Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures
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.
August 22, 2023
The end of summer brings a return to school. With it, there is a renewed focus on DEI or DEAI, which has become over the last several years a central concern of institutions of higher education in the United States. Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, Inclusion...
February 21, 2022
The first time that one of my students had the opportunity to pick up a fifteenth-century breviary, he was so nervous he could hardly bring himself to touch it...
June 08, 2020
If you are like me, you’ve probably visited WebMD more than a few times trying to figure out if your headache is just a headache or an early stage of brain cancer. Or, if you’re more old school, you may have one of those enormous home health compendiums sitting on a shelf somewhere in your house.
January 08, 2020
Japan and Europe, two regions whose paths crossed only in 1543. Paris and Kyoto, two cities separated by 5,970 miles. Can they have something in common? Let’s try to see how and to what degree...
October 18, 2018
We are happy to announce that our innovative and successful (no false modesty here) program, Manuscripts in the Curriculum, is continuing, in a slightly different form as MITC II.
October 19, 2017
This post takes a closer look at what’s in a Book of Hours, which is arguably the most important text of the late Middle Ages. This is why...
June 13, 2017
The telephone, the Ferris Wheel, the first public toilet, the television, the Eiffel Tower, the incubator, the X-ray machine, even the dishwasher – these are just a few of the “firsts” exhibited at world’s fairs...
April 05, 2017
One of the questions we are asked most frequently about medieval prayer books, especially Books of Hours, is how they were actually used...
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...
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.”
