Blogpost 5

Temple of Artemis and Book Burning at Ephesus

In this second last week of research, I have been looking at what has happened to illuminated manuscripts over the years, i.e. how they might have been destroyed or lost.  The loss of many illuminated manuscripts can be put down to wars, either from deliberate destruction from invading forces and then subsequent fires etc.  Or even to deliberate destruction by the invaders in order to control the invaded peoples, or destruction because beliefs differed.  Another way, is accidental damage in fires, for example the Great Fire of London in 1666 80% of the city was destroyed, including 87 parish churches, 44 company halls and even St Pauls Cathedral, the real figure for loss of illuminated manuscripts may not be known, but you could imagine what it could be.  Of course, theft is always a major problem for valuable and beautiful items.  Over the centuries many thousands of whole books were stolen, to increase the collections of invading forces.  Theft continues into modern times, where most often books have parts stolen, especially the very precious illuminations themselves, either as images or whole pages.

Book of Kells, Christ enthroned

I have also been compiling a list of known illuminated manuscripts, trying to pick one from each century, from 5th century, up to the 15th century.  These are: the 'Ambrosian Iliad' from the 5th century; 'St Augustine's Gospels' from the 6th century; the 'Naples Dioscorides' from the 7th century; the 'Book of Kells' in the 8th century; the 'Book of Nunnaminster' of the 9th century; the 'Gospels of Otto III" from the 10th century; 'Bamberg Apocalypse' from the 11th century; the 'Winchester Bible' of the 12th century; the Ashmole 'Bestiary' from the 13th century; 'The Golden Haggadah' of the 14th century and 'The Hours of Catherine of Cleves' from the 15th century.

My processes this week have taken a really long time, especially in compiling my list of known illuminated manuscripts, I mainly used the Masterpieces of Illumination book, which has the sub-heading of: "the world's most beautiful illuminated manuscripts from 400 to 1600", almost exactly what I was looking for.  But another useful source was Wikipedia's List of Illuminated Manuscripts, which listed hundreds for me to look at.  Unfortunately, because of Wikipedia's reputation of not always being accurate, I preferred to use this as a base to jump from, and find more reputable sources for more information, or at least to try to confirm what I was reading on the Wiki.  This was difficult, because not all the sources I have been using have information on all the Illuminated Manuscripts, so there was a lot of searching, and toing and froing between sites and books.  But I finally got there.  Another web source I have found most useful was The History of Information.  My picture this week include a drawing of book burning at an Ancient Greek city, Ephesus, a page from the Book of Kells, one of my known illuminated manuscripts and what I think is a very beautiful and detailed illumination, and my two instalments from the series: Medieval Manuscript Reproduction, 5b being the final one.

 

Medieval Manuscript Reproduction, Part 5a: Painting an illuminated letter

 

Medieval Manuscript Reproduction, Part 5b: Painting an illuminated letter

Bibliography

Link to my complete Bibliographical page.