@yiddishknights / yiddishknights.tumblr.com
A look inside the Livre de portraiture by thirteenth-century architect Villard de Honnecourt. This rare medieval sketchbook (or instruction manual) contains more than 250 line drawings across 33 pages of parchment, in which de Honnecourt tried out ideas, did studies, and copied old masters. For more, see here.
Bibliothèque Nationale de París (MS Fr 19093)
Ludlow Fraktur and Hebrew
The Ludlow Typograph was one of the four major type composing systems that survived through the 20th century (the others were Monotype, Linotype, and Intertype), and numerous typefaces were designed specifically for its system. Today we show some Fraktur and Hebrew typefaces designed for the Ludlow Typograph.
German-reading peoples were the last group to relinquish the use of Gothic typefaces like Fraktur in the mid-20th century, and since, in our post-WWII imaginations, this kind of letterform is often associated with the Nazis (even though the Nazis themselves abolished it in 1941 after associating it with Jewish influences), it seems odd and even wrong to have it displayed along with Hebrew typefaces.
These specimens are displayed side by side in Ludlow Typefaces: A Specimen Book of Matrix Fonts, produced in Chicago around 1940, just before the Nazis jettisoned the use of Fraktur. The letterform itself has its roots in the late 12th century, and so has nothing to do with the National Socialist Party, except that the Nazis and all German-reading peoples used it until the 1940s because it was a letterform long associated with German national identity. And, of course, German Jews comfortably used Fraktur to read and write in German.
Read more about the Ludlow Typograph and its composing system in this post.
I love the point where Tolkien stops pretending he's writing a mid-20th century fantasy novel and just fully writes in Old English half-lines:
Still she did not blench: maiden of the Rohirrim child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair yet terrible. A swift stroke she dealt, skilled and deadly. The outstretched neck she clove asunder, and the hewn head fell like a stone. Backward she sprang as the huge shape crashed to ruin, vast wings outspread, crumpled on the earth; and with its fall the shadow passed away. A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise.
There are 3-4 paragraphs like this. It's great.
*examines your pdf folder* have you read them all?
Is a wine cellar meant for storing only empty bottles?
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Illustrations for Sir John Mandeville, Voyage d’outre mer (British Library Add MS 24189, c 1410-c 1420)
Illustrations from The Tale of Lohengrin, Knight of the Swan after the Drama of Richard Wagner by Willy Pogany (1913)
The dressing of a knight
Gaheris and Agravain prepare Gawain to meet his destiny.
Poster for the Richard Wagner opera Lohengrin, The Swan Knight
by Alfred Choubrac
Illustration from The Tale of Lohengrin, Knight of the Swan after the Drama of Richard Wagner by Willy Pogany (1913)
glad you asked, @thepinkpidgeon! okay so, rats. let's do this.
to start off we've got these fabulous rat men holding rats from two 15th c. manuscripts of hans vintler's flowers of virtue, giving "ratatouille but if linguini was also half-rat":
then there's this beautiful, sort of ratty woman with a mirror (whom i love very much) from the margins of a 16th c. book of hours:
the following creature is from a 1424 copy of thomas of cantimpré's liber de natura rerum. it is NOT a rat (in fact, it's supposed to be a sperpent called chelydros), but the manuscript description calls it "rat-like", which i find fitting:
here we've got a 13th c. illustration of a common bussard eating a rat (from de arte venandi cum avibus):
then there's this one 16th century book of hours that has quite a few rats in it. the catalogue description indicates that it's probably because the commissioner had like... something to do with rats. like maybe it's a name pun or something? either way, very cool rats:
then in the ormesby psalter (late 13th c.), there's this cat watching a rat hole:
and to wrap it up, here are two illustrations (c. 1450) from a collection of hebrew fables, the first showing a rat and weasels (?) running towards a trap, then the rat getting trapped:
so. that's my collection of rats in manuscripts for today :)
sources: Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Ser. n. 12819, fol. 129r //// Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 13567, fol. 123v //// Berlin, SBB, Hdschr. 241, fol. 144v //// Vatican, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1066, fol. 130v //// Vatican, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Pal. Lat. 1071, fol. 10r //// Utopia, armarium codicum bibliophilorum, Cod. 103, fol. 11v, 33r and 97v //// Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 366, fol. 131r //// Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Oppenheim 154, fol. 21v and 27v
I would like to add these images from British Library MS Harley 6563, depicting rats sieging a castle defended by a cat:
These are on fols. 71v and 72r, so they occupy facing pages and are clearly part of the same scene. I'd provide a view of the whole thing, but of course the manuscript viewer is down and I only have these because I happened to save them to my computer a while back.
Hey tumblr we need to have a talk about something I noticed.
Specifically going by tags attached to images I’ve blogged or reblogged, there seems to be a misconception that marginalia means “any quirky medieval art”.
It’s not.
Marginalia is anything in the margins of a text.
The ones that will get posted on tumblr will more often than not be quirky drawings, but they also include notes, annotations, scribbles, and whatever else. The quirky drawings just happen to get a lot of press on here because, well. They’re quirky drawings.
For instance, see this image here of a platanista (river dolphin) chomping down on an elephant’s trunk?
This is not marginalia! This is a full-fledged illustration. It’s within the text (Liber natura rerum, Thomas de Cantimpré, Librairie de Valenciennes Ms 0320). It illustrates the entry on Platanista.
This is what it looks like in context.
But you know what are marginalia? Let me circle them for convenience.
Know the difference. It won’t save your life but it will make you more popular at a medievalist conference.
Images from a 13th-century copy of the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī -Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Arabe 5847
Riding Coat. first half 13th century. Credit line: Purchase, Director’s Fund and Oscar de la Renta Ltd. Gift, 2008 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/456931
We've just launched a new site focusing on material features in our early manuscripts, with tutorials on bindings, pages, content, and decoration, and links to digitized manuscripts with those features.
