Erik Kwakkel blogging about medieval manuscripts
In the beginning there were animals and they were deemed suitable for writing on. Before paper was introduced in medieval Europe, the book s origins walked in the meadow as calf, goat, and sheep. Little did they know that their skin would become parchment and filled with poetry, songs, and stern theological lessons. From beast to Continue reading Beastly beginnings
The chances of a medieval book making it to the safety of a modern library are dazzlingly small. Relatively few did. Imagine the challenging journey across centuries of wear and tear, fire and water, and perhaps worst of all, fickle readers. Why keep a book from the past that is handwritten on yellowish animal skin Continue reading Perfect imperfection
When readers in Western Europe turned their eyes to printed books, around the middle of the 15th century, handwritten books became old-fashioned, unwanted, and ultimately obsolete. Bookbinders began to disassemble medieval manuscripts and recycle their strong parchment leaves as binding materials. Thousands were systematically destroyed over the next two centuries, which is why one often Continue…
It reads like a horror story. In 1964, the New York rare book dealer Philip Duschnes (d. 1970) bought and subsequently broke a splendid medieval Bible produced in early-fourteenth-century Paris (Figure 1). Every page is adorned with exuberant decoration, usually with gold leaf. The manuscript also contains numerous historiated initials, like the letter S above. With Continue reading Breaking Bad:…
Over the years I have developed a passion for the ways in which medieval scribes and booksellers (i.e. stationer, libraire) promoted their products. Commercial book artisans had a variety of tools available to attract clients to their shops, from spam scribbled in the back of manuscripts ( If you like this, I can make you one Continue reading The Oldest Surviving Printed Advertisement in English…
Medieval readers, especially studious ones, must have cursed their desks from time to time. It is not easy to manage desk space when working with often large and clunky medieval books. Scribes and translators developed work-arounds for these space issues, as I have shown in a blog post on medieval desktops. Scribes would place two Continue reading Medieval Book Carousels
Doodling is something we all do, from time to time, often without realising. Listening to someone on the phone or perhaps attending a meeting (or class), we scribble, rather haphazardly and spontaneously, squiggly lines, random words, and mini drawings. The practice is quite old. Doodled squiggly lines and mini drawings are encountered frequently in medieval Continue reading Doodles in Medieval…
Selfies are by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon. As shown in a previous post on medieval selfies, some decorators made self-portraits in manuscripts, showing that the practice predates print – albeit without the use of a camera. They did so to identify themselves as the creator of a miniature or historiated initial, or even Continue reading Me, Myself, and I: The Story of Two Medieval…
It may seem a stretch to compare page design with architecture, but the comparison really works, I think. Looking at the medieval page, it is not difficult to regard it as an engineered construction: a convoluted space defined by columns and corridors, with rooms inhabited by thoughts and ideas (Figure 1). Nothing encountered on the Continue reading The Architecture of the Medieval Page
One of the fundamental things in a medieval book is letters – those symbols that fill up page after page and that make up meaning. Each one of us human beings writes differently and considering that medieval books were made before the invention of print, it follows that the scripts they carry show a great variety in execution styles. Continue reading The Secrets of Medieval Fonts