Category Archives: Jenneka Janzen

Games of Thrones? Popular Medieval Board Games

Posted on August 8, 2014 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen Living without modern entertainment luxuries, what did medieval people do for fun? Surely it wasn’t all farm labour, praying, or jousting (to play into common misconceptions)? Believe it or not, several of our favourite board games originated … Continue reading →

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Mark Their Words: Medieval Bookmarks

Posted on July 11, 2014 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen When talking about manuscripts with the uninitiated, I usually mention how features that guide us through our modern books – running titles, subheadings, and indices, for example – originated in the Middle Ages. Yet, I tend to … Continue reading →

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Judging a Book by its Cover: Manuscript Bindings Without Bling

Posted on May 30, 2014 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen Our blog has featured medieval bindings before (Jenny’s blog on “bling” bindings was recently published in Quest magazine) but with an eye to the extraordinary, and extremely rare. In fact, finding an intact medieval binding, never mind … Continue reading →

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“There’s a map for that!” Visualizing the Medieval World

Posted on April 4, 2014 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen Generally, a map is a visual illustration of an area, a means to symbolically represent spatial relationships between objects, regions, and even ideas. I bet for many of us we most commonly use maps to find the quickest bike … Continue reading →

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Dragons and Courtiers: Medieval Doodles in a Leiden Manuscript

Posted on February 14, 2014 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen This week’s blog is a show-and-tell of one of my new favourite finds in Leiden University’s Special Collections. Two weeks ago, Turning Over a New Leaf hosted another successful colloquium and Lieftinck Lecture. I coordinated the manuscript … Continue reading →

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Top Manuscript News of 2013

Posted on January 3, 2014 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen First, a very Happy New Year to all our readers from the Turning Over a New Leaf Project! 2013 was an exciting year for manuscripts! New technologies and growing digitization programmes enhanced avenues of access and exploration … Continue reading →

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Dueling Cantors and Their Early Musical Notation

Posted on November 8, 2013 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen In my last blog post I briefly discussed one of my favourite manuscripts, the Cantatorium of St Gall (Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek Cod. Sang. 359). It survives as the oldest complete neumed manuscript. I also mentioned that early neumes, … Continue reading →

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Early Musical Notation: A Look at the ‘Cantatorium’ of St Gall

Posted on September 30, 2013 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen This week, while playing with the iPhone app for e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, I paid an online visit to one of my favourite manuscripts, the Cantatorium of St Gall (Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek Cod. Sang. … Continue reading →

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Where the Wild Things Are: The Medieval Bestiary

Posted on August 16, 2013 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen While a bit denser than Maurice Sendak’s modern bed-time story, medieval bestiaries were, and still are, crowd-pleasers. A bestiary is a collection of short descriptions about a wide variety of (real or imagined) animals, birds, and in … Continue reading →

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The Boring, Ugly, and Unimportant – Biases in Manuscript Research

Posted on July 12, 2013 by medievalfragments

By Jenneka Janzen As I carry out my dissertation research, I’ve spent some time thinking about the role aesthetics play in which manuscripts are studied, and which ones are deemed too boring, unimportant, or ugly to attract interest. Certainly, it … Continue reading →

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