Museums

Harvard University’s Art Museums include a wealth of medieval artworks, manuscripts, and objects from global cultures.

Image: Dara Shikoh with Sages, Payag, c. 1635. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s world-class collections include global works of artwork, sculpture, and design from late antiquity to the early modern period.

Image: Persian, Shiraz. Miniature from the Shahnameh: Rustam fighting with Suhrab, 14th century. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Massachusetts.

Boston’s Museum of Fine Art’s world-class collections include global works of artwork, sculpture, and design from late antiquity to the early modern period.

Image: “Initial “H” with St. Martin and the Beggar”, Memmo di Filippuccio, Italy (Siena?), early 14th century. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

The Boston Public Library’s Medieval and Early Renaissance Manuscripts Collection “documents the development of Western script and illumination across six centuries. The collection represents a major resource for the study of history and art during the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, and is among the finest held by any public institution in America. Holdings are rich in liturgical and devotional works, along with classical Latin and Greek texts, works of philosophy, science, law, geography, and a variety of other subjects and genres.”

Image: Cutting from an antiphonal in Latin, Netherlands, 15th century, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

The Worcester Art Museum, 50 minutes outside of Boston, holds the second-largest arms and armor collection in the United States. The John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection includes 1500+ objects, many of which are from medieval Europe, but it also includes objects from Egypt and Japan.

Image: “St. George and the Dragon”, Southern Germany, 1480-1490. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.