Book excerpt: This beautifully illustrated volume explores the richness of the J. Paul Getty Museum's holdings in German and Central European manuscripts from the ninth to the eighteenth century. This book showcases full-color reproductions of masterpieces from such works as Carolingian manuscripts of the ninth century; several sumptuously illuminated Ottonian texts from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries; two of the most celebrated examples of Romanesque illumination: the Helmarshausen Gospel book from the 1120s and the Stammheim Missal, made around 1170 for Saint Michael's monastery in Hildesheim; The Life of the Blessed Hedwig from 1353, and the only known illuminations by the Cologne painter called the Master of Saint Veronica, ca. 1400. It also illustrates many richly colored illuminations from such manuscripts as a luxury psalter made in Würzburg, dating from the mid-thirteenth century; a copy of Rudolf von Ems's Weltchronik, produced in the early fifteenth century; and chivalric and dynastic manuscripts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.