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.
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.
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...
October 15, 2019
Let’s play a game. What do you think of when you hear, “Bible,” and “Thirteenth Century”?
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...
October 26, 2017
For Halloween we pulled a “thriller” off the shelf with graveyard mysteries and bloody murder...
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...
March 22, 2017
News flash! Eighteen “new” manuscripts were added to our text manuscripts site last Thursday...
March 10, 2017
Monsters and mythical creatures, birds and beasts, warriors and angels are far from unexpected in the margins of medieval manuscripts, where they supply endlessly variable subjects for marginalia...
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)...
