| Summary: | Medieval church treasury inventories document an astonishing abundance of sumptuous treasury objects that no longer exist. These inventories, however, tend to withhold data of traditional interest to art history with their terse, formulaic, and minimal descriptions. Thus they have been somewhat marginalized. This essay recommends future approaches to these texts. By excavating generic conventions to detect underlying value systems, these inventories become quite voluble regarding medieval attitudes towards precious metalwork, vestments, and other liturgical objects. The approaches discussed here include issues of vocabulary, authorship, and formal convention; the mise-en-page and mise-en-livre of these texts; and their relationship with book inventories.
|
|---|