handwritten, printed, digital – a blog about ancient, medieval & late-modern book cultures. New posts every Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Don't forget to subscribe
At the turn of the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci described himself as an 'omo sanza lettere', a man without letters. He most likely meant that he had, to paraphrase Ben Johnson, little Latin and even less Greek. Leonardo was one of the last men of the Middle Ages and one of the first of... Continue Reading →
In 1819 the Harvard Professor Edward Everett (d. 1865) was rummaging through monastic libraries in Greece for ancient manuscripts - as many professors were doing at the time, anyway. At Meteora he found the treasure he sought: “I saw a few MSS in this library, among which was a fine parchment Chrysostom, in several vols. folio.—I... Continue Reading →
An exceptional collection of seven alphabets (two Hebrew, one Greek, one 'Chaldaean', one 'Egyptian', one runic, and one of obscure origin entitled 'Norma') is preserved in a manuscript in the Vatican library (Reg.lat.338) composed in Northern France or perhaps Germany and dating, probably, from the first half of the 9th century AD. Written in Caroline... Continue Reading →
While I am preparing a post about the work that inspired the name of this blog - the 14th-century Philobiblon ('The Love of Books') - here is a lamentation extracted from the same work about the state of scholarship in the first half of the thirteenth century. In chapter 10, the author Richard de Bury criticises... Continue Reading →
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