Since the introduction of the personal computer, multi-media has become an important ingredient of modern life. Yet the combination of different media has a long history in western European culture: during the Middle Ages and early modern period, artists from various disciplines collaborated frequently and produced amazingly complex multi-media art works. The contributions to this volume in the series «Groningen Studies in Cultural Change» take up the challenge to go 'beyond comparatism' in order to study combinations of the arts in the most literal sense of the word and explore the changing attitudes towards the production and perception of multi-media art from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The topics range from the epistemology of word and image combined, multi-media interior decoration, early forms of 'Totaltheater', political communication, the emotive effects of Lutherian poetry and music, to the eighteenth century French critics of 'ut pictura poesis'.