#medieval codex

[birds-and-manuscripts]

Detail of inkwell and quill with manuscript book (please notice the bookbinding tail band and the red straps with golden buckles that would have held the book closed).

Botticelli, S. (1483 c.). Madonna del Magnificat [tempera on wood]. Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze. Picture by me.

[catschimericalcreations]

Marginalia, a strange rabbit lizard hybrid based on the doodled illustrations on the edges of medieval manuscripts, by Cat’s Chimerical Creations

Did you know:

With every donation you make at https://ko-fi.com/catschimericalcreations you can unlock one fun fact about any repurposed Beanie Baby hybrid plush beast of your choosing!

[catschimericalcreations]

Decided I needed this beast in my life:

there should be plushies of the strange but endearing creatures that live in medieval texts margins

[delaish]

Day 7: ⚔️ Happy ending ⚔️

A knight in battle attire

got into bed with his squire.

Instead of conquering forts,

they played with each others swords.

I feel the ending of KCD2 is a pretty good happy ending for the boys (if you romance Hans, of course 😎). The last dialogue options between them are lovely 🩷

To wrap up the challenge, I wanted to try out a different drawing style. So, I based this one on an illustration from the Codex Manesse, but adapted it to the boys. It’s kind of sad that this Hansry Week is coming to an end. It’s been amazing seeing so many artists pouring their heart into this, and I’m really happy I got to be part of it too. Thanks to everyone! 🥰🥰🥰

[cuties-in-codices]

couple in a wooden tub

from the medical-astrological schürstab codex, nuremberg, c. 1472

source: Zurich, ZB, Ms. C 54, fol. 44v

[illustratus]

Graf Albrecht von Heigerloch, Codex Manesse

[upennmanuscripts]

For today's #CoffeeWithACodex we looked at this late 15th century Italian Missal and golly, I like these historiated initials a lot.

(Ms. Codex 2076)

[mioritic]

Detail from a portrait of the writer Heinrich von Veldeke (around 1150 – after 1184)

Codex Manesse, Zürich, ca. 1300-1340, 30r

Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

[m3dieval]

[Video]

Techniques from the Codex Gladiatoria demo'd by skupina historického šermu Adeptus.

[didoofcarthage]

January calendar page with Janus and Capricorn, from the Stammheim Missal

German, probably 1170s

tempera colors, gold leaf, silver leaf, and ink

J. Paul Getty Museum

[amphibimations]

Choose your own adventure comic, poll below!

As you stand on the vast moorland, near where the hills end and the bog starts, your mind rushes with anticipation. Today, you are going to RAISE THE DEAD!!!

… More specifically, you’re going to try necromancy on some dead frogs. You’ve been practicing for months, and now that you’re 12 years old, you feel like you should at least be able to make small animal skeletons move. 

First, you’ll need to find some bones. 

All you need to do is search the large, carnivorous pitcher plants and sundews that grow in the area. There are a lot of plants, so it would be easier if you had someone to help you search. This is where your pet golem, Pete, will come in handy. You like to mold him into a different shape every time you remake him. 

This collaborative choose-your-own-adventure comic is called Codex Calluna. A new page will be posted every Saturday evening (est). If you would like to, reblogs mean more people will be able to see this and participate!

Archive blog with only the comic pages: here

[birds-and-manuscripts]

“The manuscript book isn’t only the necessary medium for the trasmission of ancient and medieval culture: it’s also a complex and dynamic object, which reflects, in its appearance and physical structure, the cultural, economical, social and political changes through the centuries.” - Marilena Maniaci.

Throughout history, humankind has always felt the need to communicate, and to fulfil that need has used a variety of recipients for their writing — organic, inorganic, of plant or animal origin… Before, and alongside, the well-known triptych of papyrus-parchment-paper were and are clay, shards of pottery, metals, fabrics, leaves, wood, bones…

Any writing, in its materiality, is a two-faced coin. One face is that which can be easily (or not) seen, such as the text and the images. The other face is all that is not seen, be it inside the writing, such as the material aspects, the structure, the techniques, or outside the writing, such as the culture or socio-economic situation.

While philology and palaeography study the text and images are the interest of art historians, that hidden other face is the subject of research of codicology, particularly in its acceptation of archaeology of manuscripts. Codicology is a relatively recent branch of studies, which originates as an ancillary science to philology and palaeography and as such still lacks a unified method or mission, but in the aforementioned meaning of the term and for what concerns us, it can be defined as the study of the history of codices (sing. codex).

Codicology, then, studies the codex in everything that isn’t text and writing, and partially images (although all of these things give contextual information, and are taken into consideration). But what, exactly, is a codex?

A codex isn’t a book, it’s not even a scroll - at least, not necessarily. As defined by Marilena Maniaci a codex is “a container of information, mostly textual, but also visual and musical, in which the dimension of immaterial ideas interacts, in different and complex ways, with the materiality of the object.” More simply, a codex is any object consisting of a material which has been written on or which was meant to be written on and which has been bound or could have been bound.

A scroll is a codex, a book is a codex, but also ostraka (pottery shards) which have been tied together through holes, or a single and quite big piece of vellum which has been folded.

The three following images are all codices, as different as they may seem!

Codicology studies the materials a codex is composed of, the way it was produced, used, re-used, its history throughout the years, in whose hands it ended up and how its “adventures” influenced its physicality. These informations, seemingly of secondary importance, can give us interesting insights on the times the codex “lived” through.

[dtwof]

Happy Easter from the St. Gall Gospels (Irish, c. 750)

[doubtspirit]

Troubadours from Codex Manesse, 1305-40

[c4tto626]

my favourite part of the kcd2 codex is that it's straight up just. a bunch of interesting historical information (on everything from the various locations to how medieval toilets worked) with some fun behind the scenes bits scattered in here and there by the developers. all games should do this actually lol

[cuties-in-codices]

the sun

illustration from the medical-astrological "schürstab codex", nuremberg, c. 1472

source: Zurich, Zentralbibl., Ms. C 54, fol. 28v