Category: historical manuscripts

This was posted within the past week; I saw it in several places:

• 2,500 Japanese woodblock prints including some amusing prints depicting London life by a Japanese printmaker who never visited London. I just read about this one this week.

And these are all historical manuscript collections which I return to from time to time:

• Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral, including (according to my notes):
  • St. Chad Gospels – c. 730. Blend of Irish and Anglo-Saxon influences; think Lindisfarne Gospels and Book of Kells, both written a little later; it includes the earliest surviving examples of Old Welsh writing. Celtic half-uncial.
  • Wycliffe New Testament – late 1400s; insular gothic style.
• Iliad, 10th century manuscript, Venetus A
• Magna Carta at the British Library. 
• Qur’an, 14th century Cairo.
• Hebrew Bible, 1482 Lisbon by Samuel ben Samuel Ibn Musa
• Voynich Manuscript, end of 15th century 
• da Vinci’s notebook at the British Library
• Ethiopic bible, 15th century
• Mozart’s notebook
• Jane Austen’s  handwritten juvenilia
• Notebook of William Blake
• Great Isaiah Scroll, c.125 BCE, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the 1970s
• Lindisfarne Gospels, late 7th century

And, while I was drafting this post, this came my way: a comprehensive list of online collections, twitter accounts and blogs having to do with medieval manuscripts. Wonderful! The article is by Robert Miller at College and Research Libraries News, via the Book-Art-L.

 

The J. Paul Getty Museum has made available high-resolution images of Georg Bocskay’s Mira calligraphiae monumenta online here. Lettered in the mid-1500s by Georg Bocskay, Joris Hoefnagel added the illuminations about 30 years later. What an wonderful addition to the WWW’s digital calligraphy resources.

The Schøyen Collection is an impressive resource for the study of historical manuscripts. As described on the website, “The Collection, based in London and Oslo, contains over 20,000 significant manuscripts of major cultural importance and is an important part of the world’s heritage.”

Begun about 1920 and probably digitized beginning in 2000, the collection spans centuries and continents. The website is easy to navigate and well organized in the old-style way — that is, by categories. It’s clear that some of the scanning was done earlier in the development of digitization techniques, but it is nevertheless a valuable resource.

Thanks to Christopher Haanes for pointing the way to this digitized repository of historical manuscripts.

I’ve been traveling for the past few weeks, but I’m back in my studio and eager to get back to work. The next few posts will include images from my travels in Crete and Israel.

 

Here’s a detail shot of a Byzantine music manuscript I recently came across amongst a treasure trove of medieval manuscripts in a monastery in Crete.
As usual, click on the image for a closer look.
I’ll post more images once I get them all sorted out.

I recently completed a Stanford MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) entitled “Digging Deeper 1: Making Manuscripts“. This six-week course ended in early March, and I’m still mulling over what I learned.

Some of the topics covered in the course:

• the social, political and economic forces which drove the change from papyrus to membrane (vellum, parchment);
• circumstances which caused the decline of the scroll format and the rise of the codex format;
• information a medieval manuscript can provide to us about its origins and use;
• historical scribal practices that help to identify the date and location of manuscripts, from pricking and ruling to page design features such as catchwords and quire markings;
• how to find digitized images of medieval manuscripts, how these images are organized, and the pros and cons of studying digitized images as opposed to the studying the manuscripts themselves.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to Stanford’s next MOOC on medieval manuscripts, entitled “Digging Deeper 2: The Form and Function of Manuscripts“. This course will continue some of the studies begun in part 1 but also focus on conservation practices today.

I wrote more about this MOOC experience in my regular column of the Guild of BookWorkers Newsletter. (If you are not a member, you’ll be able to read it in 6 months or so.)