Download or read book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts written by Christopher de Hamel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts. Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize. A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick! Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too. In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell). From the earliest book in medieval England to the incomparable Book of Kells to the oldest manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, these encounters tell a narrative of intellectual culture and art over the course of a millennium. Two of the manuscripts visited are now in libraries of North America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts allows us to experience some of the greatest works of art in our culture to give us a different perspective on history and on how we come by knowledge.
Download or read book The Manuscripts Club written by Christopher de Hamel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over a thousand years of history The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years: a monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America—all of them members of what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club. This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel’s unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion that crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been. In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript “at a bookseller’s in a back alley.” This was his reaction: “The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold—as many of them were—cannot be told.” The members of de Hamel’s club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style and a lifetime’s experience.
Download or read book Les Enluminures written by Christopher De Hamel and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautiful catalog explores four books that are remarkable survivals of what people read in the Middle Ages - the finest of medieval Bibles (the greatest text of Western civilization), one of the oldest Books of Hours (the most famous medieval manuscripts of all), Biography (the unique legend of an Anglo-Saxon princess), and the History of Troy (the oldest chivalric story in European history). These are all manuscripts unknown on the market for at least eighty years. One of the four was last described in print in 1588; the others were last catalogued for sale in 1909, 1932 and 1938 respectively. All are richly illustrated, with a total of 133 miniatures between them, as well as hundreds of borders and illuminated animals and grotesques. Some of the finest artists of the period were responsible for the miniatures, and at least two of them likely issue directly from the greatest of European courts.Prize-winning author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, Christopher de Hamel, wrote the Introduction and Catalogue. Founder and President of Les Enluminures, Sandra Hindman is responsible for the Preface. Les Enluminures is an internationally recognized leader in the field of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, miniatures, and finger rings. Dr. Sandra Hindman, an expert on medieval and Renaissance manuscript illumination and Professor Emerita at Northwestern University, founded Les Enluminures in Paris in 1991 in association with her Chicago-based business. The New York City location opened in May 2012. Keegan Goepfert (M.A., Courtauld) became Vice-President of the company in 2012. For over twenty-seven years, Les Enluminures has forged and maintained relationships with the world's most prestigious public and private collections. International clients include the Musée du Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the J. Paul Getty Museum, among many others. The gallery has exhibited in most major art fairs in the United States and Europe, and we organize three to four exhibitions in our gallery spaces annually.
Download or read book The Book in the Cathedral written by Christopher de Hamel and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, a captivating account of the last surviving relic of Thomas Becket The assassination of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 is one of the most famous events in European history. It inspired the largest pilgrim site in medieval Europe and many works of literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Anouilh's Becket. In a brilliant piece of historical detective work, Christopher de Hamel here identifies the only surviving relic from Becket's shrine: the Anglo-Saxon Psalter which he cherished throughout his time as Archbishop of Canterbury, and which he may even have been holding when he was murdered. Beautifully illustrated and published to coincide with the 850th anniversary of the death of Thomas Becket, this is an exciting rediscovery of one of the most evocative artefacts of medieval England.
Download or read book Scribes and Illuminators written by Christopher De Hamel and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the work of medieval paper, parchment, and ink makers, scribes, illuminators, binders, and booksellers
Download or read book A History of Illuminated Manuscripts written by Christopher De Hamel and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Illuminated manuscripts are perhaps the most beautiful treasures to survive from the middle ages. This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the medieval world of books, their production and their consumption. The text divides this world into different groups of readers and writers: missionaries, emperors, monks, students, aristocrats, priests, collectors and the general public. De Hamel is both informative and immensely readable, and the sumptuous illustrations render this book too good to be missed."--From Amazon.com
Download or read book The Gilded Page written by Mary Wellesley and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII “A delight—immersive, conversational, and intensely visual, full of gorgeous illustrations and shimmering description.” –Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author’s status—part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer’s writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people—the grinders, binders, and scribes—in their creation and survival. The Gilded Page is the story of the written word in the manuscript age. Rich and surprising, it shows how the most exquisite objects ever made by human hands came from unexpected places. “Mary Wellesley is a born storyteller and The Gilded Page is as good as historical writing gets. This is a sensational debut by a wonderfully gifted historian.” —Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars
Download or read book Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts written by Elaine Treharne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'. The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.
