Image: Annunciation to the Shepherds, twelfth century psalter – BL, MS Cotton Caligula A. The project has been generously supported by The Polonsky Foundation, and draws upon the expertise of curators, cataloguers, conservators and imaging specialists from both institutions, who have learned from one another through a programme of knowledge exchange and reciprocal visits. Readers may explore themes, such as history, illumination, science and manuscript making. The British Library website presents a curated selection of these manuscripts highlighting various topics and manuscripts. You can also view and compare manuscripts side-by-side using International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) technology. The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s trilingual website allows users to search manuscripts in English, French and Italian. Kathleen Doyle, Lead Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library says: ‘By providing online access to the digitised versions of 800 of some of the finest of these manuscripts we hope to transform awareness of this period of close political and cultural entwinement between our two countries, when scribes moved between England, France and Normandy, working in Latin, French and English on manuscripts of unparalleled beauty and sophistication.’ The Online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is a searchable database of some of the western illuminated manuscripts in the British Library. The two-year project, The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700-1200, began in the summer of 2016 and saw teams from both libraries working together to digitise, fully catalogue and make available online 400 manuscripts from each of their collections. Pages 7, 8, 9 have been singed along the bottom margins, and elsewhere, the gothic hand lettering has been scraped away, presumably with a knife, in preparation for a liturgical update that never got entered.A two-year project, drawing on the collections of the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has made 800 manuscripts from the period 700 – 1200 available online for the first time. The sturdy parchment of this particular antiphonary has seen far worse than the careful hands of a professional curator. No need to fear that Yvard’s bare hands could cause harm to this 530-year-old object.Įxperts at the British Library have decreed that the modern practice of donning white gloves to handle antique manuscripts decreases manual dexterity, while heightening the possibility of transferred dirt or dislodged pigments. Our ears may not be able to detect much difference between the skin sides and flesh sides of these remarkably well preserved pages, but Bower does due diligence, as Yvard slowly drags her fingers across them. Featuring an array of fascinating illustrations from the British Librarys rich medieval collection, Cats in Medieval Manuscripts includes anecdotes about cats. Entries from the British Librarys catalogs of manuscripts precede each reel. It’s rare to find such pleasurably tingly ASMR sensations paired with allusions to the somewhat barbarous process of making parchment from animal skins, but that’s what illuminator Francesco dai Libri, and his son Girolamo were working with in 1492 Verona. Kudos too to National Art Library Special Collections curator Catherine Yvard…if she ever wants a break from medieval manuscript illumination and Gothic ivory sculpture, she could specialize in extremely soothing voiceover narration.
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