#medieval codex

[catschimericalcreations]

Marginalia the Rabbit Dragon Hybrid based on a Medieval Manuscript Doodle is two years old today!

tip jar

[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!

[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.

[twiggyhecate]

Ooooo British Researcher Nicholas Gibbs decipher states that the manuscript is a medieval woman's wellbeing guide and the text is shorthand Latin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiNq_tFGzPE&feature=share