Scholars of medieval art increasingly are investigating the modern vicissitudes of the objects and architecture they study. There is a wealth of work, for example, on neo-gothic imaginings of the Middle Ages, as manifest in nineteenth-century church restoration projects, the development of museums, and the construction of new buildings in medievalizing styles. But there are relatively few studies of modern attitudes toward manuscript illumination. This is surprising given the fact that contemporary scholars are so deeply indebted to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century collectors and enthusiasts for preserving, cataloguing, and inaugurating the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Christopher de Hamel’s examination of the manuscript collections of the Rothschild family is, therefore, particularly welcome. Some of the “greatest hits” of late medieval illuminated manuscripts were purchased by Rothschilds and passed to the principal libraries of Europe and the United States. De Hamel’s narrative thus is a piece in a larger story of the recovery of the medieval past in the market and museums of the modern age. The Rothschild family fortune was founded in the Jewish quarter of eighteenth-century Frankfurt where the paterfamilias of the clan established a lucrative banking business and sent his sons to expand the family enterprise in the...