13 April 2022
Discovering Boccaccio manuscripts online
The Italian writer, poet and humanist, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) is probably most familiar in the English-speaking world for his Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories that were adapted by Chaucer and Shakespeare and inspired works by Swift, Tennyson and Keats. He was a key literary figure in late-medieval and Renaissance Europe whose considerable output included love poetry, courtly tales, a genealogy of the gods, and the first collection of biographies devoted solely to women in Western literature.
Towards the end of his life, disillusioned with love and suffering from a variety of ailments, he was only dissuaded from burning much of his own material by the intervention of Petrarch, a close colleague and mentor. Fortunately his works survived, and the many translations and extant manuscripts are testament to their popularity. In the 15th century numerous illustrated copies were produced for the courts of Europe.
Twenty seven British Library manuscripts containing works of Boccaccio are either fully or partially digitised in our online catalogues. An advanced search in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts using the field ‘Author’: ‘Boccaccio’ produces a list of all of these with a selection of images from each one. Six are also fully digitised on our Digitised Manuscripts website. Here are just some of these fascinating manuscripts.
Concerning Famous Women
Most impressive of all are two grand volumes of Boccaccio’s ground-breaking collection of biographies of famous women, De claris mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women) in a French translation by Laurent de Premierfait. Both contain magnificent illustrations of the characters and their deeds. Boccaccio’s purpose in this work is to encourage virtuous behaviour among women, but the examples he chooses from among biblical, classical, mythological and historical characters are both good and bad. All the well-known female figures are present, each one accompanied by a portrait, from Eve to Medusa, and from Sappho to Cleopatra, alongside less familiar examples such as Hypsicratea, Queen of Pontus, and Faustina Augusta, wife of Marcus Aurelius. Christine de Pizan based many of her biographies of women in the famous Cite des Dames on this work.
The Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts also features copies of the original Latin text of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. One of these, Harley MS 6348, is an early copy made in Italy in the 14th century, not long after Boccaccio’s death. The opening page of De claris mulieribus contains the dedication beginning with the words: ‘Pridie, mulierum egregia...’ The first sentence translates as:
‘Some time ago, illustrious lady, while away from the crude multitudes and almost free of other concerns, I wrote a little book in praise of women, more for the pleasure of my friends than as a service to humanity’ (trans. Guarino).
Concerning Noble Men and Women
In addition to his biographies of women, Boccaccio produced a collection of biographies of both men and women, De casibus virorum illustrium, also translated into French by Premierfait. Some of these are very large volumes, each containing over fifty biographies with numerous miniatures. For example, Royal MS 14 E V, a Bruges manuscript owned by Edward IV, is almost half a metre tall and has 513 folios – the size of a small suitcase – so you need to be strong just to lift it off the shelf! the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts has images of all the pages with illustrations from this manuscript. For example, a historical event known as the Sicilian Vespers, the Easter rebellion by the Sicilians against French rule in 1282 when thousands of French civilians were murdered, is the subject of one illustration.
The theme of the biographies is the changeability of fortune. Boccaccio focuses on the downfall of famous people, all of whom are subject to the will of Lady Fortune. In book 6 the two meet and speak about the fates of the unlucky nobles who are destined to fall from dizzy heights of power and wealth.
Another manuscript of his work, Harley MS 621, has a miniature at the beginning of each of the major sections or books into which the work is divided. In this one, Boccaccio watches Fortune turn her wheel. Note the cockerel in the border!
The Fall of Princes
The English poet, John Lydgate, produced an abridged version of De Casibus in a Middle English translation, known as The Fall of Princes. Three copies are fully digitised on Digitised Manuscripts. One of these, which was probably made at Bury St Edmunds, contains a series of illustrations of key scenes in the margins. One gruesome example is of King Cyrus of the Persians who subdued all the nations from Syria to the Red Sea. According to the Boccaccio/Lydgate version of his life, Tomyrus, Queen of the Scythians defeated his army, severing his head from his body, and throwing it into a bowl of blood with these words, ‘Thou that hast all thy time thirsted for blood, now drink thy fill, and satiate thy self with it’.
