Gifts of the Past
December 09, 2016
It seems you can’t go anywhere this time of year without a barrage of advertisements flaunting gifts for everyone on your list...
Welcome to the Medieval Text Manuscripts Blog! This blog highlights what makes our text manuscripts particularly interesting and appealing to us – and (we hope) to you too! Here we explore what these books can tell us about how they were made and used. We also share what we know of their most fascinating and unusual contents, makers, and owners. Some of our discoveries are quite significant, some merely amusing, and some bizarre. All medieval manuscripts have much to reveal to their attentive modern audiences. Follow our blog to learn more about them.
December 09, 2016
It seems you can’t go anywhere this time of year without a barrage of advertisements flaunting gifts for everyone on your list...
November 15, 2016
The iconic image of a Hebrew Bible is the Torah Scroll, the Sefer Torah - monumental scrolls containing the entire Pentateuch (the five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) that are used for public reading during prayer services...
November 03, 2016
The Dead Sea Scrolls are considered the “most famous manuscript find of all time” and the “greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century.” Today they surely rank as one of the most important and revered literary and religious manuscripts in existence.
October 11, 2016
We usually try to give our blogs a catchy title. In this case, we didn’t have to try very hard. What could be more intriguing than a book called the Secret of Secrets...
September 07, 2016
It can be mind-boggling to think about how many hands a manuscript has passed through between the time that its pages were copied an
August 01, 2016
Spend enough time with medieval manuscripts and you wind up wishing their early readers had been a bit more forthcoming in identifying themselves and indicating how they used their books, preferably in the flyleaves and margins of the selfsame books...
June 29, 2016
It is always a special pleasure when one of our manuscripts finds the perfect new home (and frankly, we have wonderful clients, so that is often the case). Today we would like to introduce two distinguished scholars, David Andrés-Fernández (Spain), and Jane Morlet Hardie (Australia)...
June 02, 2016
This week’s post is dedicated to a unique, unpublished wine manuscript from the fifteenth century: “the Statutes Regulating the Wine Trade and Transportation in Bologna.”
May 16, 2016
Anyone who has ever handled medieval manuscripts comes away with a sense of how they bring the past alive in a very human way. In all sorts of manners, manuscripts divulge...
April 20, 2016
Some medieval and Renaissance manuscripts survive in almost pristine condition. There is a special pleasure in turning the pages of manuscripts such as our copy of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics...