![]() ![]() ![]() The vast majority that have survived were created on parchment. Most illuminated manuscripts are from the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and the majority are religious texts, although secular texts increased starting in the 13th century. This is a 12th century initial from a Bible, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The illumination on them made them valuable and thus aided in their preservation. The majority of these texts were created for literate Christians. The earliest date back to 400 and were created in Italy or the Byzantine Empire by monastic scribes whose work preserved most of the existing literature of Greece and Rome. Illuminated manuscripts with their elaborate initials, borders and miniature illustrations were painstakingly painted by hand, page by page. ![]() These manuscripts are mostly Christian documents, but also include Islamic ones that use the same techniques. Along with art and architecture, they have transmitted the culture and knowledge of their times to us today.Īmong them are illuminated manuscripts, which originally meant only manuscripts decorated with gold or silver but has come to refer to any decorated manuscript encompassing the European tradition and techniques of painting. The word manuscript means “hand write.” These manuscripts encompass a wide variety of topics from religion, court life and history to literature, medicine, food and crafts. A subset of it was illustrated manuscripts, which were produced in ancient Egypt, China, Japan, the Mideast and America and later in Europe. The Turin Erotic Papyrus: The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)īased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema , the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at on Faceboo k.For thousands of years before the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, painting filled the role of illustration in cultures worldwide. The Art of Swimming, 1587: A Manual with Woodcut Illustrations While the remedies themselves might never have been particularly effective, their accompanying illustrations do remain strange and amusing even a millennium later - and isn’t laughter supposed to be the best medicine?ġ,000-Year-Old Manuscript of Beowulf Digitized and Now OnlineĢ,000-Year-Old Manuscript of the Ten Commandments Gets Digitized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Resolution As with many a Medieval work, the book freely mixes fact and lore: to pick the mandrake root (pictured at the top of the post), “said to shine at night and to flee from impure persons,” the guide recommends “an iron tool (to dig around it), an ivory staff (to dig the plant itself up), a dog (to help you pull it out), and quick reflexes.” You can behold these and other pages of the Cotton MS Vitellius C III in zoomable high resolution at the British Library’s online manuscript viewer. Quite a few of the species with which the guide deals would have been directly known to few or no Anglo-Saxons in those days, and some of the entries, such as the one describing dragonswort as ideally “grown in dragon’s blood,” seem more fanciful than others. (Somehow one doesn’t imagine those latter sections playing quite as well with today’s alternative-medicine market.) Each entry about a plant or animal features “its name in various languages descriptions of ailments it can be used to treat and instructions for finding and preparing it.” The manuscript‘s Old English is actually the translation of “a text which used to be attributed to a 4th-century writer known as Pseudo-Apuleius, now recognized as several different Late Antique authors whose texts were subsequently combined.” It also includes “translations of Late Antique texts on the medicinal properties of badgers” and another text “on medicines derived from parts of four-legged animals.” Just recently, the British Library digitized the oldest such volume, a thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript known as the Cotton MS Vitellius C III. The book, writes the British Library’s Alison Hudson, “is the only surviving illustrated Old English herbal, or book describing plants and their uses.” (The sole condition note: “leaves damaged by fire in 1731.”) In a way, those books have a place in a long tradition, stretching back to a time well before modern medicine existed as something to be an alternative to. ![]() Publishers have put out guides to their use by the dozens. If you don’t much care for modern medicine, entire industries have arisen to provide you with more “alternative” or “natural” varieties of remedies, mostly involving the consumption of plants. ![]()
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