Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures

What does it mean to read an illuminated manuscript today? The Roman de la Rose reveals a language beyond text - the parchment, the gesture, and the gaze all speak eloquently.

What does it mean to read an illuminated manuscript today? And more specifically, how do we—as modern readers and viewers—encounter a work like the Roman de la Rose, with all its visual and textual complexity, its resistance to singular interpretation? Two manuscripts from Les Enluminures open a path toward understanding how the Rose speaks to us.

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...

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.

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...

“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...

Autumn, what does it mean to you? Crisper days and chilly nights, a new palette in the garden, asters, pumpkins? A new academic year? For us at Les Enluminures, it means that it is time for the annual Fall update of the Text Manuscripts Site.

The margin is “in” nowadays not “out.” Our recent exhibition at Les Enluminures (The Margins of Medieval Art: Questioning the Center) got me thinking about the margins in other types of manuscripts, text manuscripts that are not especially illuminated.

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...

In uncertain times, a tool to predict the future could change your life, but such a device would surely be costly or physically unattainable. Yet, that tool might be right in the palm of your hand...