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Medieval Manuscripts: Exploring Craftsmanship, Ownership, and Use

  • Region: London
  • Type: Talk
  • Cost: Free

11 February 2025, 5.30 – 7.00pm

Institute of Historical Research, (Wolfson Room NB01),Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU & online- via Zoom

Book here!

Sophia Adams (The Courtauld Institute of Art) – Thome famulo tuo’: An Owner for Beinecke MS 410
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library MS 410 is a finely decorated late fifteenth-century prayer roll. Currently, its first owner, depicted as a kneeling cleric beneath an image of the Five Wounds, has not been identified with any certainty. In this paper, I will propose an identity for this figure, and locate this manuscript and its original owner in a specific collegiate context.  In doing so, I dispute the catalogue’s tentative identification of this figure, and also provide a counter to the most recent scholarly interpretation of this manuscript as a ‘birth girdle,’ a spiritually and physically protective artefact made explicitly to protect women during pregnancy and childbirth.

Edward Cheese (Independent conservator) – Material Manuscripts: A view from the bench
This paper will review the idea of the materiality of the manuscript book from a conservator’s point of view, and attempt to recover some of the understanding of the parchments and principles of binding which medieval craftspeople had, but which were eroded over subsequent centuries of producing printed paper books.

Founded in 1970, the London Society for Medieval Studies seeks to foster knowledge of, and dialogue about, the Middle Ages (c.500–c.1500 CE) among both scholars and the wider public in London. All welcome.

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/medieval-manuscripts-exploring-craftsmanship-ownership-and-use 

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