TextmanuscriptTextmanuscripts - Les Enluminures

les Enluminures

medieval text manuscripts Blog

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.



Before Dr. Tulp: a Medieval Surgeon's manual

Perhaps if you studied the history of art (from Pyramids to Picasso, we used to call it colloquially) in school, you are familiar with pictures representing surgical operations such as Rembrandt’s masterpiece, the Anatomy Lesson Dr. Tulp...

more »

Gospel Books: Changing Form and Many Functions

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.

more »

DEAI and Medieval Manuscripts

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...

more »

BIBLIOMORPHY: Gothic (and Earlier) Bibliomorphy

For those of you tuning in for the first time, “bibliomorphy” is the study of objects that are recognizable as books (“biblio,” meaning book) because they use the form of the book, but that are created in combination with the forms and functions of other object types (“morph,” meaning to transform).

more »

BIBLIOMORPHY: Books and Jewelry

“Why do you sell jewelry?” “What does jewelry have to do with medieval manuscripts?” People often ask me these questions, especially at art fairs, puzzled I guess by how different the media are...

more »

Time, Daylight, and the End-of-Year Calendar

Short winter days are now upon us. Usually, we don’t consider the actual length of our day to be shortened, otherwise we could leave work at 3:00pm! There may be less daylight now, but the measure of the day does not change throughout the year. Why is this?

more »



headerDeco