Some years ago, when the British Library put up their Turning the Pages digital display for a few of their very finest treasures, I discovered that there were people who thought that the Lindisfarne Gospels was a picture book and that it contained about seventeen pages. I guess my interest in paleography grew partly out of a passion for the words in books. Medieval manuscripts, for all the elegance and beauty of their illustrations in many cases, are still verbal narratives.
But they can still look gorgeous. I have updated the images in Medieval Writing for the script example and paleography exercise for the insular half uncial of the Lindisfarne Gospels with new colour images courtesy of the British Library, which now has a full digital facsimile with no turning pages, but all of them displayed.
While my wee sample is basically about the letter forms, nonetheless the spiffy dragon initial looks awesome in living colour.
1 comment:
Got to add - so so so true re Lindisfarne's first showing by BL! Why would anyone think there was more? TG one can revel in all that's going up now but I so wish they would REMOVE those Turning the Pages (I landed on them again by accident recently) and just direct people to the digitised MS... with a little explanation to help the disfunctional.
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