Academic literature on the topic 'Illumination of books and manuscripts, Ethiopian'

The canon lists in Sēnodos und Fetḥa nagaśt do not represent the original arrangement of biblical books, since they go back to coptic traditions. Most of the biblical manuscripts are younger than the lists (c. 14 to c. 20), and their order of books is very disparat. Although the original arrangement cannot be identified from them, they reveal aspects of arrangement, which generate a specific ethiopian shape of the bible. Books or groups of books are bound together in different ways. In the OT there are eight books of the Law instead of five, and the rest remains in great variance. In the NT the internal order of the groups is stable, but the ar­rangement of the groups varies. Looking at this variability from a perspective of reception, the manuscripts are important, for they show what the believing community actually had before it. The ethiopian biblical canon seems to be construed as a net of various innerbiblical dialo­gues.

Ethiopian Muslims introduced literary culture and manuscript collection in the mosques after the introduction of Islam in the seventh century. Books stored and preserved in a bookshelves known as taqet (Arabic, tāqat, shelf). This clearly shows African endogenous culture of preserving textual material that before the introduction of European models for archives and museums. This article demonstrates the collection of Islamic manuscripts in Ethiopian state archives and private collections and illustrates their challenges with recommendation to rescue the collections.

This article examines the book culture of the Jesuit mission to Ethiopia (1557–1632). Combining archival and field research, it considers the composition of the mission’s now-lost libraries, the use of books as tools of conversion, book production, and missionary engagement with Ethiopian Orthodox book culture. Furthermore, it illuminates the Jesuit reliance upon Ethiopian collaborators both to understand Orthodox texts and to produce Catholic manuscripts in the absence of a printing press. Using the personal libraries of Pedro Páez, S.J. and Afonso Mendes, S.J. as case studies, it posits that the gradual acceleration of acts performed by Jesuits upon Orthodox books—including collecting, translating, editing, and destroying—paralleled the rising aggression and cultural intolerance of the mission. Ultimately, this resulted in the expulsion and murder of the Jesuits, and the destruction of their libraries in a series of state-sanctioned book burnings that permitted a revival of Ethiopian Orthodoxy.

This article considers the major cycles of illumination in two Books of Hours belonging to Thomas Butler, seventh Earl of Ormond (c.1424–1515). The article concludes that the iconography of the two manuscripts reflects the personal and familial piety of the patron and was designed to act as a tool in the practice of devotion.

Review(s) of: Illuminated manuscripts and incucabula in Cambridge: A catalogue of western book illumination in the Fitzwilliam museum and the Cambridge colleges, part five: Illuminated incunabula, volume one: Books printed in Italy, by Andriolo, Azzura Elena and Reynolds, Suzanne, (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2017) hardcover, 288 pages, RRP 149 pounds/Euro175; ISBN: 9781909400856.

Abstract Long sidelined by art historians, the Wandalgarius Codex is a compendium of legal texts dated to 793 that represents an early venture in a trend associated with the 790s: populating initial letters with lively figures. This article centers the Wandalgarius Codex in discussion of experimental book illumination in the late eighth century. The decade saw re-definition of the visual organization of books, the uses illumination could serve, and the ways manuscripts in many genres reflected and shaped projects of education and reform. The essay sets Wandalgarius’ approach to initials in conversation with the well-known Gellone Sacramentary, and investigates the scribe-draftsman’s characterization of his own work as an ambitious contemporary book-maker.

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

Abstract This essay follows three different stages of the fusion of images and words in the tradition of the book. More specifically, it tackles the transformation undergone by the initially religious combination of visual figures and scriptural texts, exemplified by medieval illuminated manuscripts into the spiritual, non-dogmatic, illuminated books printed and painted by poet-prophet William Blake in a manner that combines mysticism and literature. Eventually, the analysis reaches the secularized genre of the graphic novel that renounces the metaphysical element embedded in the intertwining of the two media. If ninth-century manuscripts such as the Book of Kells were employed solely for divinely inspired renditions of religious texts, William Blake’s late eighteenthcentury illuminated books moved towards an individual, personal literature conveyed via unique pieces of art that asserted the importance of individuality in the process of creation. The modern rendition of the image-text illumination can be said to take the form of the graphic novel with writers such as Will Eisner and Alan Moore overtly expressing their indebtedness to the above-mentioned tradition by paying homage to William Blake in the pages of their graphic novels. However, the fully printed form of this twentieth-century literary genre, along with its separation from the intrinsic spirituality of the visual-literary fusion in order to meet the demands of a disenchanted era, necessarily reconceptualize the notion of illumination.

