Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts > Status Update

‘the element of pure chance which has brought the volumes to wherever in the world they are now. One may think of all great works of art as public and static, but this not at all true of illuminated manuscripts. Their restlessness has been an unexpected theme. Of the twelve items interviewed here, only one - the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre - is preserved today in the country where it was actually made’

‘The margins of the Spinola Hours are exceptionally wide, like those of the Semideus . The text area here takes up only about 4 by 3 inches: around this then are full borders, to dimensions of about 5¾ by 4 inches, all within a page size almost twice as large again, more than 9 inches high. If wide margins were thought to be a wanton luxury, these are taken to the extreme.’

‘The speed with which printing was introduced across Europe is remarkable. By 1500, the end of the so-called ‘incunable’ period, 350 towns had printing presses, 30,000 titles had been issued, and some 9,000,000 books had been printed. Medieval manuscripts still have a certain glamour of exclusivity and uniqueness; mass-produced incunabula even now are very common.’

‘There can be many explanations of an apparent discrepancy. For one, this is a documentary hand, writing in Latin, whereas the Chaucer manuscripts are literary texts written in English in a standard book script. In palaeographical terminology, the former would be called a ‘secretary hand’ and the latter ‘anglicana’ (or ‘anglicana formata’ at its more refined level).’

‘kind of composite text is what is known as a ‘Book of Hours’, a term which goes back to the Middle Ages. The precise contents vary from one manuscript to another, but the defining features are the distinctive cycles of prayers and psalms to be recited at each of the eight ‘hours’ which divided up the medieval religious day – the hours of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline.’

‘Although the pictures are all finely drawn and are of the same general date as the script, it is fairly clear that they were afterthoughts in a manuscript not originally designed to be illustrated at all. They fall at odd places in the text, sometimes at the very end of the groups of poems on the theme depicted. That is not normal in a medieval manuscript.’

‘wear white gloves in the reading-room is that by now they had become really dirty, having evidently picked up 800 years’ worth of dust clinging to the pages, even though I was extremely careful to touch only the corners of the margins. Far from me soiling the manuscript with my hand, the transference of dirt was actually the other way round. In turn, blackened gloves surely themselves become a hazard’

‘The twelfth century is the period from which we begin to have considerable amounts of information and yet sometimes we know absolutely nothing.’

So very true!

‘that turning-point in the history of books when literacy was passing out of the monopoly of the monasteries, when itinerant secular artists were edging into the business but had not yet settled in permanent workshops, and when manuscripts crossed the great divide from inalienable possessions of the Church into luxurious and purchasable artefacts for the laity, with a definable cost and a commercial value.’

‘In examining manuscripts and wondering about their patrons, I have a self-formulated rule that if you are not sure whether a book is royal, it isn’t; for when manuscripts were commissioned for medieval kings or emperors, the luxury and gratuitous displays of wealth are overwhelming and unambiguous.’