The Decameron
There are also Boccaccio manuscripts on the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts containing a variety of his other works, including three of his most well-known work, the Decameron. This copy of the Decameron, translated into French by Laurent de Premierfait, is decorated with borders containing the royal arms of England. This is because it was part of the collection of manuscripts owned by King Edward IV of England.
Other Boccaccio texts include Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, a quasi autobiographical novel about a love affair set in Naples.
This overview of Boccaccio manuscripts helps to demonstrate that our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, though not providing full digital coverage, remains a key source for images of our manuscript collections. We continue to maintain it and make updates and corrections to the records. We hope you enjoy exploring!
Chantry Westwell
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
09 March 2022
Tall tales of the medieval ‘holster book’
If you have a modern medium-sized paperback (also known as B-format in the UK) or an A4-sized notebook at hand, you can check the page proportions of most modern printed material. That is, that the width of the page is between 65 and 70 percent of the height of the page. This relationship between height and width also holds true for most medieval manuscripts. But there are intriguing exceptions to this norm. For instance, there is a subset of medieval books that have remarkably tall and narrow dimensions.
One of the advantages of this unusual format is that it makes it easy to hold the book open with one hand and to turn the page with the other. This suggests that the text within these books may have been referenced while standing up or moving around. They are also often relatively small and portable, and some scholars have suggested that they were meant to hang from a belt or to be kept in a leather ‘holster’. Another theory is that they were easily packed in a saddlebag to take travelling. This is why they are now often called ‘holster books’ or ‘saddle books’.
One late 10th-century English example of such a book is now the first part of a composite manuscript. It mainly contains the Rule of St Benedict (Regula Sancti Benedicti), by St Benedict of Nursia (b. c. 480, d. c. 550). The Rule is a set of guidelines for the spiritual and practical life of a monastic community and was the most important such rule in the early medieval period. Its influence was especially marked during the so-called Benedictine reform movement in England during the second half of the 10th century. The reformers, with the support of King Edgar (r. 959–975), aimed to reinstate strict monasticism following the Rule of St Benedict. In reformed houses, a passage of the Rule was read aloud every day.
This copy is around 230 mm tall and only around 95 mm wide. The proportions of this book were discussed by John Lowden in this virtual exhibition, in which he suggested that it might have been made to fit a recycled ivory plaque used to decorate the book cover. The large writing and short lines of this copy of the Rule would also have assisted with the communal daily readings.
Books used in the liturgy were also quite often made in this format. One example is the Noyon Sacramentary, a book containing the prayers and texts needed to perform Mass and other ceremonies made for the use of Noyon Cathedral in the late 10th century. It has been called a ‘saddle book’ since it might have been meant for use by the bishop of Noyon when he needed to travel to consecrate churches throughout the bishopric. You can read more about its decorated initials and their connections to earlier 9th-century manuscripts in a previous blogpost.
Many tall and narrow books from the late 10th and 12th centuries contain works by classical authors, for instance this copy of the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil (b. 70 BC, d. 19 BC) made in the late 12th or early 13th century. Considered Virgil’s masterpiece, the Aeneid soon became a standard text in Latin education and it continued to be used to teach Latin grammar and rhetoric throughout the Middle Ages. It is possible that this book was used by a teacher who needed it constantly at hand, to read aloud from and refer back to, while moving through a classroom setting. Another possible reason for this format specifically for classical poetry is that it fits the generally short lines of verse, such as the hexameter of Latin epic poetry.
It is even more likely that another 12th-century manuscript, which was digitised as part of The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project, was used in a classroom. This book contains the Thebaid by the Roman poet Statius, another Latin epic poem that was a popular text of the medieval school curriculum. As seen on this page, with the end of Book I and beginning of Book II, the layout of its tall and narrow pages left generous outer and lower margins. This was evidently necessary, considering the many marginal and interlinear glosses and annotations that were added subsequently, in several layers and by different hands. This is a sign of its use in a scholarly teaching context.
