interested the authors, but their great knowledge and good sense
have left their conclusions singularly unassailed.

In manuscript illumination the course of present studies has been
redirected by Professor Francis Wormald in a series of brilliant and
stimulating articles. But behind him and other workers in that
field lie the minute, penetrating, and far-seeing labours of Dr. M. R.
James, whose catalogues are the basis of all later research and whose
achievement belongs in its extent to the age of giants.

These are the great classics of the subject. But the English twelfth
century has at the moment many adherents: as I have been working
on this century the ground as it were has been shifting under my
feet. In architecture the articles and lectures of M. Jean Bony,
whose generous advice and comments I most gratefully acknow-
ledge, have given a change of emphasis in the selection of signi-
ficant points. A thesis, as yet unpublished, by Dr. George Zarnecki
has brought new order and shown new relationships over a large
sphere of our Romanesque sculpture: I am greatly indebted to his
work, to the collection of photographs formed by him for the
Courtauld Institute, and above all to many talks with him on the
problems involved. In illumination the wide knowledge and
speculative ingenuity of Dr. Otto Pächt bring constant and start-
ling increases in our understanding of this period. As yet his results
have been made available only in one short article and in some
lectures delivered in the universities of Oxford and London. I have
learned much from him and almost every point in this book con-
nected with illumination has been discussed with him, often, I
fear, in the hallowed silence of Bodley's Selden End. I find it
impossible to disentangle my own opinions from his and I should
like to acknowledge most fully the great part he has played in all
my treatment of the subject. His own book, when it appears, will
establish many points that here are only hinted at. A striking con-
tribution to the study of manuscripts of the Canterbury school
has recently been made by Dr. C. R. Dodwell in a thesis for a
doctorate in the University of Cambridge.

In the production of these volumes of the Oxford History of
English Art illustration, of necessity highly selective, must always
be a major problem, and each period requires a somewhat different

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