| We've all been in tourist shops while on vacation and seen the multitudes of pictorial postcards. These images feature beautiful, breathtaking places and artifacts and nearly always manage to reduce them to mere shadows of reality. Pictures of illuminated manuscripts, like the ones here, would make very good postcards. They just don't convey the magnificence of the book itself. For example, the gold in the images does not sparkle as the pages of Kirby 1 do. The colors of the images, although vivid, do not jump off the screen as the inks and dyes of the true book jump off the page. The image, as it appears before you, tells you nothing of the 500-year old vellum pages that one would only imagine touching with a gloved hand. |
| Like most tourist postcards, images of illuminated manuscripts represent unique items. Every page of every illuminated manuscript was labored over by a multitude of craftsmen, each adding depth and beauty to the work. Everything from the vellum and the ink to the text and the cover was painstakingly created by human hands. This web site delves into the illuminated manuscripts of medieval times, the creation of these beautiful volumes and the symbolism of their images. A detailed provenance of Kirby 1 which is housed in the Special Collections department of the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges, is included as well as a glossary of terms. |
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Index of Main Sections | |
Images in Kirby 1
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The Making of a Manuscript
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The Marriage of Jacob and Phillippa
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Global Considerations
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Technical Terms Glossary
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Acknowledgements
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Related Links
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Bibliography
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