If you want to learn more about the medieval engagement with ancient Greek and Roman works and authors, check out the article on The classical past on the Polonsky Medieval England and France 700-1200 project website.
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
Part of the Polonsky Digitisation Project
01 March 2022
GOLD tickets go on sale
Tickets are now on sale for our upcoming exhibition, Gold. Bringing together fifty spectacular items from around the world, this exhibition explores the use of gold in books and documents across cultures.
For thousands of years, people have found all kinds of ways to incorporate gold into books and documents: gold writing, inscriptions on gold surfaces, gold-illuminated pictures, gold book covers. So intrinsic was gold to the craft of luxury book production that manuscript decoration is known as ‘illumination’ from the use of gold to light up the pages.
Gold has long been considered deeply meaningful. Its extraordinary appearance means that many religions around the world have found gold a fitting way to express the divine. As a rare luxury material, gold was adopted by rulers to convey political messages about their power and wealth.
The exhibition will explore the different techniques employed by craftspeople to incorporate gold into books, including gold leaf (applying thin gold foil), shell gold (painting with powdered gold, which was traditionally kept in seashells), and gold-tooled leather bindings.
It will showcase books and documents from twenty countries, seventeen languages, and five major world religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. Exhibits range from 5th/6th-century inscribed gold plates from Myanmar to a 1920s art deco gold-tooled binding from France. There will be plenty of splendid medieval manuscripts on display, including the Harley Golden Gospels made in Germany around 800, which is written entirely in gold ink, and the Golden Haggadah made in Spain around 1320, renowned for its gold-illuminated scenes from Genesis and Exodus.
Gold will be open at the British Library from Friday 20 May - Sunday 2 Oct 2022. You can pre-book your tickets online now. An accompanying book Gold: Spectacular Manuscripts from Around the World is available from the British Library shop.
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
Supported by:
The exhibition is supported by the Goldhammer Foundation and the American Trust for the British Library, with thanks to The John S Cohen Foundation, The Finnis Scott Foundation, the Owen Family Trust and all supporters who wish to remain anonymous.
25 February 2022
Meaning in the margins of the Theodore Psalter
The British Library has loaned four manuscripts to an exhibition at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, In the Name of the Image: Imagery between Cult and Prohibition in Islam and Christianity, which opened on 4 February. The exhibition takes a comparative, cross-cultural perspective to trace the varying approaches of Islam and Christianity towards the use of imagery. On loan from the Library are three lavishly illuminated Persian manuscripts from the 16th-17th centuries, together with one of our most precious illuminated Greek manuscripts, the 11th-century Theodore Psalter (Add MS 19352).
Completed in 1066 at the Stoudion Monastery in Constantinople, the Theodore Psalter is one of the richest illuminated Greek manuscripts to survive. It is named after the monk Theodore, who wrote at the end of the book that he was both the copyist and illuminator. The book contains the Psalter in Greek, distributed in 20 units (kathismata) corresponding to the use of the Psalms in Byzantine liturgy, as well as a poem about the life of the Prophet David and the appendix known as the Biblical Odes. With its 440 coloured illustrations, placed in the margins of its 208 folios, this manuscript is the most fully illuminated Psalter to survive from the Byzantine Empire.
The Theodore Psalter belongs to a special group of illuminated Psalters called ‘marginal psalters’. These manuscripts place the biblical text in the centre of the page leaving ample margins for illustrations that are linked to the corresponding passages of the biblical text with red and blue strokes.
This layout resembles the structure of so-called catena manuscripts, named after the Latin word catena, which means ‘chain’ or, in a more abstract sense, a series of loosely related items, like the links of a chain. These contain biblical commentaries with the biblical text in the centre of the page and the commentary in the margin, organised in dense units or figural shapes. The link between the biblical text and the corresponding units of the catena commentary is marked with an elaborate system of signs and letters which resemble the strokes in the Theodore Psalter.
This similarity in layout between catena commentaries and the illustrations of the marginal psalters often helps us understand the rationale of the illustrations of the Theodore Psalter. Some images of the manuscript do not appear to have any obvious relationship to the texts they are linked to. They depict scenes from the life of Christ or saints, even later historical events, which are seemingly unrelated to the adjacent Psalms. Their connection, however, can be explained if we check the relevant passages in the catena commentaries.
