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.

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Rapscallions and Resolutions

Happy New Year to all of our readers! The year 2017 is full of possibilities – and, we’re guessing, full of resolutions as well...

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The Shape of the Thing:

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...

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The Dead Sea Scrolls

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.

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The Secret of Secrets

We usually try to give our blogs a catchy title. In this case, we didn’t have to try very hard. What could be more intriguing than a book called the Secret of Secrets...

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A Legal Reference Book

Spend enough time with medieval manuscripts and you wind up wishing their early readers had been a bit more forthcoming in identifying themselves and indicating how they used their books, preferably in the flyleaves and margins of the selfsame books...

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This week’s post is dedicated to a unique, unpublished wine manuscript from the fifteenth century: “the Statutes Regulating the Wine Trade and Transportation in Bologna.”

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Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Some medieval and Renaissance manuscripts survive in almost pristine condition. There is a special pleasure in turning the pages of manuscripts such as our copy of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics...

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Book of Secrets

Look too briefly at the book below and it might trick you. The faded title written hastily upon its modest binding proclaims it to be...

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A Love Token

We’re guessing love is on your mind right now, whether it be a many-splendored thing or full of anxious fear (or both!).

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