Abstract Attempts to position Renaissance Europe within a global framework have encouraged an examination of the interdependencies that bound Europe to the rest of the world, yet key figures from northern Europe, particularly France, have yet to be fully examined in this way. This paper investigates a series of manuscript illuminations connected to the court of René d’Anjou (1409–80). Each image depicts the physical focus of devotional activity either in the form of reliquaries, icons, or pilgrimage sites and provides visual evidence for cultural exchange, raising issues of global connections, personal piety, and intellectual curiosity. In each case, the devotional object or place is brought closer to the patron by its representation within the manuscript. An investigation of these works challenges Renaissance isolationism and highlights the importance of cultural transfer and cross-cultural communication. Cultural hybridity and the idea of visual material acting as an expression of the integration of geographically diverse aesthetic ideas is one area examined in this essay. René was evidently central to a European dialogue with the wider world and presided over a culturally diverse and receptive court. The concepts of peripatetic ideas and representational flexibility are examined in relation to these images, encouraging a consideration of what happens when the pictorial and literary systems of unrelated cultures come together.
Bryony Coombs (2025) studied this question.