Download or read book Meetings With Remarkable Men written by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: EXACTLY A MONTH HAS ELAPSED since I finished the first series of my writings—just that period of the flow of time which I intended to devote exclusively to resting the parts of my common presence subordinate to my pure reason. As I wrote in the last chapter of the first series, I had given myself my word that during the whole of this time I would do no writing whatsoever, but would only, for the well-being of the most deserving of these subordinate parts, slowly and gently drink down all the bottles of old calvados now at my disposal by the will of fate in the wine-cellar of the Prieuré, and specially provided the century before last by people who understood the true sense of life. Today I have decided, and now I wish—without forcing myself at all, but on the contrary with great pleasure—to set to work at my writing again, of course with the help of all the corresponding forces and also, this time, with the help of the law-conformable cosmic results flowing in from all sides upon my person from the good wishes of the readers of the first series. I now propose to give a form understandable for everyone to everything I have written down for the second series, in the hope that these ideas may serve as preparatory constructive material for setting up in the consciousness of creatures similar to myself a new world—a world in my opinion real, or at least one that can be perceived as real by all degrees of human thinking without the All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, p. 1236 slightest impulse of doubt, instead of the illusory world which contemporary people picture to themselves. And indeed, the mind of contemporary man, of whatever level of intellectuality, is only able to take cognizance of the world by means of data which, whenever accidentally or intentionally activated, arouse in him all sorts of fantastic impulses. And these impulses, by constantly affecting the tempo of all the associations flowing in him, gradually disharmonize the whole of his functioning, with such sorrowful results that it is impossible for any man, if he is able to isolate himself even a little from the influences of the established abnormal conditions of our ordinary life and is willing to think about it seriously, not to be terrified—as, for example, by the shortening of our life with each decade. First of all, for the ‘swing of thought’, that is, for establishing a corresponding rhythm for my thinking and also for yours, I wish to follow somewhat the example of the Great Beelzebub and imitate the form of thinking of one highly respected by him and by me, and perhaps already, brave reader of my writings, by you, if of course you have had the daring to read through to the end all of the first series. That is to say, I wish to introduce at the very beginning of this writing of mine what our dear-to-all Mullah Nassr Eddin1 would call a ‘subtly philosophical question.’ I wish to do this at the very beginning because I intend to use freely, both here and in my later expositions, the wisdom of this sage, who is now recognized almost everywhere and upon whom, it is rumoured, the title of ‘The One and Only’ is soon to be officially conferred by the proper person. And this subtly philosophical question may already be sensed in that sort of perplexity which is bound to arise in the consciousness of every reader of even the very first paragraph of this chapter, if he compares the many data on which his firm convictions about medical matters are based with the fact that I, the author of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, after the accident which nearly cost me my life, with the functioning of my organism not yet fully re-established owing to the incessant active effort Mullah Nassr Eddin, a legendary figure in numerous countries of the Near East, is an embodiment of popular wisdom.
Download or read book The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination written by Christopher De Hamel and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British Library's collection of manuscripts is mined for a wealth of examples, illustrated in color, to this guide to illumination for the general reader. De Hamel (now librarian, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK, he's a leading scholar in the field) discusses first why then how manuscripts were illuminated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Toward a Global Middle Ages written by Bryan C. Keene and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.
Download or read book Making Medieval Manuscripts written by Christopher De Hamel and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many beautiful illuminated manuscripts survive from the Middle Ages and can be seen in libraries and museums throughout Europe. But who were the skilled craftsmen who made these exquisite books? What precisely is parchment? How were medieval manuscripts designed and executed? What were the inks and pigments, and how were they applied? This book looks at the work of scribes, illuminators and book binders. 0Based principally on examples in the Bodleian Library, this lavishly illustrated account tells the story of manuscript production from the early Middle Ages through to the high Renaissance. Each stage of production is described in detail, from the preparation of the parchment, pens, paints and inks to the writing of the scripts and the final decoration and illumination of the manuscript. This book also explains the role of the stationer or bookshop, often to be found near cathedral and market squares, in the commissioning of manuscripts, and it cites examples of specific scribes and illuminators who can be identified through their work as professional lay artisans.0Christopher de Hamel's text is accompanied by a glossary of key technical terms relating to manuscripts and illumination, providing an invaluable introduction for anyone interested in studying medieval manuscripts today.
Download or read book Introduction to Manuscript Studies written by Raymond Clemens and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides an orientation to the field of medieval manuscript studies. It will be of help to students in history, art history, literature, and religious studies who are encountering medieval manuscripts for the first time, while also appealing to advanced scholars and general readers interested in the history of the book before the age of print. Every chapter in this guidebook features numerous color plates that exemplify each aspect described in the text and are drawn primarily from the collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge."--Book jacket.
Download or read book Bibliomania written by Thomas Frognall Dibdin and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 804 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fabric written by Victoria Finlay and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth—how we make it, use it, and what it means to us. How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents —and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.
Download or read book Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts written by Michelle Brown and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2018-12-18 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a historiated initial? What are canon tables? What is a drollery? This revised edition of Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms offers definitions of the key elements of illuminated manuscripts, demystifying the techniques, processes, materials, nomenclature, and styles used in the making of these precious books. Updated to reflect current research and technologies, this beautifully illustrated guide includes images of important manuscript illuminations from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and beyond. Concise, readable explanations of the technical terms most frequently encountered in manuscript studies make this portable volume an essential resource for students, scholars, and readers who wish a deeper understanding and enjoyment of illuminated manuscripts and medieval book production.
Download or read book Image on the Edge written by Michael Camille and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.
