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Dear Santa … A Wish List for the Medievalist
By Julie Somers With only ten days left until Christmas, many people (like myself) are still searching for the perfect gifts. In my internet shopping adventures I discovered some unique ways to share...
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Manuscripts in the Kitchen
By Jenny Weston (My apologies if you received an e-mail with an unfinished version of this post a few days ago— A case of hitting the wrong button while writing)! The holidays are upon us! During this...
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Medieval Manuscripts: Continuity and Comfort for the New Year
Guest Post by Cynthia Lange Cynthia is a Research Assistant on Bridging on Unbridgeable, a project in progress at Leiden University regarding the development of English usage guides. One of the things...
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Library or Labyrinth?
By Irene O’Daly A book that has probably done more than any other to introduce people (including myself) to the world of the medieval library is Umberto Eco’s masterpiece The Name of the Rose....
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My First Year on Twitter: How I Became @erik_kwakkel
By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel) I signed up for Twitter almost a year ago to the day. I had heard of Twitter, of course, but I connected the medium to such messages as “I am so bored of this life!” and...
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Pondering the Physical Scriptorium
By Jenneka Janzen When meeting new people, sooner or later one is invariably asked “What do you do?” In my case, after providing my go-to brief description of Manuscript Studies, it is nearly always...
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Oh! The Places You’ll Go!: The Amazing Places Medieval Manuscripts Have Been...
Julie Somers Lately, as I investigate the networks along which medieval manuscripts traveled, my thoughts often turn to connections with my own books. When I look at my home library, although many of...
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Listening to the Book: Medieval Music Manuscripts
By Jenny Weston As a researcher studying the reading habits of medieval monks, I spend a great deal of time pondering the ‘world of the monk’. While I usually focus on the books that the monks were...
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Secrets of the Page: Palimpsests
By Irene O’Daly On Monday evening (11.02.13) a full house was present at the University Library for an entertaining and fascinating lecture by Will Noel, director of the Schoenberg Institute and...
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Paws, Pee and Mice: Cats among Medieval Manuscripts
Today’s blog is a guest post from Thijs Porck, a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture, Universiteit Leiden. This week Erik’s tweet on cat-paws in a fifteenth-century manuscript...
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The Proud Reader: Showing Off the Medieval Book
By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel) When I started this post I set out to answer a very simple query: what is the oldest photograph we have of a real reader interacting with a medieval manuscript? The...
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The Social Life of ‘Medieval Fragments’
Come visit our Flickr Photostream Lieftinck Lecture February 2013 We have some great photos from the past Lieftinck Lectures and Manuscript Colloquia held at Leiden University Library. All available at...
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New Exhibition Starring the Leiden Aratea
By Jenneka Janzen Like a discerning foodie seeking out the rarest delicacies, or an adrenaline junkie dreaming of the next death-defying bungee jump, I too have a ‘bucket list’ involving one of my...
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Image Interrupted – The Unfinished Medieval Manuscript
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...
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“Devil Be Gone!” : Temptation, Sin, and Satan in Medieval Manuscripts
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...
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‘I have trodden the winepress alone’ (Isaiah 63.3)
Stammheim Missal, Getty Collection, Los Angeles MS 64, f. 85v-86r Depiction of Christ in Majesty (left), Crucifixion (right) from the Stammheim Missal, used at Hildesheim (Germany) in the 1170s. If...
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Navigating the Digital World
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...
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Making Books for Profit in Medieval Times
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...
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Hairy Bindings and Golden Bookworms: My Research in Bruges
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...
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Digital Tools for Medieval Texts: Workshop at the Huygens ING
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...
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