This course explored manuscripts (hand-made, hand-written, hand-decorated books) from (mostly) Western Europe from (mostly) late antiquity to the early modern period, with some discussion of manuscripts written before and after those times, and from a variety of cultures outside of Western Europe (Byzantium, the near East, the Islamic world, Africa, Asia, and the Americas).
The class discussed manuscript construction (how they were built, starting from the sheep, cow, or goats that were slaughtered and skinned to make parchment, and ending with the pages being sewn and bound by hand), content (covering a wide variety of scripts and artistic conventions), and the changing historical and cultural contexts of manuscript creation, use, and conservation from late antiquity to the twenty-first century.
We took advantage of a huge variety of digitized manuscripts held in libraries large (the Vatican Library, the National Library of France, the British Library) and small (various municipal libraries throughout Europe and North America). We’ll also dig into Western’s own modest but extremely interesting collection of manuscripts, making some trips to our Archives and Research Collection Centre (ARCC) to work with the manuscripts hands-on.
ARTHUM 2200
Professor Kyle Gervais
HANDWRITTEN: MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS AND THEIR CONTEXTS
Untitled work by
Ivanna Navarrette
Hear more about the course from SASAH Teaching Fellow Kyle Gervais!