An interesting case is Psalm 45 which is about a royal wedding where the bride is addressed with the words ‘Listen, oh daughter behold and incline your ear … for the king desired your beauty’ (Psalm 45: 11). Right next to this passage in the Theodore Psalter, we see an image of the Annunciation, with the Virgin in the centre flanked by the Archangel Gabriel and the Prophet David.
The connection between text and image becomes clear if we look up the passage in a catena manuscript. In a 17th-century copy of an 11th-century compilation, the passage is explained by a quotation from the 4th-century theologian, Athanasius of Alexandria, who writes that ‘this phrase relates to the Virgin Mary and foreshadows her annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel. David addresses the Virgin as his daughter because she was born from his seed and after him.’
This commentary explains every element of the image in the Theodore Psalter: both the Archangel addressing the Virgin and David, who seems to be talking to her. It looks like a very accurate visualisation of this commentary.
At first sight, the illustration added to Psalm 26:5 (‘I hate the assembly of evildoers and I will not sit with the ungodly’) looks unrelated to the biblical text. It depicts iconoclasts destroying a sacred image. If we check the catena commentaries, however, the short interpretation added to this phrase in the margin of a late 10th-century manuscript equates the ‘evildoers’ of the Psalm with ‘pagans and heretics’.
For the illustrator of the Theodore Psalter, this identification of the ‘evildoers’ as ‘heretics’ meant the heresy of the iconoclasts, who interpreted the biblical commandment against graven images to the letter and destroyed pictures and icons. The illumination visualises this interpretation of the ‘evildoers’ who are represented as they remove the image of Christ from a wall. As a result, the just, who ‘will not sit with the impious’, are identified with the defenders of the icons, St Theodore the Stoudite (759–826) and Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople (758–828), who are depicted arguing with the iconoclast emperor.
You can now admire the exceptional animated commentaries of the Theodore Psalter in the exhibition In the Name of the Image at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich until 22 May 2022.
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
11 January 2022
Reach for the stars
Marcus Tullius Cicero (b. 106 BC) is one of the best-known ancient Roman authors. A formidable speaker at court trials and political debates as well as a prolific theorist of rhetoric and philosophy, he influenced generations of scholars and students. It is less known, however, that through his striking and often beautifully illustrated work the Aratea, he was also responsible for introducing many a medieval and early modern reader to the Classical constellations.
In addition to his many prose works, Cicero was also a poet. However, his reputation as a poet was tarnished somewhat by an infamous work he wrote about his own political genius, The history of my own consulate, which is now lost. Nevertheless, other examples of his poetic texts are preserved, including his translation of an epic poem by the 3rd-century BC Greek poet Aratus.
Aratus was asked by the Macedonian king Antigonus Gonatas (320 – 239 BC) to compile a handbook on stars and constellations. The resulting work, entitled Phaenomena (Appearances on the Sky) is in hexametric verse and presents an overview of the entire astronomical knowledge of Aratus’s time in polished poetic language. It was highly esteemed, and survives in many copies, often with commentaries. An early example is a fragment of a 4th-century papyrus codex that contained the poem with notes on the right-hand margin.
The popularity of this work is also demonstrated by the fact that the Phaenomena is the only pagan poetic text that is explicitly referred to in the New Testament. In the Acts of the Apostles, when Paul speaks to the Athenians on the Areopagus, his speech begins with a quotation from ‘one of the poets’ of the Greeks. The unnamed poet was in fact Aratus. Paul cites from line 5 of his Phaenomena claiming that ‘we are all offspring’ of a supreme God (Acts 17: 28).
It was perhaps this wide-reaching popularity of Aratus’s poem that attracted Cicero to translate it into Latin at the very beginning of his career. His translation became known as the Aratea, after the original Greek poet. Unfortunately, Cicero’s translation does not survive in its entirety; the prologue and several other portions of the work are now lost and less than half of the original text has eventually come down to us. However, what the manuscripts did preserve is the illustrative tradition of the text, which may date from Late Antiquity.
