Medieval Manuscripts

The Diocesan library in Pelplin contains several manuscripts which originate from its mother monastery in Doberan. They probably came here with the first monks from Doberan to the newly founded monastery in Pogódki (1258) which moved to Pelplin a few years later (1276). The stock consists of six manuscripts with a definite possession note of Doberan Monastery and seven further handwritings which are classified by research work as originating from Doberan. The article presents the manuscripts and the current state of research.

Ornament as Argument  explores notions of ornamentation and materiality in 10th and 11th-century Christian manuscript illumination. In particular, the book investigates the function and metaphoric meaning of so-called textile pages—images evoking the weave patterns of Byzantine and Islamic silk. An analysis of a broad range of objects situates textile pages in the context of medieval reading practice, visual exegesis, and worship. Based on various theological arguments that bear on the images and the book as an object in itself, the illuminations emerge as powerful textile metaphors. These concern material approaches to scripture, textile readings of the incarnation, and the physical book as body. Ornament as Argument thus contributes to a new understanding of the vital role illuminated manuscripts played in medieval material culture.

This paper, given at the 2020 Virtual International Medieval Conference (Leeds) addressed two later manuscript copies of Hrabanus Maurus's "carmina figurata," In honorem sanctae crucis and examined how visual alterations to the poems reflect contemporary religious movements.

Resumo: Como um dos períodos mais ricos em termos de produção de documentos, o reinado de Alfredo, o Grande (871 – 899) se destaca em diversos âmbitos. Estando em um contexto de reformas, o reinado de Alfredo ressignifica as produções intelectuais em Inglês Antigo. Tal ressignificação acontece na criação de documentos oficiais como a Crônica Anglo-Saxônic e diversas obras clássicas em Latim são traduzidas ao vernacular. Uma destas traduções é a da Ecclesiastica Historia Gentis Anglorum, de autoria do monge Beda, o Venerável (673 – 735) publicada na língua latina em 731. A origem desta tradução está dentro do projeto alfrediano que visa contemplar a construção de unidades dos povos Ingleses na esfera do político, com Alfredo proclamando-se rei dos Anglos e dos Saxões e do cultural, com a criação e tradução de documentos no vernacular. Assim, o objetivo deste trabalho é investigar a trajetória dos seis manuscritos que compõe a versão de Beda em Inglês Antigo e, principalmente, dissertar sobre sua origem e transmissão. Ao investigar isto, lemos como um único documento, envolvido em projeto de unidade, fragmenta-se em manuscritos que possuem trajetórias distintas no decorrer da história.

Palavras-Chave: Beda; Alfredo; Unidade; Transmissão manuscrita; Inglês Antigo.

Abstract: As one of the richest periods in terms of production of documents, the kingship of Alfred, the Great (871 – 899) stands out in various scopes. Being in a context of reforms, the kingship of Alfred resignifies the intelectual productions in Old English. Such resignification happen in the creation of official documents like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a number of classical works in Latin are translated to the vernacular. One of these is the Ecclesiastica Historia Gentis Anglorum, authored by the monk Bede, the Venerable (673 – 735) and published in Latin language in 731. The origin of this translation is on the alfredian project which aims to contemplate the construction of unities of the English people in the sphere of the political, with Alfred claiming itself king of the Angles and the Saxons, and of the cultural, with the creation and translation of documents into vernacular. Thus, the purpose of this work is to investigate the trajectory of the six manuscripts which compounds the version of Old English Bede and, mainly, to dissert of its origin and transmission. By investigating this, we read how a single document, involved in a project of unity, fragments itself in manuscripts which have distinctive trajectories throughout history.

Keywords: Bede; Alfred; Unity; Manuscript transmission; Old English.

A transcription of Leonin's "Viderunt Omnes" (c. mid to late 12th century), showing excerpts of the original two sources with comparative variations and a modern transcription.

For a recording and score-video see the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p9WQlyVPrA

Script for video: https://youtu.be/3a7qkEcrLdg on concept of "manuscript" from codicological point of view. It is part of the series, "Deciphering secrets: the Illuminated Manuscript of Medieval Europe", offered from 15-7-2016 in www.coursera.org.

A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Blackwell Companions in Art History, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2019) (a collection of thirty-nine original essays from leading and upcoming scholars in the field, each historiographically analyzing one of a systematic and editorially determined range of subjects in the development of Romanesque and Gothic art history; eleven new essays were added to the revised original thirty essays of the first edition; this includes my introductory essay, "A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art").

