In this newscast, we are discussing a couple of medieval books and finds, a digitized astronomical manuscript from Uzbekistan, and a 20,000-book library, that you can buy with a mansion attached 🙂
There's a piece of news that triggered us to discuss this topic. A medieval Hebrew prayer book is expected to be sold for about $6m at Sotheby’s. However, we want to approach this theme thoroughly.
It's probably time to switch to some other topics besides medieval manuscripts from Russia and Rus', something that we've been discussing quite a lot during our live streams. But we've seen so much interesting stuff during this summer and want to share more of it with you!
A collection of rare, illuminated manuscripts from the Medieval and Renaissance eras owned by the late New York philanthropists Elaine and Alexander Rosenberg will go under the hammer at Christie’s in a live auction on April 23rd in New York.
Deep inside the archives of the National Library in Prague’s Klementium, a 13th-century document has been discovered that’s exciting attention from musicologists. It contains fragments of six musical compositions for two voices and was bound inside a later manuscript.
Restoration of a damaged artwork or artifact poses a delicate issue: while restoration can perhaps return an artifact to what it might have looked like when it was newly completed, the fact that the artifact is damaged in the first place is also part of its history.
Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, was hacked to death in Canterbury Cathedral 850 years ago and has been studied ever since, so it was generally assumed that everything that could be known about him was already explored.
Today we share this special issue of The Illuminators' Magazine from 1862. That's a beautiful and informative edition that includes 29 amazing plates (chromolithographs) showcasing different types of illumination.
It's time to share this month's digitized books. Both of them will be dedicated to illumination and both were published in the middle of the 19th century. Today's book is A Guide to Beginners in the Art of Illumination by A. H. Warren.
Identifying the origins of a manuscript is a notoriously subjective art, one that requires an impressive visual memory and an exceedingly trained eye that can quickly spot the telltale details which hint at certain artists, periods, and locations.
Dame Judi Dench, actress and the president of the Brontë Society, supported the Society's call to crowdfund the institution's bid for the second issue of Charlotte Brontë’s Young Men's Magazine at an auction in November.
Part of an extensive collection of manuscripts, unearthed in the Russian city of Novgorod more than five years ago, these childish writings were produced by an old practice of writing on birch bark.
It takes an expert eye to decipher old and damaged manuscripts, but even that is not enough sometimes. Recently, multispectral technology has aided researchers of the Dead Sea Scrolls to read ink invisible to the naked eye and pinpoint previously unknown texts.
“The Tale of Genji” is of interest due to many reasons. While the original manuscript no longer exists, it was supposedly made in Orihon style — a Japanese version of concertina binding. And it was written by a noblewoman a thousand years ago.
In this interview, Professor Gregory Clark, a distinguished scholar of medieval manuscripts, provides an examination and analysis of the recently resurfaced Fauquier Book of Hours and its significance.
