Rare manuscript of Boccaccio’s work discovered in England
A manuscript dating back to the year 1400 has been discovered at the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library – it contains French translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s work ‘De casibus virorum illustrium’ (On the Fates of Famous Men).
Voices on the Medieval Page, Part 1: The Reader
Considering how special it was to own a manuscript, it may seem remarkable that medieval readers wrote in their books.
Illuminated Manuscripts: Art and Science
Stella Panayotova from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, discusses how her research using scientific observations and pigment analysis is shedding light on how medieval manuscripts were made.
Medieval Books of Hours in the Public Library of Bruges
A documentary created by the Public Library of Bruges about their collection
The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts
Six hundred years ago Christians who went to church and they learned to to destroy manuscripts.
Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis
The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists.
Stanford University and Walters Art Museum team up for medieval manuscript digitization project
A new agreement will ensure the long-term preservation of the Walters Art Museum’s digitized collection of medieval manuscripts and provide new apps for studying them.
Reading the unreadable: New X-ray technology can now read rolled-up scrolls
Scientific breakthrough will allow historians to virtually read medieval scrolls to fragile to open.
Chasing Krüger’s Dream: Studying the Transmission of Classical and Medieval Manuscripts Using Lattice Theory and Information Entropy
New computational techniques show how modern digital philology is changing the way we think of the transmission of medieval manuscripts through space and time.
Networking Scribes
This was the keynote paper given at the Celtic Studies Association of North America Annual Conference at the University of Toronto April 18 – 21, 2013.
Rare 15th-Century Manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah purchased by The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Mishneh Torah was created by Moses Maimonides (d.1204), and is considered one of the most important documents of medieval Jewish law.
Reconstructing a Late Medieval Irish Library
‘It is a tricky thing to discuss a library that has not existed for 350 years.’
Making Books for Profit in Medieval Times
What I find most remarkable about the bookish slice of medieval society that I study is not so much the differences between medieval manuscripts and our modern books, but their similarities.
Teaching the Creed and Articles of Faith in England: Lateran IV to Ignorantia sacerdotum
The broad conclusion of this thesis is that the available evidence shows that the basic principles of Christian doctrine were available both to the lower clergy who would preach and teach the Creed and Articles of Faith and also to the laity who would receive this preaching and instruction.
New software program allows dating of medieval manuscripts from popular words
‘These words have their own life. It’s amazing how we can decipher the date of a document based on the evolution of word usage.’
Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art
A symposium held at the Art Gallery of Ontario offered new insights into the artistic community of 14th-century Florence.
The Hidden Masters of the Middle Ages: the Limbourg Brothers
Their best known work is the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which is called the ‘most valuable book in the world.’
Making Manuscripts
A short video on how medieval illuminated manuscripts were made.
The Liber Vitae of Durham (BL MS Cotton Domitian A. vii): a discussion of its possible context and use in the later middle ages
The Durham Liber Vitae belonged in the later Middle Ages to Durham Cathedral Priory and, to understand its context, the history of the communities which produced it must be understood.
The Welsh Female Saint: Patterns within a Social Framework
Historia Divae Monacellae, the Latin Life of Melangell is also comparatively late in composition, with the earliest manuscript being from the 16th century, but possibly drawing on earlier written sources.3 When we look at the availability of written texts relating to male saints the difference in source material is immediately evident.
Lotions and Potions: Medical Books from the Middle Ages
Medicine existed long before it was a science taught at medieval universities. This lecture takes the audience to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the first medical handbooks were translated from Arabic into Latin, the learned language of the West.
Was medieval manuscript marginalia pure distraction?
This essay aims at investigating the roles and meaning of pictures in the marginalia of medieval manuscripts, and I will try to reach some conclusions through looking at examples from some European manuscripts of mainly the high and late Middle Ages.
The speaking cross, the persecuted princess and the murdered earl: the early history of Romsey Abbey
The Old-English note may have begun life as an endorsement, either to the grant of privileges or (what is perhaps more likely) to the agreement about the woodland belonging to Romsey, a notice of which has become attached to it; it was not uncommon when diplomas were collected into cartularies for such endorsements to be used as ‘headings’ for the text.
Picturing Gregory: The Evolving Imagery of Canon Law
This paper surveys images created for the opening of the Liber extra between around 1240 and 1350, from a variety of standpoints: iconography, page layout, patrons and readers – and also suggests possible ideological agendas that might be embedded in the illustrations.