The latter is the more precise and useful term, since it denotes no specific animal and it is sometimes difficult to identify definitively the creature whose skin formed the pages of a book. This material is variously referred to today as “vellum” or “parchment”. The vast majority of books produced in Western Europe, prior to the end of the 14th century, when paper was introduced to the West, were made from animal skins, which had been transformed from hairy, slippery, distinctly smelly items, into smooth pages of stable, flat parchment that provided the perfect ground for inks and pigments. The riddle has two answers: it obviously refers to a book, but the opening line suggests an alternative solution an animal of some kind. Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book Riddles,Penguin Classics, revised edition 1993) Of smiths, wound about with shining metal….” With gold thus I am enriched by the wondrous work (Part of the stream) and again travelled over me, Sprinkling useful drops it swallowed the wood dye An 11th-century Anglo-Saxon riddle, from the Exeter Book (Number 26) hints at the variety of skills necessary to transform animal skins into parchment copy texts paint and gild decoration and illustration, and bind folios between boards processes that reveal a great deal about medieval scribal and artistic practice.īit into me once my blemishes had been scraped away This lecture will explore how an illuminated book was produced, in the belief that an understanding of materials and techniques provides a firm foundation from which to pursue other avenues of investigation.Īnalysis of the word “manuscript”, literally meaning “written by hand”, conveys the fact that all the books considered here were hand-made, but their production involved much more than the expert penmanship practiced by scribes such as the man seated at his desk in this mid 12th-century illustration (Plate 1). ![]() A broad-brush approach might consider issues such as patronage, and function or a narrower focus concentrate on the scripts employed, the study of Palaeography, or the style of decoration and illustration, the discipline of Art History. They can be studied in a multitude of ways. Illuminated manuscripts are some of the most interesting, and aesthetically appealing artifacts to survive from the Middle Ages.
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