ethiopian Eunuch"), Pamela Patton' ("Color, Culture, and the making of Difference in theVidal Mayor)",and Mark Cruse ("Novelty and Diversity in Illustrations of the Marco Polo'sDescription of the World"). Under the label of a "Case Study," Kristen Collins and Keene report from the trenches of the curatorial world on how museums' exhibition and collection practices shape notions of identity and promote inclusion and therefore wield considerable influence over how their audiences are introduced to and engage with the art of other cultures.

The fourth and final section, "Itineraries from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Travel, Circulation, and Exchange," highlights the ways in which global exchange took place, that is, through the networks built upon commerce, trade, travel, and warfare. Manuscripts, especially, participated in these networks as easily portable objects with useful information contained in often beautiful and luxurious packages. Given as gifts or taken as loot, manuscripts crossed geographic, political, religious, and cultural boundaries with great frequency, as the essays by Jill Caskey ("Transplants and Transformation in a Global Middle Ages") and Michelle H. Craig, (Manuscripts, Faith, and Trade across the Medieval Sahara") show.

In sum, the essays presented in Toward a Global Middle Ages provide a compelling and comprehensive case for following the turn of the Global Middle Ages for scholars and students alike. There are some distractions in the organization of essays that are worth noting. Some readers may question why some essays appear in a given section. For example, in the second section on intermediality, J. Sören's survey "Buddhist Illuminated Manuscripts in East Asia" seems less to do with intermedial exchange than it does with making the case for comparative study of book cultures. Melanie Holcomb's and Elizabeth A. Eisenberg's essay "Traveling off the Page: Bringing Voyage to Life in Hebrew Poetry and Painting" also seems out of place in the final section on physical travel, and exchange. Some readers may also question the label of "Case Study" applied to some of the essays. What this label means in this context remains unclear to this reviewer as all the essays appear to be case studies. But these are minor distractions and can be easily put aside in favor of the overall contribution of the essays individually or as a group. Keene is to be commended for producing such a vital and important volume, one that will surely prove to be a valuable resource for global medieval studies for many years to come.​