A search through the ball cupboard turned up ‘an entirely undisciplined clutter of smallish leather-bound books’ – including Kempe’s long-lost memoir, which was later identified by the medievalist Hope Emily Allen. In 1934, the son of Colonel William Butler-Bowden was playing ping-pong at their house in Derbyshire and needed a fresh ball. Given that Old English poets were obsessed with ruin and the ravages of time, such tales seem grimly appropriate.Ī schoolboy also figures in the saga of The Book of Margery Kempe. Wellesley gives a stirring account of the Cotton fire, noting that heroic Westminster schoolboys rushed into the flames to throw manuscripts out of the windows. As a result, some words of the poem are irretrievably lost, while others are known only from transcriptions made in the 18th century, before the charred edges had crumbled. One of these, the sole witness to Beowulf, was almost lost in 1731 when the ominously named Ashburnham House caught fire, destroying or damaging more than two hundred volumes from the famous collection of Sir Robert Cotton. Four books contain about two-thirds of all surviving Old English poetry, and for a few months in 2018 those four lay side by side in a single (doubtless heavily insured) glass case for an exhibition at the British Library. Some of the best medieval poems – Beowulf, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – have come down to us in a single manuscript. She explores a phenomenon that is seldom studied: the voids, gaps and empty frames that manuscript artists used to represent the unrepresentable.Ī manuscript is a unique artefact: war, fire, flood and, worst of all, the dissolution of the monasteries have taken an immense toll, making each work that survives precious. Meanwhile, Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image is a rarefied treat for connoisseurs – a kind of apophatic art history. But she addresses a more scholarly audience, offering an ‘architextual and phenomenological’ study of the medieval book as a unique object-in-the-world, meant to be perceived by all the senses.
In Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts, Treharne covers similar ground, concentrating as Wellesley does on British manuscripts. She interweaves her tale of book production with the case histories of many individual works, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the prayer book of Henry VIII, giving anecdotal accounts of the ways in which they were lost or found, preserved or destroyed. Writing for a lay audience, Mary Wellesley introduces the collaborators – patrons, artists, scribes and authors – whose labour is revealed or hidden in manuscripts. The poem is deeply sensual, as Elaine Treharne notes: ‘It represents the noise of slicing, sloshing, scraping, stitching, sawing, smithing, singing, sighing, and … the smell and taste of guts and wood, fire and melting wax.’įortunately, no animals were harmed to produce the three works under review, each of which explores the materiality of the medieval book. This transformation of beast into book fills 28 lines of intense reflection on a craft perceived as both violent and holy. Finally, the speaker becomes the ultimate product: a Gospel book that makes its users ‘in heart the bolder, in mind the happier,/in spirit the wiser’.
#Medieval manuscripts with ultramarine full
But the speaking voice modulates into the parchment itself as it is pierced by a knife, folded by fingers and inscribed by ‘the bird’s delight’ – a quill full of ink. In an Old English riddle-poem it is the dead animal who speaks: ‘an enemy’ killed him, stole his strength and deprived him of hair. The Middle English charters allude to a much longer tradition. More than five hundred calves died to create the magnificent Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible, which dates from the time of Bede.
But to transmit all those words, a book as large as the Bible required a very large herd. The circle is complete and the sacred flesh reverts to words. Then the letters that spell redemption were inscribed on his skin, with nails for quills, in the ink of his blood. As the Word made flesh, Christ declares that his body, like parchment, was stretched on a frame and dried on a tree. But when we read medieval texts in print editions all that mess disappears – so we no longer see what the authors of the Middle English ‘Charters of Christ’ saw when they compared God’s sacrificial Lamb to the lambs that supplied their writing material. Turning sheep and calves into parchment is a messy, smelly business. A lmost everything we know about medieval culture is written on the skins of dead animals.