![]() However, for whatever reason, decorative initials were not ultimately added to this manuscript. The scribe left space and a guide letter for a decorative ‘W’ at the start of Book II of the Life. This manuscript was produced in England at some point between 14, and the main text is John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. St John’s College MS 56 gives us an excellent opportunity to see this process in action. Sometimes the scribe would also add a guide letter indicating what needed to be supplied. How did the process of adding decorative initials work? Scribes typically wrote the body of the text first, leaving spaces for decorative initials to be filled in later. ![]() The example below is a gold leaf ‘S’ on purple flourishing. There are many pen-flourished initials in MS 131, the Italian Psalter introduced above. Pen-flourished initials have thin lines extending from the initial, usually in a different colour from the letter itself. ![]() For example, an initial ‘S’ is made to look like a dragon(?) in MS 20, a copy of Haymo (? of Auxerre) on Isaiah produced in England in the middle of the twelfth century. There is a particularly elaborate arabesque ‘A’ in MS 17, a computistical miscellany produced in England early in the twelfth century. Inside the initial ‘B’ is an image of King David, to whom the Psalms are traditionally ascribed.Īrabesque initials are characterized by their interlacing foliage and curvilinear style. This particular historiated initial is from the opening of Psalm 1, which begins: “Beatus uir” ( blessed is the man). The Hours of the Virgin is a series of prayers, readings, and psalms. As the name suggests, a Psalter contains the Book of Psalms. One of the most elaborate types of decorative initial is the historiated initial, which features a person or scene relevant to the text (if the scene is not relevant to the text, then the term inhabited initial can be used).Ī striking historiated initial can be found in MS 131, a Psalter and Hours of the Virgin produced in Italy c.1475. Decorative initials can help to highlight important textual divisions, and so they made books easier to navigate as well as visually pleasing for medieval readers. Further, decoration can shed valuable light on reading practices, manuscript production, and cultural values in the medieval period.Ī decorative initial is generally larger and more ornate than the surrounding text. However, decorative features in medieval manuscripts often had functional benefits as well as aesthetic appeal. It is easy to be blinded by the beauty of medieval manuscript decoration, especially when faced with a collection as rich as that of St John’s College Library. The books I have chosen were variously produced in England, Flanders, France, and Italy-though the majority of my examples are English as this is by far the most well-represented material in the St John’s College collection. The manuscripts on display here span the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, I have tried to include a range of material. ![]() In the space of just a blog post, it is difficult (if not impossible) to convey the sheer variety of decoration that can be found in western medieval manuscripts. My hope is that this blog post will not only be a feast for the eyes, but also a useful introduction for people unfamiliar with the field. This blog post will showcase a variety of examples, while also explaining the terminology used to describe the decoration. St John’s College Library is fortunate to have so many beautifully decorated medieval manuscripts in its collection. But others, like historiated initial and rubrication, can be opaque for the non-expert. Some terms, like border, are self-explanatory. Instead, I was working almost exclusively with Ralph Hanna’s Catalogue (bibliographic details below).įocusing so heavily on catalogue entries reminded me that the terminology for medieval manuscript decoration can be quite esoteric. Due to Coronavirus restrictions, I was initially unable to consult the medieval manuscripts at St John’s College in person. I recently joined the St John’s College (Oxford) library team to work on the TEI project, my main role being to incorporate existing catalogue records into the Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries online database. This post also appears on the St John’s College blog. Sian is a Rare Books and Manuscripts specialist. Dr Sian Witherden outlines a series of decorative manuscript features.
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