Last week I was ill and in Paris, my least favourite city, but this was entirely justified by being able to see the Echternach Gospels in person. Made on the island of Lindisfarne around 690, it’s a stunning monument of early insular art and script.
Fully digitised at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530193948
On Sunday I'll be taking my students back to Vercelli and Verona, where (among other things) we will be working with an incredible uncatalogued #medieval #manuscript collection and using digital tools to investigate hidden #fragments inside book bindings. We will also be eating a lot of delicious pasta! Posts about this will be tagged with #SpringSchool25 - stay tuned.
When I teach #palaeography I tell my students that the history of handwriting is the history of people. This #manuscript proves it: copied personally by #Petrarch, one of the great poets of the Italian #Renaissance, it ends abruptly at the top of a page, when Petrarch suddenly died in July 1374. We only know this context thanks to painstaking palaeographical and historical research.
Paris, BnF, MS lat. 5784: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84469390/f105.item#
The tools of antique and medieval scribes - versus the tools we now use to investigate the work of scribes! (Here on a desk at the Bodleian, where I’m preparing for an afternoon of reading #medieval #manuscripts).
The Göttingen Summer School in Digital #Palaeography is back on! No fees, free accommodation for 2 weeks, and small travel bursaries. Deadline is 30 April. All information at https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/695097.html. #PalaeographySchool25
Revealing #palimpest with #multispectral #imaging! These amazing results, showing a #Merovingian overtext and a 5th-century Gospel undertext, were achieved by my colleague Alex Zawacki at Göttingen. I'll be presenting the full results of this and other cool discoveries in May at a German-language conference in Kiel.
Early #medieval Gospel books often contain images of the four evangelists and their animal symbols, usually with excellent facial expressions. Here is Mark, attempting to save his work from his lion, who appears to love eating books.
Cuthbercht Gospels, p. 154: http://data.onb.ac.at/dtl/7365239
There are moments of awe in manuscript studies, and this is one - a note written by Cassiodorus himself. He was a sixth-century senator and scholar, known for nothing less than laying the intellectual foundations of Western medieval monasticism. Here he displays his erudition by expanding on a passage from Philo of Carpasia's commentary on the Song of Songs.
Vat. lat. 5704, 58r: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.5704
Underneath this 8th-century drawing from southern Germany is a note that says "Winithar made these beasts". Winithar was a famous scribe and this is not his handwriting! The drawing was probably made by some monks (or novices) to mock him – or cheekily to transfer the blame for the doodles to him.
(Scribes including Winithar sometimes finished books with the phrase "I made this").
Karlsruhe, Cod. Aug. perg. 182, fol. 67: https://digital.blb-karlsruhe.de/blbhs/content/pageview/14843
Has anyone seen this sign after "deo gratias" before? It looks like it might be the Tironian note for "amen", but in an unusual form.
Clm 14540: https://handschriftenportal.de/workspace
In the ninth century, this scribe translated the Latin names for different types of nymphs into Old English. All of them became "elves" of the mountain, wood, water, field and sea.
This is the kind of text that was the inspiration for Tolkien's mythology!
Huge news: the Codices Vossiani Latini, for years behind a €8000-a-year paywall, have just been made open access. This is a huge collection of 300 #medieval #manuscripts, many of them from the earliest years of the Middle Ages.
Does anyone know the history or name of this insular letter y? @medievodons @historikerinnen @histodons #palaeography
I'm at the British Library and the charter I'm looking at – from CE 799 – may not be photographed. It's literally back to the drawing board for me! #palaeography @medievodons @histodons @historikerinnen
On the bottom right of this lovely ninth-century depiction of St Matthew writing his Gospel, we see a book chest containing 3 codices and a scroll. This was the standard way books were kept until around the 12th century: stacked flat on top of each other in chests. Bookshelves were invented much more recently than one might think!
(The text across the image is bleed-through from the previous page).
This is the actual handwriting of Alcuin of York, famous scholar, teacher and adviser to Charlemagne in the 8th century. With bonus parchment hole! #palaeography
This is a 9th-century copy of the Notitia Galliarum, a Roman register of cities from the 4th–6th centuries. In this entry, it lists the primary cities of the first province of Germany: Strasbourg (stratisburgo), Speyer (spira) and Worms (uuarmacia). This was an important list, even centuries after it was first made, because it helped prevent bishops arguing over the territories of their dioceses!
This is an #INSULAR manuscript, which means it was written in Germany but has associations with the British Isles. So the flourish on the final s may actually come from a similar Northumbrian practice. See for example the Salaberga Psalter, in which many final letters have beautiful formal flourishes. This is one of the many questions our project will be investigating! #palaeography
7r: https://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN838718817&PHYSID=PHYS_0019&DMDID=DMDLOG_0002&view=overview-toc
@InsularMSS
It's always a delight when a scribe finishes the page with an exuberant flourish on the final letter, just because they can - as in this 9th-century manuscript, where the final long s (shaped like a modern f) is curling wildly into the lines above. #palaeography
