Ripolles

I investigate some of the implications of "regional art history" in the discussion of objects from "border" regions, in this case the Marca Hispanica, which fell between the Carolingian Empire to the north (now modern-day France) and Islamic Iberia to the south. In the absence of clear model–copy frameworks, the bibles from the monastery of Ripoll may appear somewhat orphaned—a perception I redress in this paper. I orient Ripoll's output within diverse textual and visual traditions, assessing the balance between the local and the international in shaping not only single codices but also entire libraries. Collections of books represented their own unique form of creativity and reflected particular ways of making sense of the present in terms of the past.