Author Archives: medievalfragments

I Love Paris in the Springtime… A User’s Guide to the BnF

Posted on May 20, 2013

By Irene O’Daly Say the words Bibliothèque nationale de France to any manuscript researcher and it tends to invite a series of anecdotes – usually horror stories about long days trawling through blurry microfilms, refusals of access to manuscripts, and its … Continue reading →

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The Last of the Great Chained Libraries

Posted on May 10, 2013

By Jenny Weston On a beautiful sunny day last week, the Turning Over a New Leaf project team decided to take a day off from the office to visit a spectacular chained library in the small town of Zutphen (located in … Continue reading →

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A Hidden Medieval Archive Surfaces

Posted on May 3, 2013

By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel) On my Tumblr I recently posted two entries devoted to a remarkable discovery made in the Book History class I am co-teaching with Paul Hoftijzer for the Book and Digital Media Studies programme at Leiden University. It concerns 132 … Continue reading →

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Digital Tools for Medieval Texts: Workshop at the Huygens ING

Posted on April 26, 2013

By Julie Somers At the Huygens ING in The Hague, researchers and program developers convened last week to discuss the creation of tools that are intended to help all ‘scholars-at-large’ of medieval manuscripts use digital technologies in useful ways. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Julie Somers, Project News

Hairy Bindings and Golden Bookworms: My Research in Bruges

Posted on April 19, 2013

By Jenneka Janzen Access to digitized manuscripts online (see Irene’s Navigating the Digital World) is changing the way medievalists can and are expected to work. While the benefits of accessing an electronic facsimile for research with respect to preservation and … Continue reading →

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Making Books for Profit in Medieval Times

Posted on April 15, 2013

By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel) The novelist L.P. Hartley once said that the past is like a foreign country: things are done different there. What I find most remarkable about the bookish slice of medieval society that I study is not … Continue reading →

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Navigating the Digital World

Posted on April 5, 2013

By Irene O’Daly Recently, the library of Trinity College, Dublin made their most famous manuscript, the Book of Kells free to view online. While this is a welcome move, I was disappointed by the relative lack of browsing ease that … Continue reading →

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‘I have trodden the winepress alone’ (Isaiah 63.3)

Posted on March 29, 2013

Depiction of Christ in Majesty (left), Crucifixion (right) from the Stammheim Missal, used at Hildesheim (Germany) in the 1170s.  If you look on the bottom of f. 86r, you can observe a man treading grapes in a vat. The banners … Continue reading →

Posted in Project News

“Devil Be Gone!” : Temptation, Sin, and Satan in Medieval Manuscripts

Posted on March 22, 2013

By Jenny Weston For most God-fearing medieval Christians the Devil was ‘legitimately scary’. He (and his band of demonic followers) presented a very real threat to one’s spiritual fortitude—always out to trick, torment, and tempt good Christians into a life … Continue reading →

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Image Interrupted – The Unfinished Medieval Manuscript

Posted on March 15, 2013

By Julie Somers Recently, I received as a gift a pretty amazing coloring book full of images of medieval tapestries. Beautifully drawn copies of medieval masterpieces, yet empty and free to the possibility of re-creating them in my own fashion, … Continue reading →

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