Books by Diana Scarisbrick

Published to accompany a major exhibition at the State Museums of the Moscow Kremlin organised jointly with the Indo-Russian Jewellery Foundation, this lavishly illustrated catalogue brings together royal, ceremonial, and personal Indian jewels to showcase the entire range and variety of the jeweller's art in India.

The distinguished private collection, known as the Griffin Collection, comprises in its entirety examples of every category of ring -- signet, devotional, memorial, decorative -- dating from antiquity to modern times. This catalogue, focusing on about 150 rings in the collection, is concerned with perhaps the most personal rings of all, those associated with love and marriage. Some can be recognised by the figure of Cupid armed with his quiver of golden arrows, others by the symbols of heart and clasped hands. However, the majority are gold bands, sometimes plain and occasionally decorated, that are inscribed with mottoes in English expressing the admiration, affection, and pledges of fidelity which bind humankind together. Known as posies or little poems because they often rhyme, these mottoes were current on rings from the late Middle Ages until the middle of the 19th century. Through these rings, Ms. Scarisbrick engagingly tells the long story of the relations between the sexes from the fifteenth century, when the cult of courtly love was superseded by an idealization of monogamous marriage, to an end in the twentieth century as a result of a different moral outlook.

The political and social worlds of France, England and Vienna during the period which began with the French Revolution and ended with the Second Empire are engagingly seen through the eyes of a highly intelligent Scotswoman, Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, who weds Charles de Flahaut, a Napoleonic general, against the wishes of her admiral father.

Devotes itself exclusively to rings, considering them thematically rather than chronologically. This title considers rings in all their forms and makes us delight in them as works of art, and makes their context come alive through paintings, drawings and vivid quotations.