Manuscripts and Palaeography Archive
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The Cross as Tree: The Wood-of-the-Cross Legends in Middle English and Latin Texts in Medieval England
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe wood-of-the-cross legend is actually a group of narratives that trace the pre- history of the wood used to make Christ's cross back to Old Testament figures, or in some cases back to paradise itself. -
New Testament from the oldest complete Bible available online for the first time
Posted on December 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe New Testament volume from one of the British Library’s most valuable treasures, Codex Alexandrinus, has been made available online for the first time on the British Library’s website. -
The Production and Planning Process of the Book of Kells
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsThe Book of Kells is one of Ireland’s greatest treasures, although its origins— location and date—cannot be definitively determined. The gospel book earned its name from the monastery in which it was last housed before its move to Dublin (circa 1654) for safekeeping during the Cromwellian period when Catholic establishments were dissolved and property was either looted or destroyed. -
In It for the Money: The Birth of Commercial Book Production
Posted on December 5, 2012 | No CommentsThis lecture introduces the main players of this world of medieval book commerce -- parchment makers, paid scribes, illuminators, shopkeepers -- and discusses why these traditionally separate professions blended into a closely knit community that stands at the cradle of our bookish world today. -
The Geese Book – medieval manuscript now available online
Posted on November 28, 2012 | No CommentsOne of the most interesting manuscripts of the late Middle Ages is now available online - The Geese Book, a lavishly and whimsically illuminated, two-volume liturgical book, can now be accessed through a project from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. -
New Book on ‘The Book of Kells’ launched
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsThis new publication, presented in a cloth-bound slipcase, features 84 full-size reproductions of complete pages of the manuscript, while enlarged details allow one to relish the intricacy of elements barely visible to the naked eye. -
Medieval Book History Week Lecture: “Practical Latin and Formal English in the 14th-15th Centuries”
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis lecture is part of Medieval Book History Week. Renown Professor Jeremy Catto spoke about literacy and language in England during the later Middle Ages at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. -
University of Exeter to create app showcasing Anglo-Saxon manuscripts
Posted on November 12, 2012 | No CommentsThe world’s largest collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry may soon be available on a smart device App, as part of a project initiated by the University of Exeter. -
St Augustine Was Eaten by a Bear: Book Production in Carthusian Monasteries
Posted on November 10, 2012 | No CommentsSo stop reading and lets think about physical appearance: what does it look like, what does it feel like, what does it smell like. -
Crowdsourcing the Medieval Text: New Avenues for Examining Leaves and Fragments
Posted on November 8, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper will argue that while formal institutional websites are useful for highly professional and specialized projects, broader and more popular social media and photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Facebook offer the potential to provide an easier and more widely accessible platform for exploring (i.e. crowdsourcing) medieval manuscript fragments. -
Excusing the Inexcusable: Abbots Who Diminish the Patrimony, and the Monks Who Love Them Anyway
Posted on November 7, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of the fantastic SESSION IV: Abbots between Ideals and Institutions, 10th–12th Centuries. This paper focused on the writing about abbots during the tumultuous period of Stephen's reign. -
“The Self and the Other: Migration and Ethnicity in Late Anglo-Saxon England”
Posted on November 6, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of the session: SESSION II: Who Do They Think They Are? and dealt with Anglo-Saxon migration, names and charters. -
Christian Living Explained: Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis liber in a Carolingian Instructional Manual
Posted on November 3, 2012 | No CommentsAnother paper from the yesterday's SESSION I: Lived Religion in the Middle Ages. This paper focused on Alcuin of York's contribution to the standardisation of Carolingian Christian texts for pastoral instruction. -
Authors, Scribes, Patrons and Books
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsThis essay gives an account of the social role of manuscripts and early printed books and the processes by which they were made, processes that changed greatly during the period -
Kassia: A female hymnographer of the 9th century
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsIt’s obvious that the Byzantine female hymnography was not flourished especially in Byzantium. -
The ruling as a clue to the make-up of a medieval manuscript
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe purpose of this inquiry is to try to reconstruct the original state of the manuscript using ruling as a clue. -
The Librarius and Libraire as Witnesses to the Evolving Book Trade in Ducal Brittany
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn monasteries and cathedrals of the medieval West, the « custos librariae » functioned primarily as a custodian or keeper of bound codices, and we see a similar role emerge from extant medieval registers from Breton cathedral chapters. -
Textile and Embroidered Bookbindings of Medieval England and France
Posted on October 3, 2012 | No CommentsThese are rich, elaborately crafted objects that required binders to collaborate with craft persons skilled in needlework. Beautifully woven fabrics were used, some of which were made for clothing. O -
The Naples L’homme arme masses, Burgundy and the Order of the Golden Fleece: The origins of the L’homme arme tradition
Posted on October 3, 2012 | No CommentsThe six anonymous L'Homme arme masses in naples MS VI E 40, of the Biblioteca Nazionale, have prompted heated debate concerning their genesis since Dragan Plamenac discovered them in 1925. -
The Rare Oxford Machzor Vitry: A Rosh Hashana essay
Posted on September 17, 2012 | No CommentsThe Machzor Vitry work is, as mentioned above, not just a prayer book but includes much more, including many laws and a commentary. It consists of three portions; the halakhic legal portion, the liturgical formulae, and commentaries to the prayers taken from the aggadah. -
The Forgotten Text of Nikolai Golovin: New Light on the Igor Tale
Posted on September 14, 2012 | No CommentsMann argues that a rare text of the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche comes from an early, fifteenth-century redaction that scholars could never locate—a redaction that is the prototype for all the redactions that have been studied heretofore. He maintains that unique parallels between this redaction and the Slovo o polka Igoreve support the hypothesis that the Igor Tale was an oral epic song in a tradition that actually continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when oral tales about the Kulikovo Battle (1380) were composed. He places the new parallels in the context of other evidence for oral composition in the Igor Tale. -
15th-century Book of Hours comes to South Carolina
Posted on September 13, 2012 | No CommentsA 15th-century Book of Hours has been recently purchased by the University of South Carolina, and students and the public will soon be able to see the valuable medieval text in person and online. -
Scholars discover fragments of French medieval epics
Posted on September 13, 2012 | No CommentsThe larger fragment is a section of text from the Chanson de Guillaume, one of the earliest surviving Old French texts, known until now in only one manuscript. The smaller fragment comes from a manuscript of Foulque de Candie, a late twelfth-century poem. -
Origins and Development of the Notariate at Ravenna (Sixth through Thirteenth Centuries)
Posted on September 9, 2012 | No CommentsExcluding the profession of the sword, that of the notary was among the earliest, the most self-conscious and certainly the largest in the medieval world. -
New Technologies in Teaching Paleography
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsDuring last years many instruments for teaching and research in paleography have been planned and carried out; they mostly were dynamic web sites based on information systems, which were used to manage bibliographical data on medieval manuscripts and to implement the processes usually adopted from researchers for the collection of information.
