Imagining the Medieval World at the Morgan
The Morgan Library & Museum will present The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World from January 24 through May 25, 2025. At the exhibition’s center is the Book of the Marvels of the World, an illustrated guide to the globe filled with oddities, curiosities, and wonders—tales of fantasy and reality intended for the medieval armchair traveler. Bringing together two of the four surviving copies of this rare text—one from the Morgan’s collection, the other from the J. Paul Getty Museum—the exhibition examines medieval conceptions and misconceptions of a global world. The related works on display bring to life the world of the Book of Marvels. Together, these objects demonstrate how foreign cultures were imagined in the Middle Ages, and what the assumptions of medieval Europeans can tell us about their own implicit beliefs and biases. The exhibition also features Persian and Ottoman manuscripts that engage the theme from a non-European perspective.
Accounts of marvels were a primary way for pre-modern people from many cultures to learn about distant lands. Stretching the limits of imagination, these accounts often become increasingly fantastical the farther one travels from home. For example, in the description of Sri Lanka from the Book of Marvels, both text and image focus on the region’s massive snails, which are said to be so large that locals live inside their shells and hunt them like wild game. Likewise, Arabia is depicted as a region rich in precious gems, which are cut from the stomachs of dragons like pearls from oysters. As entertaining as such accounts were in Europe, they reinforced notions of cultural and religious superiority, often by characterizing other cultures as immoral or uncivilized. As colonialism, trade, and global travel expanded, these largely imagined accounts informed real-world encounters, often with violent results.
“This exhibition is an opportunity to exhibit and study the Morgan’s copy of the Book of the Marvels of the World—the most complete extant copy—while also examining its perspective on the global medieval world,” said Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner
Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “Enriched by other exemplary medieval manuscripts from the Morgan’s collection, the exhibition continues our tradition of sharing the latest medieval scholarship with the public.”
Other highlights in the exhibition include rare illustrated manuscripts of Marco Polo and John Mandeville; a richly ornamented Ottoman Book of Wonders, made for a sultan’s daughter; a spectacular medieval map of the Holy Land, based on pilgrimage accounts; and one of the earliest European depictions of Native Americans. In summer 2024, a complementary show, The Book of Marvels: Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages, was held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where their copy and the Morgan’s copy of the Book of Marvels manuscripts were placed in conversation with objects from the Getty’s collection.
The Morgan Library & Museum is located at 225 Madison Avenue. For more information, call (212) 685-0008.
