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.
July 16, 2020
What do you think of when you hear the expression “a sleeper”? Perhaps you think of adorable babies and toddlers safe and warm in their sleepers? Or maybe...
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...
July 11, 2017
It wasn’t easy being king in the Middle Ages. This was a common conclusion drawn in the literature and historical writing of the period...
December 09, 2016
It seems you can’t go anywhere this time of year without a barrage of advertisements flaunting gifts for everyone on your list...
September 07, 2016
It can be mind-boggling to think about how many hands a manuscript has passed through between the time that its pages were copied an
August 01, 2016
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...
April 20, 2016
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...
April 05, 2016
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...
February 04, 2016
Aside from the prodigious quantity of snow it deposited on the American East Coast, one of the most notable stories about the recent Winter Storm Jonas was...
October 01, 2015
Does this sentiment strike a chord? This post takes its title from a melancholy line of Latin poetry written in the back of a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript...