1. Introduction
A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art
Conrad Rudolph

2. Artifex and Opifex – The Medieval Artist
Beate Fricke

3. Vision
Cynthia Hahn

4. Materials, Materia, "Materiality"
Aden Kumler

5. Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers
Madeline H. Caviness

6. Narrative, Narratology, and Meaning
Suzanne Lewis

7. Formalism
Linda Seidel

8. Gender and Medieval Art
Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz

9. Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Herbert L. Kessler

10. Iconography
Shirin Fozi

11. Art and Exegesis
Christopher G. Hughes

12. Whodunit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art
Jill Caskey

13. Collecting (and Display)
Pierre Alain Mariaux

14. The Concept of Spolia
Dale Kinney

15. The Monstrous
Thomas E. A. Dale

16. Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture
Laura Kendrick

17. Definitions and Explanations of the Romanesque Style in Architecture from the 1960s to the Present Day
Eric Fernie

18. Romanesque Sculpture in Northern Europe
Colum Hourihane

19. Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture
Robert A. Maxwell

20. The Historiography of Romanesque Manuscript Illumination
Adam Cohen

21. The Study of Gothic Architecture
Stephen Murray

22. France, Germany, and the Historiography of Gothic Sculpture
Jacqueline Jung

23. Gothic Manuscript Illustration: The Case of France
Anne D. Hedeman

24. “Specially English”: Gothic Illumination c.1190 to the Early Fourteenth Century
Kathryn A. Smith

25. From Institutional to Private and from Latin to the Vernacular: German Manuscript Illumination in the Thirteenth Century
Michael Curschmann

26. Glazing Medieval Buildings
Elizabeth Pastan

27. Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts
Brigitte Buettner

28. Reliquaries
Cynthia Hahn

29. East Meets West: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States
Jaroslav Folda

30. Gothic in the Latin East
Michalis Olympios

31. Art and Liturgy in the Middle Ages
Eric Palazzo

32. Architectural Layout: Design, Structure, and Construction in Northern Europe
Marie-Thérèse Zenner

33. Sculptural Programs
Bruno Boerner

34. The Art and Architecture of Female Monasticism
Jeffrey F. Hamburger

35. Cistercian Architecture
Peter Fergusson

36. Art and Pilgrimage: Mapping the Way
Paula Gerson

37. "The Scattered Limbs of the Giant": Recollecting Medieval Architectural Revivals
Tina Waldeier Bizzarro

38. Medieval Art Collections
Janet Marquardt

39. The Modern Medieval Museum
Michelle P. Brown

For an audio-video animation of the manuscript with the modern transcription see the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO56v7qltNo

An edition of the anonymous labyrinthine ballade on three canons, "En la maison Dedalus" (In the House of Dedalus) from the Berkeley Manuscript.

This edition includes a modern transcription of the music, the original manuscript excerpted, poetic and literal translations of the text, reconstruction of the 11-tier labyrinth upon which the music is overlain, and pedagogical materials/explanations of the musical and poetic medieval Ballade forme-fixe.

Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 673 (= Sg) contains an early version of the Decretum Gratiani (pp. 3a – 201a) and an appendix with 20 further texts (pp. 201a – 203a) in part 1 and numerous patristic, homiletic, canonistic and other excerpts (pp. 203a – 246b) in part 2. The investigation of the appendix and of part 2 shows that they not only share some of the scribes, rubricators and annotators with the Decretum, but also some of its content. Indeed, the appendix and part 2 contain 58 texts which can be found, in one form or another, in the vulgate Decretum. 17 of these 58 texts appear in the Decretum in the first part, too, but always in different versions, thus excluding any direct textual dependency. For the canonistic texts, the compiler of the second part of Sg probably used the Panormia, the Collectio 3 librorum or the Collectio 9 librorum, and the Collectio 5 librorum. Other likely formal sources include Burchard’s or Ivo’s Decretum or the Polycarpus together with the Collectio 2 librorum / 8 partium. The most recent datable texts in part 1 (1146) and part 2 (1139) suggest that the latter was compiled or actualized at about the same time as the former.

SOME MODERN SCHOLARS, such as Jeremiah Hackett and Agostino
Paravicini Bagliani, assert that the thirteenth-century work most commonly known as the Speculum astronomiae should not be attributed to Albertus Magnus. However, this article, based on a close analysis of forty-one of the surviving fifty-nine manuscripts containing the Speculum
in conjunction with a wide array of other primary sources, demonstrates
that the preponderance of the evidence is strongly suggestive that this is
a genuinely Albertine work. Furthermore, this article considers some of
the ways in which astrology fit into Albert’s larger theological and philosophical thought. Since Albert was a bishop and a theologian, it is necessary to see his astrological views as central to his theology, which is why he wrote about the subject almost every time he put pen to paper. Thus, this article not only argues for Albert’s authorship of the Speculum but also demonstrates how it fits within his larger body of writings on astrology and theology, while showing how these two subjects were linked for him.

