Laris Grollemond, Kelin Michael, Elizabeth Morrison, and Joshua O’Driscoll, The Book of Marvels: A Medieval Guide to the Globe. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024, x, 142 pp., numerous colored figures and plates.

Wonders are natural phenomena that fall beyond or outside the normal categories with which we define or comprehend our world in physical terms. Miracles, on the other hand, prove to be events that reflect God’s intervention in our lives, such as magical healing or the recovery from death. In the Middle Ages, the difference between the natural sciences and the study of wonders was not a strict one, as many illustrated manuscripts beautifully illustrate. One of those was The Book of Marvels, written by an anonymous author and illustrated by a contemporary artist or a group of artists in the early fifteenth century. It has survived in four manuscript copies, one of which has recently been acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Ms. 124). It has a twin in the manuscript held by the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (Ms. M.461); both were produced in Angers (western France) around 1460–1465, perhaps for a wealthy merchant if not for the famous Duke René of Anjou. The present book accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum and at the Morgan. Readers can both enjoy the book with its enormous range of colored illustrations and also the excellent discussions of the major aspects. To be extra careful, in a note to the readers, we are told that some images may trouble modern sensitivity, another perhaps unsavory attempt to sanitize all past cultures and history.