03 September 2013
The Bounty of Byzantium
The British Library is delighted to announce the digitisation of eleven new Greek manuscripts, all of which are now available on our Digitised Manuscripts site. This project was generously funded by Sam Fogg. The manuscripts range in date from the tenth century to the sixteenth century, and include a number of Gospels and related texts as well as two works of Byzantine poetry.
We are very excited to make these newly-digitised manuscripts widely available; they contain many stunning images, and several have original or near-contemporary bindings. Keep an eye out for future blog posts which will describe some of the individual manuscripts in more detail, but for now, enjoy exploring some of the treasures of our Greek collections!
The eleven manuscripts now on Digitised Manuscripts are:
Burney MS 19: Gospels, second half of the 10th century, with illuminated headpieces and initials. Illuminated portraits of the four evangelists were added in the twelfth century.
Burney MS 20: Gospels, 1285, with illuminated headpieces and portraits of the evanglists.
Evangelist portrait of Luke, Burney MS 20, f. 142v
Burney MS 97: Manuel Philes, De animalium proprietate, a series of poems on different animals, with accompanying illustrations. Written by the noted Cretan scribe Angelos Vergekios in the second quarter of the sixteenth century.
Additional MS 26103: Gospels, probably 12th century, containing illuminated headpieces and initials, and a portrait of St John the Evangelist and his scribe Prochoros.
Additional MS 28819: Psalter, 16th century, with an illuminated portrait of David and illuminated headpieces.
Decorated headpiece at the beginning of Psalms, Add MS 28819, f. 2r
Additional MS 28820: Divine Liturgies, 1695-1709, with illuminated portraits of John Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory.
Portrait of John Chrysostom and angels, Add MS 28820, f. 2v
Additional MS 35030: Gospels, 13th century, with illuminated headpieces and portraits of the evangelists, and decorated canon tables.
Additional MS 37002: Gospels, 1314-1315, with illuminated headpieces and portraits of the evangelists, and decorated canon tables.
Additional MS 39591: formerly Parham MS 9): Gospels, mid-12th century, with illuminated headpieces and portraits of the evangelists (one of which is a nineteenth-century addition).
Additional MS 39603 (formerly Parham MS 21): a cruciform Lectionary, 12th century, with illuminated initials and finial ornaments. In a binding of wooden boards covered with blue velvet.
Front binding, Add MS 39603
Additional MS 40724: Georgios Choumnos, Metrical Paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus, 15th-16th centuries, with coloured illustrations throughout.
Add MS 40724, f. 66r
- Cillian O'Hogan
01 September 2013
A Calendar Page for September 2013
For more details on calendar pages or the Golf Book, please see the post for January 2013.
The important end-of-the-summer work in the fields continues in these calendar pages for September. In the opening miniature, men are ploughing with teams of horses, while another man sows grain from a bulging sack. Behind them can be seen a modest farmhouse, and to the right, a man knocking acorns from the trees to feed the pigs that have gathered around him, in a labour more usually associated with November or December. In the bas-de-page, a group of white-clad men are playing at marbles, while another is trying his luck on a pair of stilts. On the following page, below the saints' days for September and a roundel of a scorpion for Scorpio, is a scene of men playing a game that closely resembles golf (hence the name given to this manuscript, the Golf Book); for more details on this unique depiction, please see our post A Good Walk Spoiled.
Calendar page for September with a miniature of labourers ploughing and sowing grain, from the Golf Book (Book of Hours, Use
of Rome), workshop of Simon Bening, Netherlands (Bruges), c. 1540, Additional MS 24098, f. 26v
Calendar page for September with a bas-de-page scene of a men playing a golf-type game, from the Golf Book (Book of Hours, Use of Rome), workshop
of Simon Bening, Netherlands (Bruges), c. 1540, Additional MS 24098, f. 27r
30 August 2013
Guess the Manuscript VI
In honour of our recent uploads to Digitised Manuscripts, the latest installment of our universally-acclaimed Guess the Manuscript series is going Greek. There's your first and only clue; as always, the manuscript is part of our medieval collections, and can be found somewhere on the Digitised Manuscripts site. Happy hunting!
If you haven't already had a go at this engrossing game, please check out our previous posts, Guess the Manuscript I, II, III, IV and V.
You can leave your guesses here in the comments, or send them to us via Twitter @BLMedieval.
Update: and the winner is... Peter, at @chesswoodseats ! Peter was the only one who came up with the correct answer; this is a folio from Add MS 15581, a Greek copy of the Gospels from the 11th-12th centuries. Thanks for playing along, and look out for a new Guess the Manuscript soon!