One of the earliest and fullest copies of Cicero’s Latin translation of Aratus’s poem is a manuscript made in the early 9th century (Harley MS 647). The manuscript preserves a carefully edited text: Cicero’s Latin verses are arranged in blocks copied on the lower half of the page in Caroline minuscule. Above, there are lavish coloured illustrations, which contain explanatory notes written in old-fashioned Roman rustic capitals inside the images. The work, therefore, is both useful and beautiful, as is apparent in the section on the constellation Cygnus the swan.
This early layout comprising text, illustration and commentary proved very successful. It had a long afterlife surviving in a number of later manuscripts, such as a deluxe copy produced at a Benedictine abbey in Peterborough around 1122. This adaptation of Cicero’s Aratea shows a similar layout to the manuscript 300 years earlier but the illustrations are now drawn in pen, without colours except for red dots marking the stars of the constellation.
Manuscript copies of Cicero’s Aratea were produced up until the end of the 15th century when they were replaced by printed copies retaining the illustrative tradition of the earliest manuscripts on the printed pages. This longstanding history of the textual and illustrative tradition of the Aratea shows not only the success of Cicero’s poetical skills in translating Aratus but also the wide-reaching influence of ancient literature and scientific thought on the evolution of science through the manuscripts and their illustrations. You can read more about medieval astronomical manuscripts in our article Medieval science and mathematics on the Polonsky Foundation Medieval England and France, 700–1200 website.
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
Part of the Polonsky Digitisation Project
07 January 2022
Dürer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist
The British Library has loaned five manuscripts to Dürer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, which is on display in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery until 27 February 2022. The exhibition traces the travels across Europe of the German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), including his journeys to the Alps, Italy, Venice and the Netherlands, through his works and journals. The exhibition follows on from its successful opening at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, Germany. For more about the manuscripts included in that venue, see our blogpost on Dürer in the Low Countries.
The curators Susan Foister and Peter Van den Brink explore various aspects of Dürer's art and interests, and elaborate on them in the accompanying publication. One aspect of this is Dürer's theories of proportion and perspective, and features one of his drawings of infants to illustrate this point (British Library, Add MS 5228).
Albrecht Dürer's proportion drawings of infants, before 1513: Add MS 5228, ff. 186v–187r
Other evidence comes from Dürer's own letters and his travel journal. Many of Dürer's letters from his travels survive, including those to his friend, the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530). One of the Library’s letters is included in this section of the exhibition (Harley MS 4935).
Dürer travelled to the Low Countries in 1520–21, where he made many drawings in different techniques, such as silverpoint and leadpoint, chalk and charcoal, ink applied with pen and brush, and watercolour. He kept a journal of his visit, which survives in two copies' at least one page of his original journal remains, with sketches of pieces of folded cloth with instructions on how to make a woman’s cloak (Add MS 5229).
A page from Dürer’s original diary of his Netherlandish journey in 1520: Add MS 5229, f.50r
Dürer’s interest in Martin Luther (1483–1546) is also documented in his journals. Dürer owned a number of Lutheran tracts, as well as recording a list of Luther’s works, which dates from around 1520 (Add MS 5231).
List of works by Martin Luther: Add MS 5231, f.115r
On his travels Dürer met several other artists, including Gerard Horenbout (1465–1541) and Horenbout’s daughter Susanna. Dürer and Horenbout met in Antwerp in May 1521, shortly before Horenbout moved to England to the court of Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547). Two leaves from the Sforza Hours painted by Horenbout around this time are featured in the exhibition: the Virgin and Child and the Virgin as Queen of Heaven.
Image of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven, by Gerard Horenbout, from the Sforza Hours: Add MS 34294, volume 2, f. 133v
The Sforza Hours is a complicated manuscript, first made for the Duchess of Milan, Bona Sforza, who died in 1503. The miniatures made for Bona were painted by the Milanese court painter and miniaturist Giovan Pietro Birago (active 1471–1513). On her death, her nephew Philibert II, Duke of Savoy (1497–1504), and subsequently his widow, Margaret of Austria (d. 1530), inherited the book. Margaret served as regent of the Netherlands on behalf of her nephew, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1519–1556), and at this point Horenbout added 16 full-page illustrations of the life of the Virgin, including the two images featured in the exhibition.
