A MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT OF BATTLE PLANS
MANY MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS were liturgical, but there were exceptions. The fifteenth-century Visconti Semideus, as described in Christopher De Hamel’s Meeting with Remarkable Manuscripts, is an artful collection of battle plans. … Continue reading
HUGO PICTOR’S SELFIE
IT’S RARE TO know authorship of an 11th-century manuscript. However, thanks to Christopher De Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, the Oxford University’s Bodleian Library’s Bodley 717 is an exception. Tidbits … Continue reading
A PALAEOGRAPHER’S ADVENTURE PART 2
IN PART 1 yesterday, manuscript specialist Christopher de Hamel introduced us to the earliest surviving book known to have been in medieval England, The Gospels of Saint Augustine. Today in … Continue reading
A PALAEOGRAPHER’S ADVENTURE PART 1
RESEARCHING OLD MANUSCRIPTS is anything but musty and mundane. Palaeographer Christopher de Hamel is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and former Fellow Librarian at the university’s Parker Library. … Continue reading
PASTIME WITH GOOD COMPANY
GIVEN COVID-19’S SUGGESTED pastime at home sans company, I got to thinking about fulfilling ways to hunker down. Recently here I cited armchair travel. Today, tidbits touch on Henry VIII … Continue reading
HENGWRT PINKHURST TIDBITS PART 2
THE HENGWRT CHAUCER is the oldest known manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. Yesterday here at SimanaitisSays, I shared several tidbits of Christopher De Hamel’s encounter with the Hengwrt at the … Continue reading
HENGWRT PINKHURST TIDBITS PART 1
ADAM PINKHURST was a scribe during Chaucer’s time, the late 1300s and early 1400s. The Hengwrt Chaucer, c. 1400, is the earliest known example of Chaucer’s most famous work, The … Continue reading
CARMINA BURANA REVISITED
WHO ISN’T AWED by Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana? Its throbbing rhythm in O Fortuna/Velut luna/Statu variabilis (“O Fortune/Like the Moon/Changeable”). Its salacious lyrics composed for lusty 12th-century monks. And, for … Continue reading
THE CODEX AMIATINUS—A BIBLE WITH LEGS PART 2
ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS OFTEN are associated with compelling tales. For example, yesterday’s Codex Amiatinus, Part 1, set the stage: There’s a trio of medieval English monks and three commissioned illuminated manuscripts … Continue reading
THE CODEX AMIATINUS—A BIBLE WITH LEGS PART 1
MORE THAN 1300 years ago, Benedictine monks in Anglo-Saxon England put together illuminated manuscripts of the Bible. Around 700 A.D., three of these immense handwritten tomes were produced at the … Continue reading
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