27 August 2013
Anglo-Saxon Invasion
The British Library has one of the most comprehensive collections of manuscripts in Old English, many of which have already been catalogued online with images at the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. We have recently added catalogue entries and images for the Old English manuscripts in the Additional collection. There are relatively few of these, but some of these manuscripts contain unique or very important texts.
They are:
Add MS 47967: The Old English Orosius
Zoomorphic initial (A)'E'(ft) with four heads and interlaced bodies at
the beginning of Book III, Chapter i, from the Old English Orosius,
England (Winchester), c. 892-925, Add MS 47967, f. 31v
Add MS 37517: The 'Bosworth Psalter'
Opening page of Psalm 101 with a large decorated initial, display capitals, and interlinear gloss in Old English, from the Bosworth Psalter, England (Canterbury?), 4th quarter of the 10th century, Add MS 37517, f. 64v
Add MS 40000: The 'Thorney Gospels'
Large decorated initial 'Q'(uoniam) at the beginning of Luke's Gospel, with faint interlinear glosses, France (Brittany?), 1st quarter of the 10th century, Add MS 40000, f. 48r
The glosses in the Thorney Gospels, which are extremely faint, can be seen more clearly online by zooming in on the images, than they can in the manuscript itself. They are above lines 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 17, 18 and 24; if you are having trouble reading them, you can find details in N R Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), no. 131.
Inscription in Old English from the 2nd half of the 11th century referring to
the former binding of the manuscript: '+Aelfric 7 wulfwine. Eadgife goldsmides
geafen to broperraedenne twegen orn weghenes goldes daet is on pis ilce boc her
foruten gewired' (Aelfric and Wulfwine, goldsmiths of Eadgifu, gave for the
confraternity two oras of weighed gold which is wired without upon this same
book), Add MS 40000, f. 4r
Add MS 23211: Fragments of Saxon royal genealogies and a Martyrology in Old English
Fragment with decorated initial from the first page of a martyrology, England (south-west), 4th quarter of the 9th century, Add MS 23211, f. 2r
Add MS 34652: a leaf from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: the preface with a West-Saxon genealogy from Cerdic (494) to Alfred (899) (f. 2) and a leaf from the bilingual Rule of Chrodegang (chapters 60-62, incomplete) (f. 3)
Text page of Chrodegang's rule with initials and rubric, England (Winchester), 2nd half of the 11th century, Add MS 34652, f. 3v
Add MS 61735: Farming memoranda of Ely Abbey (also available on Digitised Manuscripts here, and please check out our recent blog post on the memoranda)
Recto of the 3 strips of parchment
containing an inventory and valuation of livestock supplied by Ely to Thorney
Abbey and a note of rents (payable in eels!), England (Ely), c. 1007-1025, Add MS 61735
Add MS 40165A: Martyrology fragment (ff. 6-7) (also available on Digitised Manuscripts here)
Martyrology fragment written in insular miniscule, England (south-west?), 4th quarter of the 9th century, Add MS 40165A, f. 6v
Add MS 9381: Bodmin Gospels (St Petroc Gospels), with records of grants of manumission in Old England and Latin added on blank leaves and in margins
Canon tables with Bodmin manumissions, France (Brittany), last quarter of the 9th century or 1st quarter of the 10th century, Add MS 9381, f. 13r
Add MS 32246: Part of Priscian's Excerptiones with Old English and Latin marginal glosses and Aelfric's Colloquy
Excerptiones with a Latin-Old English glossary, England, 1st half of the 11th century, Add MS 32246, f. 21v
- Chantry Westwell
21 August 2013
King Athelstan's Books
Are you tired of the Anglo-Saxons yet? No, we're not either! Those of you who have been engrossed by Michael Wood's recent series, King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons, may have seen the beautiful Athelstan Psalter in last night's programme. We featured this manuscript in a previous blogpost; but it's worth looking at again, and you may like to know that the entire Psalter is available to view on our Digitised Manuscripts site.
The Athelstan Psalter (London, British Library, MS Cotton Galba A XVIII, f. 21r).
The Athelstan Psalter is a curious little book, just large enough to fit into an adult male's hand. The script of the original portion indicates that the manuscript was made in North-East France, in the 9th century; but by the middle of the 10th century the Psalter was in England, where it received a number of accretions, including a metrical calendar and some computistical texts.
The association of this manuscript with King Athelstan, the first king of England (reigned 924–939), is unproved. A note by a later owner, Thomas Dakcombe (d. c. 1572), describes the book as "Psaltirum Regis Ethelstani"; and this is echoed in the list of contents made for Sir Robert Cotton (d. 1631). As Professor Simon Keynes has commented, "the claim of the so-called Athelstan Psalter once to have belonged to the king is based on the slenderest of evidence". Michael Wood himself spoke on the Athelstan Psalter at the British Library's Royal manuscripts conference in 2011, the proceedings of which are shortly to be published by the British Library.
