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| Book of hours, illuminated manuscript on parchment, in Latin, Southern Netherlands, Ghent or Bruges, c. 1460-1470 |
Introduction to medieval world
* The medieval Europe was created out of the dismemberment of Rome.
* Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islamic civilizations were siblings.
* Germanic peoples, like Charlemagne's Franks, led the development of medieval Europe.
* Byzantium viewed itself as the inheritor of the Roman civilization.
* Islamic civilization quickly developed and expanded across former Roman territories.
Introduction to manuscript studies
What is a manuscript?
1 the technique used in the production that must happen by hand.
Which excludes from the concept of manuscript any printed or
otherwise mechanically produced text including incunabula.
The fact that manuscripts are individually handmade implies that
each manuscript is one of a kind.
2 the material that serves as support for
the writing, that must be soft as opposed to hard.
And thus, essentially, papyrus, parchment, or paper, at least in Medieval Europe,
excluding the four inscriptions in a stone, or other hard materials.
3 the content and purpose of the written text since the common use has
the the term in the sense of a book as a conveyor of a text.
Literally, philosophical, legal,
religious, that has been conceived to circulate and be the object
of author's mission that excludes charters and other archival records.
Codicology is the scholarly discipline that studies the manuscript book.
And codicologists, the practitioners of that discipline.
Manuscripts copied in the original author's handwriting are called
autographs.
Illuminated manuscript refers to any manuscript where the text
has been complimented with some type of decoration, whether or
not this has been made with gold and or silver.
This decoration can be for example, initials, borders, or illustrations
some deluxe manuscripts produced, even in the late antiquity, or during the Carolytian Italian Renaissance and
of course, during the Renaissance of the 15th century can have letters of gold and
silver written on purple parchment.
These manuscripts received a general denomination of codices purpurei.
If the color used to dye the parchment to Asturian purple,
the price would have been astronomically expensive.
Because this pigment, which was extracted from the glands of certain mollusks
could easily reach prices higher than the price of gold.
Illustration is properly the representation of the scenes, people, or
objects related to the content of the text.
Ornamentation is basically the ensemble of figurative filaments
that have no relation to the textual content.
Or at least a relation that is not immediately obvious.
Miniature, from the latin word miniare, has nothing to do with the small but with
minium or red lead because red was the most common color used apart from black.
However, the common use has made of miniature,
a painting found in a manuscript and more specifically,
a painting that is related to the illustration.
The term illuminatura is only found in medieval text from the 12th
century onwards.
Before that, we find historiare
which is the inclusion of images that reproduce the story of the text.
Together with complete manuscripts,
we also find fragments,
the so-called in Latin membra disiecta, singular membrum disiectum.
That can go from several gatherings to a small piece of a leaf.
In some cases, the fragmentary state of
these manuscripts is due to the greed of collectors and booksellers,
who could get a higher price by selling their manuscripts in pieces.
But in many other cases,
the membra disiecta are just the result of
a natural recycling process performed on the books when they were no longer useful.
And so we find parchment leaves with its writing utilized as
reinforcement in the book bindings of printed books or even in clothiers.
Now and then, when when the membra disiecta half are a considerable size,
it is possible to identify the different fragments in several libraries,
and so rebuild even if just virtually the original manuscript.
A good example of this is the Codex Sinaiticus which is
one of the oldest preserved copies of the Bible in the Greek language.
Locating and using manuscripts
