Drawn entirely from The Museum’s fine collection of manuscript pages, Illuminated Manuscripts: Treasures from the Collection includes nearly fifty leaves—some with elaborate gold leaf decoration and intricate ornament—from medieval Bibles, prayer books, psalters, books of hours, choir books, missals, breviaries, and lectionaries.

Most of the works date from the ninth through the early seventeenth centuries and are ink on vellum (animal skin). French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, English, and German examples will be included in addition to non-Western pages, including leaves from the Koran and Shahnameh (the illustrated Persian Book of Kings) from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly all of the leaves came to The Museum through Otto Ege, a well-known bookseller and specialist, who was born in Reading in 1888 and graduated from Reading High School in 1907. Ege was a longtime resident of Cleveland, where he served as Professor of Art and History and Dean of the Cleveland Institute of Art.