Expressive, emotional, and energetic, the Utrecht Psalter is not what you expect in a book written 1200 years ago.
Medieval books
One of the oldest surviving bibles was made in England but has clear visual ties to traditions from the ancient Mediterranean.
Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible
Kalends, nones, ides—the medieval month took its three fixed points from ancient Rome. But what about red days?
The medieval calendar
From scraping skin and cutting quills to painting and bookbinding, making a manuscript is a long, complex process.
Making manuscripts
Angular or rounded? Medieval script reveals not only what the author wrote, but when and where the book was made.
An introduction to medieval scripts
Go on, judge a book by its sound. The thinner the parchment, the higher the pitch—and the price.
Listening to the medieval book
This 1000-year-old math primer is nothing fancy, but it took months for a scribe to make.
A medieval textbook
At medieval universities, students took notes on parchment scraps, sometimes bound together with cord.
Medieval notepads
Manuscript readers tracked marginal comments with dots, lines, letters, and numbers—anticipating the footnote.
The medieval origins of the modern footnote
From cupboard shelfmarks to bookcase inventories, medieval readers devised codes for locating precious volumes.
Finding books
Lose your place? Not in a monastic library. Static or dynamic, “spider,” or wheel, these bookmarks stay put.
Smart bookmarks
Scribes left plenty of empty space, but readers often filled the margins with comments—and even little hands.
Getting personal in the margins
A carousel, a wheel, or a portable desk? Reading multiple books at once required ample space and custom furniture.
The medieval desktop
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Using the book: an introduction
Animal skin lent a durable writing surface to medieval scribes. When tanned and tooled, it also protected books.
Medieval books in leather (and other materials)
Is that a body, or a book? Arms, hands, feet, skulls—all can feature in the anatomy of a medieval manuscript.
Clasps: hugging a medieval book
Medieval libraries hid a forest in their shelves—wood boards, covered and clasped, protected precious parchment.
Binding the book
Decorators drew inspiration from design books, from enlarged capitals to elaborate figures in the margins.
Medieval supermodels
From penwork and gilding to one-letter stories, decorators offered a range of services to dazzle medieval readers.
Decorating the book
Like modern marketers, medieval scribes advertised on posters and even inserted “spam” pages into texts.