Blogpost 2

So far I have addressed the questions of what an illuminated manuscript is, and when and where did they originate.  The question of where they originated has been quite difficult for me to pin down exactly, but I have found that the real illuminated manuscripts originates in the early Middle Ages approximately the 6th century, in Western Europe.  The illumination of books or manuscripts was at it's peak between about 1066 and 1485.  But the process was being used in many other areas, and the idea of beautifying documents with decoration could be traced back to the 20th century BC with the Egyptians decorating funeral rolls.  However, to be considered a true illuminated manuscript, the decoration must contain both colour and silver or gold foil.

I thought this image was a good example of illumination,
 it has bright colours, but most importantly gold foil.

My process of detection this last week has been quite stilted.  I am not finding information from the range of sources I anticipated I would be able to.  The books I borrowed from my local library have been my main source to date.  In terms of Internet searching, so far, I have been using the search terms ‘medieval illuminated manuscripts’ and this has not been giving me much information on these items.  I have search through the following sources; Swinburne Library databases; State Library of Victoria databases; National Library of Australia databases; I have used Google Scholar; and Google – ‘I feel lucky’, I have tried an on line encyclopedia also.  I changed my search string slightly using Google suggestions and searched ‘medieval illuminated manuscripts information’, and have found a couple of websites I want to investigate further.  Some of these were: The Centre for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University; The Warburg Institute of the University of London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I will continue to investigate different search terms to gather more information, I don't think I am being broad enough to be able to gather a broad amount of information.  I've added part two of the series of Youtube videos:

 

Medieval Manuscript Reproduction, Part 2: Ruling

Bibliography

Link to my complete Bibliographical page.