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.
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...
May 17, 2021
Of all the monastic orders founded during the Middle Age, none are as romantic as the Carthusians. The extreme austerity of their way of way life has always inspired awe. And their complete withdrawal from the world paradoxically has ensured our perennial fascination.
March 30, 2021
Nationalism vs. European unification; these have been pressing questions in Europe since the end of World War II, if not before. They are crucial questions now (and highly controversial ones), given the resurgence of nationalist movements across the world, whether one is contemplating Trump’s “America first,” Brexit, or Marine Le Pen. And these issues certainly have ramifications for medieval historians since contemporary political movements are looking back to the Middle Ages (or a fictionalized version of the medieval past) to support their agendas.
July 16, 2020
What do you think of when you hear the expression “a sleeper”? Perhaps you think of adorable babies and toddlers safe and warm in their sleepers? Or maybe...
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.
February 10, 2020
Bibliography Week in NY this year was January 21-25. I’m sure some (many?) of the readers of this blog were in NY that week enjoying the various bookish events...
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 17, 2019
We usually steer clear of divisive political issues in this blog, but today, we are going to plunge right in (no pun intended)...
April 15, 2019
I know, I know, that isn’t very good… Please forgive the attempt to bring to mind some of the most famous verses there are about Spring...
February 11, 2019
Everyone at Les Enluminures really, really believes that teaching with actual medieval manuscripts is a transformative experience. This has always been an important and successful part of the mission of our text manuscripts site...