It's amazing how such a little book has survived the ravages of time (it escaped destruction by fire in 1731) to become a modern star in the age of television! Episode 3 of Michael Wood's King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons, entitled Aethelstan: The First King of England, can be viewed on the BBC iPlayer.
Further reading
Simon Keynes, ‘King Athelstan’s books’, in Michael Lapidge & Helmut Gneuss (eds.), Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies presented to Peter Clemoes on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 143–201, at pp. 193–96
Robert Deshman, ‘The Galba Psalter: pictures, texts and context in an early medieval prayerbook’, Anglo-Saxon England, 26 (1997), 109–38
20 August 2013
St John the Evangelist in the Lindisfarne Gospels
St John the Evangelist in the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D IV, f. 209v).
Now on show in Durham, until 30 September 2013, is this miniature of St John the Evangelist in the Lindisfarne Gospels. The page in question prefaces the Gospel of John in this famous, Anglo-Saxon gospelbook. John is depicted sitting on a blue cushion, with a scroll held in his left hand, and with his evangelist symbol (an eagle, imago aequilae) above his head. The pigments are as rich as the day they were painted, a combination of oranges, reds, blues and greens.
The Lindisfarne Gospels is the centrepiece of the Durham exhibition, staged in Palace Green Library, a stone's throw (literally) from the impressive Romanesque cathedral. Also are show are other British Library manuscripts, most notably the St Cuthbert Gospel (which we bought for the nation in 2012 for £9 million), plus treasures from the British Museum, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and other institutions, and items from the Staffordshire Hoard. Catch the exhibition while you can, it's a treat!
You can read more about the exhibition here. And you can see the Lindisfarne Gospels in its entirety on our Digitised Manuscripts site.
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter, @blmedieval.
19 August 2013
Get Ready to 'Save-As': New Uploads to the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
As many of you hopefully already know, the British Library offers two different ways to work with digital versions of our medieval manuscripts. Our Digitised Manuscripts website contains complete coverage of many of the items in our collections, while the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is another very useful source of digital catalogue records and images.
Miniature
of the Crucifixion, from a leaf from a missal, northern France or Netherlands, 2nd half of
the 13th century, Additional MS 34652, f. 5
The Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts is based on a Microsoft Access database, so it has allowed us to develop some very detailed search tools. CIM (as we call it) is particularly useful for iconographical searches, since each image is described individually. You can search for various terms either in these specific image descriptions, or within the wider manuscript records.
We are pleased to announce that from 13 August you will be able to find even more images and manuscripts in the Catalogue, which now includes over 4,200 manuscripts (with separate parts for another 1,000) and 36,000 images.
We update the online Catalogue twice a year, so please do send along any additional bibliography, your comments, and or suggested corrections to mss [at] bl [dot] uk, and we will include these in the next upload.
Miniature of a man cutting down a tree on
which he sits (an illustration of the proverb: 'chopping down the branch that
supports you'), from Pierre Sala’s Petit
Livre d’Amour, France (Paris and Lyon), 1st quarter of the 16th
century, Stowe MS 955, f. 15r (for example, we’ve already corrected the
just-spotted typo in the description of this image!)
All of the images in CIM are provided under a Public Domain Mark, meaning that, within certain restrictions of reasonable use, images from this catalogue are freely available to the public. We ask that you maintain the library's Public Domain tag, and provide a link or other credit back to the source on the British Library's site – but otherwise, we are happy for you to help us share these riches even more widely with the world!
Or, if you are just interested in exploring, why not take a tour of some collection highlights? Our curatorial staff have teamed up with other experts to put together a series of virtual exhibitions, exploring topics that range from manuscripts of the Bible to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to medieval bestiaries.
Drawing of Matthew the Evangelist and a
musical sequence on 'Fulgens' in Anglo-Norman neums, with the opening showing
metal clasps and part of a front flyleaf, from Orosius’ Historum adversum
paganos, England (Winchester?), between c.
892 and c. 925, Add MS 47967, f. 1v
We will soon have a blog post for you on our recent uploads of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to CIM, but in the meantime, happy searching!
- Kathleen Doyle and Sarah J Biggs
15 August 2013
Credo: British Library Manuscripts in Paderborn
Detail of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius C II, f. 5v)
Detail of Alcuin's letter (London, British Library, MS Harley 208, f. 73v)
Image courtesy of the 'Credo' website.
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