Abstract The Royal Library of Belgium (kbr) has opened a new permanent museum showcasing the historical core of its collections: the luxurious manuscript library of the dukes of Burgundy. Centred around a late medieval chapel that is part of kbr’s present-day building, the museum introduces visitors to medieval book production, the historical context of the late medieval Low Countries, and the subject matter of the ducal library. The breadth of the dukes’ (and their wives’!) interests is reflected in the manuscripts that have come down to us, ranging from liturgical books over philosophical treatises to courtly literature. The Museum places late medieval book production squarely in its historical and artistic context. Visitors are not only introduced to the urban culture that provided a fruitful meeting place between artists, craftsmen, and patrons, but also to the broader artistic culture of the late Middle Ages. By presenting the manuscripts in dialogue with other forms of art such as panel paintings and sculpture, the exhibition stresses that artists at times moved between various media (e.g. illumination and painting) and were influenced by iconography in other forms of art.

Monastic illumination of manuscripts gave to writings a force and prestige which was unprecedented. Throughout the millennium of western monasticism (500-1500 A.D.), the rich founded monasteries so that monks might pray and worship on their behalf. The monks displayed the fruit of their labours to their patrons in their churches and other works of art, particularly in their books. When with growing prosperity from about 1250 onwards the demand for individual prayer reached down to the middle class of knights and burgesses, they began to want wonderworking books of their own. They could not afford to buy a chantry chapel or a jewelled reliquary, but a small illuminated manuscript came within their means as the first step towards the purchase of paradise. Ladies in particular took to reciting the Latin Psalter and treasuring illuminated Books of Hours. In fifteenth-century depictions of the Annunciation, Mary is often shown seated in a sunlit bower with an open Book of Hours on her lap or displayed on a lectern. Likewise she is sometimes depicted with the Child Jesus on her knee, showing him a Book of Hours. The habit of possessing books might never have reached the laity if writing had not been so luxurious and so covetable. Illumination introduced the laity to script through images which could not fail to attract the eye. The children of the prosperous were introduced to the Psalter by their mothers or a priest for the purpose both of learning to read and of beginning formal prayer. To own a Psalter was therefore an act of familial as well as public piety.These words were written twenty years ago, for a conference at the Library of Congress in 1980 on ‘Literacy in historical perspective’. Since then, these themes have been addressed in several lectures and research papers at conferences, and I would stand by the main ideas expressed in that passage. Monks had indeed given extraordinary prestige to books and in particular to the illuminated liturgical book, which is a medieval invention. By the thirteenth century such books were being adapted for lay use and ownership, typically in Books of Hours. However, it is mistaken to say that lay use ‘began’ then, as the aristocracy – particularly in Germany – had been familiar with prayer books for centuries. In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen was said to have learned only the Psalter ‘as is the custom of noble girls’. A Psalter for lay use dating from c.1150, which belonged to Clementia von Zähringen, has been preserved. It contains a full-page portrait of a lady – presumably Clementia herself – at folio 6v between the end of the Calendar and the Beatus page beginning the Psalms. This book has 126 folios in its present state (possibly one folio is missing at the end) and it measures 11 cm X 7 cm, no larger than a woman’s hand. The biography of Marianus Scotus, the eleventh-century Irish hermit who settled at Regensburg, describes how he wrote for poor widows and clerics ‘many little books and many Psalter manuals’ (‘multos libellos multaque manualia psalteria’). The diminutive form ‘libellos’ and the adjective ‘manualia’ emphasise that these manuscripts were small enough to hold in the hand, like Clementia von Zähringen’s book.