Image of the Virgin Mary and Child, by Gerard Horenbout, from the Sforza Hours, Add MS 34294, volume 3, f. 177v
We hope you enjoy the opportunity to see these fascinating documentary and artistic manuscripts at the National Gallery, together with the many other loans and paintings on display there.
Kathleen Doyle
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
05 January 2022
Our digitised collection keeps on growing
Long-term readers of our blog may know that we periodically publish lists of our digitised manuscripts, the last of which was published in January 2021. With the arrival of the New Year, we are releasing an update to our lists of manuscript hyperlinks. We hope this makes it easier for readers and researchers to explore our amazing digitised treasures online. We also want to share some updates on our digitisation progress over the last year.
There are now over 4,800 Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern manuscripts on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website. Here is a full list of the items currently available, as of January 2022:
PDF: Download Full-list-digitised-mss-jan-2022
Excel: Download Full-list-digitised-mss-jan-2022 (this format cannot be downloaded on all web browsers).
Over the last year, the British Library's Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern team has been as busy as ever, working to make more manuscripts available for our readers online. During this period, we have published over 250 items, from medieval Books of Hours and Psalters to early modern rolls and atlases. All the images featured in this blogpost are from collection items that we have digitised since January 2021. Here is a list of manuscripts that we digitised in the past twelve months:
PDF: Download Digitised_mss_jan_2021_jan2022
Excel: Download Digitised_mss_jan_2021_jan2022 (this format cannot be downloaded on all web browsers).
We have continued to make progress on the major digitisation programme, Heritage Made Digital: Tudor and Stuart manuscripts. This collaborative project, involving teams across the British Library, intends to publish approximately 600 Tudor and Stuart manuscripts online. The selection encompasses original letters by members of the Elizabethan court; literary manuscripts of the works of important poets such as John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney; notes by the alchemist and astronomer John Dee; and collections of state papers that highlight numerous aspects of the political and social history of this period, particularly the relationship between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Many of the manuscripts included in the project also feature in our current exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens (Open until Sunday 20 February 2022). As of January 2022, over three quarters of these manuscripts have now been published online.
One of the items we have digitised in the past year is our most recent acquisition, the Lucas Psalter. This deluxe Psalter, which includes the book of Psalms and other devotional material, was made in Bruges for an English patron in the 1480s. It features beautiful decorated initials and borders by an artist known as the Master of Edward IV, and it possesses a contemporary 15th-century binding of red velvet with metal bosses. The Lucas Psalter can now be viewed on our Digitised Manuscripts site.
Meanwhile in August, we announced the digitisation of an important medieval Irish manuscript (Harley MS 5280), regarded as an invaluable source for early Irish literature, which features over 30 different literary works in the vernacular. These texts range from stories of miraculous events and creatures, including giant ants, golden apples and a killer cat, and tales of voyages across the sea, to ancient battles and accounts of mythical figures from Ireland’s past. The volume is also visually striking, with numerous decorated initials, as well as a number of shorter poems and notes that have been wrapped into intricate shapes on the page, with others forming borders in margins. The manuscript can now be viewed in full on our Universal Viewer.
Many images of our manuscripts are also available to view and download from our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, which is searchable by keywords, dates, scribes and languages.
We wish all our readers a Happy New Year and hope you enjoy exploring our digitised collections in 2022!
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
24 December 2021
Christmas gift ideas from medieval manuscripts
Christmas is the season of giving. This involves choosing appropriate gifts for our relatives and friends – not an easy task. Medieval manuscripts may give us inspiration, though in many cases the gifts would probably be way out of our price range. Here are some ideas for different situations.
