Clarkson Launch 012 - N. Turner - A Romanesque Binding in the Getty Museum: Materials, Craft...
Channel: International Assoc. of Book & Paper Conservators
Date: 2021-03-10

Nancy Turner is conservator of manuscripts at The J. Paul Getty Museum, where she has been responsible for the preservation and conservation of the collection of illuminated manuscripts since 1984. Her areas of specialty include the conservation treatment and technical study of parchment and painting materials of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts. B.A. Stanford University (1983: art history and anthropology); M.A. University of California, Los Angeles (1996: history). She studied bookbinding with Olivia Primanis and David Brock, and held the advanced conservation internship at Trinity College Library, Dublin during the academic year 1989-90. She first met Christopher Clarkson while taking his courses, Medieval Book Structures I (1985) and II (1987, co-taught by Michael Gullick) at Columbia University’s Rare Book School.

Turner, Nancy K. ‘A Romanesque Binding in the J. Paul Getty Museum: Materials, Craft Technology, and Monastic Reform’. Journal of Paper Conservation 20, no. 1–4 (2 October 2019): 213–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/18680860.2019.1763642.

An original twelfth-century binding in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles was studied by Christopher Clarkson in 1994. Unusual features caught his attention, particularly its undecorated tanned leather over-cover (‘chemise’) attached to bare boards by sewn-on ‘turn-in’ flaps and envelope pockets of white alum-tawed skin. With Clarkson’s condition report of the binding as its starting point, this new study situates the binding of the Getty’s Life of St Anselm into a wider context of northern French and Flemish Benedictine and Cistercian bindings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This paper highlights the binding practices of reform monastic orders and their ‘spirit of thrift’.