The oldest illuminated manuscripts are among the oldest manuscripts in existence.
#MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS SERIES#
A series of images illustrating the life of Christ prefaces the text and each book of the gospels begins with an illustration detailing the events unique to that gospel, though some of these are now lost. It contains the text of the gospels-Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the New Testament-an essential work for teaching potential converts about the life of Christ. Augustine survives today in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Augustine of Canterbury, brought books with them as they traveled from place to place preaching and establishing new churches. Medieval Christian missionaries, such as St. The Name of the Rose, a novel by Umberto Eco, imagines such a fate for Aristotle’s lost work on poetics.īooks were essential to the practice of Christianity. Because of this and other accidents of history, not all texts survived the Middle Ages. Fires destroyed many medieval libraries and the books they housed. Some monks traveled to distant monasteries to view and copy books to bring back to their own monastery’s library. This process of copying and disseminating books was essential to the preservation of knowledge. Monastery libraries housed most books and all books were copied by hand, usually by monks.
Recording and disseminating information is quick and easy today, but in the Middle Ages this process was slow and laborious. They are known today because medieval scribes diligently copied them. The original manuscripts of the Bible, the works of Aristotle and Plato and other ancient writers do not survive. Digitizing, or creating high quality digital images of manuscripts, is increasingly common and these images are normally available on the Internet, furthering the study of these medieval books. Though normally only available to scholars, many museums and libraries put some of their manuscript treasures on display. The Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the British Library in London house the world’s largest collections of medieval manuscripts. Thus, medieval books survive in large numbers. The pages of codices, on the other hand, are protected by their covers and have a much greater chance for survival.
These ancient scrolls only survive in occasional fragments, as a scroll is especially vulnerable to physical degradation. Ancient scribes wrote on scrolls that were stored in boxes. codices), meaning a book made of pages bound between two boards. Augustine Gospels (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 286).Ī medieval manuscript is a codex (pl. This page prefaces the Gospel of Luke in the St.
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