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.
October 20, 2023
In case you haven’t noticed, we updated the Text Manuscripts site last month. Do take a look! This post, about Gospel Books, was prompted by one of my favorites from the update, a manuscript of the four Gospels made in Italy in the fifteenth century.
October 14, 2022
Autumn, what does it mean to you? Crisper days and chilly nights, a new palette in the garden, asters, pumpkins? A new academic year? For us at Les Enluminures, it means that it is time for the annual Fall update of the Text Manuscripts Site.
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...
August 19, 2019
Out on your summer vacation, perhaps looking for that ideal Instagram photo, have you ever gazed in wonder at a painting and thought “how did they do that?” Well, artists’ secrets are sometimes revealed in unexpected places – like the flyleaf of a manuscript.
July 22, 2019
Launched in September 2002, www.textmanuscripts.com offers the largest and most wide-ranging inventory of text manuscripts currently on the market. Numbered 1, 2, 3, and so on, manuscripts on the site have now reached the number 1000...
May 09, 2018
Well, maybe not that zoo. Les Enluminures is going to the International Congress on Medieval Studies held in Kalamazoo...
December 21, 2017
Readers of this blog may wonder where the manuscripts described on our web site, www.textmanuscripts.com end up – who buys our treasures?
November 15, 2017
At first glance, this unlikely juxtaposition seems to mean nothing. Even Mr. Google yields no results in a search that combines this artist, subject, and scholar. But, indeed, one of Damien Hirst’s most inventive new works is...
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.