This article examines in detail a psalter for the use of Sarum executed in Rouen c. 1490-1500, to which a series of unexpected additions have been made. These include sections painted in the style of the Netherlandish Dark Eyes Masters and added leaves in various hands copied after engravings by Martin Schongauer. The original content of the manuscript has thus been enhanced and re-shaped through a process of customization and recycling, which was not uncommon practice in England at the time, as it can also be observed in the so-called Hours of the Earls of Ormond (Harl. 2887).

« Nouveau survol des écrits de Pierre d’Ailly : de la tradition manuscrite aux premiers imprimés », dans Pierre d’Ailly: un esprit universel à l’aube du XVe siècle, ed. J.-P. Boudet, M. Brinzei, F. Delivre, H. Millet, J. Verger, M. Zink, Academie de Belle Lettres 2019, pp.  267-291

The Voynich manuscript is decoded by Alisa Gladyseva
Research years: 2015-2019
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British code breakers, but nobody of them could decipher it. So in this unique book, the reader is invited to experience the joy appreciating of decoding the WHOLE Voynich manuscript which has eluded understanding for more than 500 years! It is a well- documented text  of 700 pages for degree gaining with extensive end-notes of step-by-step deciphering and morphological proving of every word, that was written in medieval Galician (Galician-Portuguese), using the Latin, and old Catalan names of flowers. It provides qualitative analyze, based on up-to-date innovative research.

Research years: 2015-2019. The book has a three main parts:

1. Decoding flowers names. Plants' names are a key for an Alphabet characters' definition.

2. Reading the WHOLE Voynich manuscript

3. Deciphering the double coded Alchemy text of the Voynich Manuscript.

Script for video https://youtu.be/nEoX5b7XvaE. Black inks' origins go back to India, fourth millennium BC. These primitive inks' main component was soot or smoke black, mixed with some agglutinating substance. This black ink is chemically very stable, but is easily washed off from parchment. Therefore, Medieval writers and copyists preferred another sort of black ink, known as metallo-acid ink or gallnuts ink. Metallo-acid ink works well on parchment, but its acidity can damage parchment. In fact, much European written heritage is endangered because of the metallo-acid inks' damaging many manuscripts.

Review of Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond, eds, The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle, Contents, Contexts, Chronologies, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 351, 2 colour + 17 b&w illust., £75. ISBN: 978-1-78327-272-3.

Apart from glosses, illuminations and diagrams, the margins of medieval manuscripts commonly feature annotation symbols – signs that were used to perform routine operations with text or provided a framework for its use. Two annotation symbol certainly familiar to anyone handling a medieval manuscript are the nota monogram, used in the Middle Ages to mark points of interest, and the r-shaped siglum, used to mark passages in need of rechecking because they contained an error or corruption. In this paper, I show that these two annotation symbols originated as elements in a particular package of late antique Christian annotation practices. From humble origins in Late Antiquity, the nota and the require rose to become the dominant forms of annotation symbols in the early medieval Latin West, surpassing in popularity other signs that came into being in the same period and context or which had even older and nobler pedigree. The prestige that the two signs attained by the Carolingian period is not self-explanatory, but rather points to the influence that specific late antique Christian practices had on the early medieval intellectual life.

From a literary point of view, the Early Middle Ages can be defined as an age of compilation. However, the nature of medieval compilation has often been misunderstood. This is because scholars have limited themselves to identifying the source-texts, ignoring deeper aspects such as the nature of tradition and authority, the scope of the compilation and the modes of reception, as well as the recontextualization process that compilation implies. When Hrabanus Maurus composed his "De institutione clericorum" in 818, he borrowed between sixty and seventy per cent of the matter from previous authors, and in fact far from pretending being original, what Hrabanus claims is not originality, but authority, although by the interweaving of his materials and with his relatively few adds he managed to create a different resulting product with a new personality. Using as a case study the "De institutione clericorum", this article addresses the problems posed by the compilation process in relation to the educational methods –mainly mnemonic training – and the spiritual practices of the Carolingian renaissance, specifically the lectio divina and the ruminatio.