Secular Sacred ─ 11th -- 16th Century Works from the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the McMullen Museum of Art from February 19 to June 4, 2006, this volume explores multiple ways in which medieval and early modern objects communicated both sacred and secular messages to their audiences. Focusing on paintings, illuminated texts, tapestries, silks, sculptures, ceramics and metalwork, many previously unpublished, from the collections of two distinguished Boston institutions, the authors of the volume's thirteen essays take an inventive and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the subjects, functions, and receptions of works of art from the eleventh through the sixteenth century. By re-thinking scholars' traditional division of objects into secular and sacred categories and by examining the history of these classifications, the authors decode images from various perspectives, revealing how lines between the two categories blur for individual works.