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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.

books of hours



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...

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Patient Portals of the late Middle Ages

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.

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Reading the Hours

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...

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Meet me at the Fair

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...

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Badges of Devotion

One of the questions we are asked most frequently about medieval prayer books, especially Books of Hours, is how they were actually used...

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Gifts of the Past

It seems you can’t go anywhere this time of year without a barrage of advertisements flaunting gifts for everyone on your list...

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Beer is made by men, wine by God

This week’s post is dedicated to a unique, unpublished wine manuscript from the fifteenth century: “the Statutes Regulating the Wine Trade and Transportation in Bologna.”

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