For that special person
The scene of the Magi presenting their gifts to Christ on the feast of Epiphany is often included in cycles of images found in medieval liturgical books. The gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh signify that the infant is a future king, priest and sacrifice. One could follow the example of the Magi and give something expensive and shiny made of gold such as a crown or a goblet, or beautifully fragrant like frankincense or myrrh. Or if you’re looking for a cheaper option, perhaps a scented candle?
What to give the person who has everything
This was the problem faced by the Queen of Sheba. In the Old Testament (I Kings 10) we are told that she visited King Solomon to test his reputation for wisdom, prosperity and holiness. The magnificence of his court and the copious offerings he made to the Lord took her breath away. So she presented him with 120 gold coins, unprecedented quantities of spices, and various precious stones. This was perhaps not the best solution for someone who already had everything. But what to do?
The Biblia Pauperum, a picture book that juxtaposes scenes from the Old and New Testaments, shows the Magi and the Queen of Sheba side by side presenting their gifts. But though gold and riches might be suitable for Solomon, are they really an appropriate gift for a baby? In this charming depiction of the Nativity, the Christ child appears to be trying to grasp the golden objects from the kneeling Magus, scattering them to the floor, while looking back at his mother to see her reaction.
Corporate gifts
Receiving gifts from managers and business associates can be a mixed experience, and choosing them is even more difficult. Medieval kings were gift-givers par excellence, giving gifts to symbolise their wealth and power and to cement alliances with their subjects. They also donated large amounts to the Church in return for eternal salvation for themselves and their families. An early example is represented in a drawing of King Cnut and his wife Aelfgifu (or Emma) presenting a magnificent gold cross to the New Minster, Winchester, as a symbol of their patronage.
Alexander the Great was both a giver and receiver of gifts, according to medieval accounts of his life. Here he is shown receiving gifts from Darius along with a threatening message from the Persian king.
Sometimes monarchs expected gifts in return from their loyal subjects. Gold goblets seem to be a popular choice in these circumstances.
It seems that manuscripts are rather short on gift ideas, if gold goblets are not to our taste. But wait – there is another option that many of us will resort to once again this Christmas… books!
Gifts for everyone
There are so many different types of books out there – something for everyone. And in the Middle Ages books were popular gifts too for kings, queens and princes. A most magnificent example is the Talbot Shrewsbury Book presented to Margaret of Anjou on her betrothal to Henry VI of England by the 1st Earl of Shrewsbury.
Notice the dogs in both these images – they were a symbol of fidelity in medieval imagery. For us they are maybe a reminder not to forget our pets this Christmas – they need gifts too! Perhaps a tasty bone would be just the thing.
All of us in the Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts team at the British Library wish you a very happy festive season!
Chantry Westwell
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
Medieval manuscripts blog recent posts
- The Passion in pictures
- Five outstanding manuscripts acquired for the nation
- The Moutier Grandval Bible loaned to Jura
- Medieval Women manuscripts now online
- Black Agnes and the siege of Dunbar
- The mortuary roll of Lucy of Hedingham
- Tales of Medieval Women
- The Nativity according to St Birgitta
- An unknown leaf from the Poor Clares of Cologne
- Don't try this at home
Archives
Tags
- Africa
- Alexander exhibition
- Ancient
- Anglo-Saxons
- Animals
- Black & Asian Britain
- British Library Treasures
- Calendars
- Classics
- Decoration
- Digital scholarship
- Early modern
- Elizabeth and Mary exhibition
- English
- Events
- Exhibitions
- Fashion
- Featured manuscripts
- French
- Gold exhibition
- Greek
- Harry Potter
- Humanities
- Illuminated manuscripts
- International
- Ireland
- Latin
- Law
- Leonardo
- LGBTQ+
- Literature
- Magna Carta
- Manuscripts
- Maps
- Medieval
- Medieval history
- Medieval women
- Middle East
- Middle east
- Modern history
- Music
- Olympics
- Palaeography
- Polonsky
- Printed books
- Rare books
- Research collaboration
- Romance languages
- Royal
- sacred texts
- Sacred texts
- Science
- Scotland
- Slavonic
- South East Asia
- Visual arts
- Women's histories
- Writing