Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books - like today's museums - preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures and everyone's place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. 'Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts' is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume's multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas - an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring over 160 colour illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.