Perhaps no other relic of the European Middle Ages captures our imagination more than illuminated medieval manuscripts, or those documents decorated with images and colored pigments. Serving as windows unto a lost world of kings, ladies, faith, war, and culture, they communicate complex visual and textual narratives of Europe’s collective cultural heritage and patrimony. In this fashion, illuminated manuscripts are dynamic messages from our communal past that are still relevant today in fields like graphic design and typography. In this seven-week course, students will explore the material creation, content, and historical context of illuminated medieval European manuscripts. Students will acquire an introductory knowledge of their distinguishing characteristics, their cataloguing and periodization (when they were created), the methods utilized to produce them, and their historical context and value. Student achievement will be assessed using not only traditional multiple-choice quizzes, but more importantly will be evaluated based on individual student projects. In their final projects students will either (1) produce a board of commented images about medieval manuscripts or (2) prepare a physical manuscript using medieval methods. The best of these peer-evaluated projects will be posted on the Deciphering Secrets website, which is our collective citizen scholarship web presence that encourages and supports our global citizen scholars appreciation and contributions to transcription of medieval manuscripts. Finally, we wish to highlight that this course is an exciting international collaboration between the University of Colorado (USA) and Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain).
2.1. Archaic Writing Materials
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来自 University of Colorado System 的课程
Deciphering Secrets: The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe
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University of Colorado System
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从本节课中
MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN KINGDOMS (PART 1) AND WRITING SUPPORTS AND BOOK FORMATS
WEEK #2
与讲师见面
Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-DávilaAssociate Professor
History
Ana B. Sanchez-PrietoDr. in Medieval History, Dr. in Education Sciences
Historiographical Sciences and Techniques
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In this video and in the following ones,
we will be dealing with several questions relating to the different sorts of
materials that have been used as support for writing through history.
As a matter of fact, one could state that any material able of offering
a relatively flat surface has been utilized as a support for writing.
But also that the degree of literacy in any given society
determines what sort of writing materials that society will use.
A scarcely literate society tends to write on durable and resilient supports,
while a highly literate society uses materials cheap and
abundant but also perishable.
And as a consequence, it might happen that more written pieces have been preserved
from a low literate society than from a highly literate one.
Depending on the origin of the materials utilized to receive writing,
we can divide them broadly in materials of mineral, vegetal, or animal origin.
The first category includes stones and metals.
Marble and bronze have been used in practically every culture for
display writing.
In the Greek and Roman world, documents such as laws, official decrees and
international treaties were usually copied in this type of support
because of their inalterable nature.
In other video, we have also mentioned gold and lead as writing supports.
Lead, as a matter of fact, is highly appropriate because it is very malleable.
And it is quite easy to turn it into thin plates where one could write without
difficulty by scratching the plates with a hard and pointy instrument like a knoll.
Apart from the damnation tablets that we will see in another segment,
we have, made of lead, a series of some 70 small codices of 7 or 8 leaden leaves.
It's written in Greek and Hebrew, but were found not so
long ago in the Jordan desert near the borders with Israel and Syria.
It is possible that these small codices date from the first or second century AD.
But their authenticity has been contested.
From the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain in the sixth and seventh century,
we have slate tablets written with a pointy and hard instrument.
The exemplars preserved are not many, but
some of them contain quite charming school exercises of writing and basic arithmetic.
All sort of domestic objects were recycled to receive writing.
Among them all, the ostraka deserve a special attention.
They are small pottery fragments on which the citizens of Athens voted
who should be exiled from the city?
From ostraka, the present term, ostracism derives.
Of course, walls have always been kind of a magnet for graffiti.
From the first century BC to the fourth century AD of Rome have come imprecations,
accounts, names and all sorts of messages written on walls.
Probably you have heard of the graffiti of Pompeii since they are especially famous.
From the animal kingdom, of course, the wax is the first substance we think of.
Wax was used together with shellac for the wax tablets.
In 1980, archaeologists found on the coast of present Turkey vessel.
And in it, a diptych of wax tablets dating probably from the 14th century BC.
And together with the wax, we must mention bone fragments, turtle shells and
silk fabric among others.
As a matter of fact, the oldest witnesses of a sort of protozymes have
been found on ostrich egg shells.
They come from South Africa and the age could reach up to 100,000 years.
Animal hides are documented as writing support from 2700 to 2500 BC in Egypt.
A very well known example of hides used for this purpose is
the mathematical text now in the British Museum Manuscript 10250.
From the vegetal kingdom, tree leaves and bark have been used as writing support.
The palm leaf was used in old India for the Pothi books.
And in China, bamboo was adapted for the same purpose.
Pliny refers as well to palm leaves as writing supports previous to
the invention of papyrus.
As for tree bark, we have only some allusions,
mostly referred to the linden tree whose inner layer called liber
was thought to be very appropriate for receiving writing.
From the word liber derives the word used for book in Old Latin vernaculars.
Birch bark has served as support for writing in several cultures.
The oldest witnesses are a collection of Buddhist manuscripts in the Kanahari
language found in Afghanistan that were acquired by the British Library in 1994.
From medieval times, we have more fragments,
this time coming from Russia from the area of Novgorod.
The most curious is the writing practice of a six or
seven-year old child called Onfim.
Wood has also been employed as writing support in many cultures.
Plato mentions wooden tablets on where notes could be taken.
We know that the Romans covered them with gypsum and
then called them tabula dealbatae.
And many centuries later Cennino Cennini described
how to whiten thick tree wood boards with grounded bone.
In 1996, two codices on wooden boards of some 2.5 millimeters
thickness were found in the oasis of Dakhleh in Egypt.
Also of wood are the so called tallies or tally sticks, which were used for
bookkeeping from Sumerian times to the 18th century England.
And finally, some textiles of vegetal origin were used as a support for writing.
The Etruscans have the so called libri lintei,
some of which are now preserved in the museum of Agram.
Agram knew the libri lintei magistratuum,
on which the names of the magistrates were registered year by year, and
the mappae linteae that is referred to by the Codex Theodosianus.
Regretfully, not even a fragment of these last ones has been preserved.
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