Warsaw, National library, Akc. 24000 is a lovely eighth-century gospel book which was at the Abbey of Saint Maximin in Trier. Interestingly it seems someone added a text for telling the future based on thunder to it. It's on display at the Pałac Rzeczypospolitej.
Pleased and honoured to say I'm starting a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the Institute of Art in the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw today. So here I am with the lady herself.
Yes that's pretty great 👍
www.theguardian.com/music/2025/o...
At least I got a letter to the guardian published online about this. I suppose it won't make a difference to a sale one could describe as fraudulent, which the guardian gave free press to, but it's there.
I very much wanted to put expert in inverted commas. The claim he spent months researching the origin and significance of the neums is a bit ridiculous when he can't get the most basic facts about them right.
Yes indeed. The two columns are almost unknown for a missal in the ninth century (and it is a plenary missal, not a sacramentary as they claim, which makes a later date significantly more likely)
I'm afraid there's a lot wrong with the expert assessment of this fragment, let alone the claim of supposed uniqueness of finding neums in a late ninth century manuscript that's getting press. Liturgical fragments get sold quite often so auction houses could try a bit harder
Congratulations! That's amazing. Do let me know if you'd like to meet up in Munich sometime (e.g. in the Staatsbibliothek), I have plenty of recommendations for day trips/hiking.
Interlacing designs and a bust in a medallion.
Initial Q formed by a colorful interlaced foliate stem, a profile human head in its center, two bird's heads with long sharp scissor-like beaks biting the stem, and an animal head where it starts and ends.
Two details of decoration and initials from the Exultet Rolls in the Museo Diocesano, Bari. Fabulous display.
#MedievalSky #Manuscripts
Two Norman Romanesque fonts of Cornwall. Left in Saint Nonna's Church in Altarnun. Right in Saint Petroc's in Bodmin.
3) More unassuming but probably the oldest surviving medieval manuscript still in Greece is the Great Meteoron's cod. 591. It is a copy of John Chrysostom's commentary written in 861 or 862 by the monk Eustathius.
Manuscripts on display in the soaring monasteries of Meteora. Here in the Great Meteoron museum are:
1) Cod. 106. A 16th century liturgical book into which a miniature of an evangelist from the ninth century is incorporated.
2) Cod. 969. A copy of the Ladder of Divine Ascent from the 11th century
Thanks for your response! I just wanted to highlight that the rite is so widespread later. But exactly as you say the great Carolingian monasteries and cathedrals could easily have had four separate manuscripts to use for the rite. But the presence in the Bobbio missal remains still intriguing.
There's always the gap between text and actual practice but the ordo is strongly linked to Carolingian reforms of baptism, so I think we can imagine an effort to outfit important churches with necessary resources. But the rite so elaborate that it's likely simplified in the average parish church.
Both the Gelasian and the Bobbio missal are reflecting a continental (probably Italian in origin) ceremony here for preparation for baptism. And I'm no expert but Carolingian gospel books I've read do tend to have each gospel on a new quire.
Just speaking as a liturgist, the ceremony is assumed ubiquitously by a lot of baptismal ordines into the 9th century (in the scrutiny) and even still in the 10th century sacramentary of Fulda (See screenshot). But it's not in insular context, so the insular gospel books aren't the place to look.
I saw a twelfth century Corfiot Gospel Book manuscript in the museum of the monastery of Panagia Theotokos in Palaiokastrista. It is one of the oldest monasteries on Corfu, though entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Perhaps this lovely manuscript dates from the founding period.
Nearby are the ruins of the Paleochristian basilica of old Palaiopolis, a magnificent structure in its day, which fell victim to successive invasions. It was first built in the fifth century, renewed in the eleventh but finally much destroyed by bombing during the Second World War.
The middle Byzantine church of Saints Justin and Sosipater is the oldest church on Corfu, dating to around 1000 and dedicated to two saints named in the Pauline Epistles and Acts who came to evangelize the island in their later years.
Nearby are the ruins of the Paleochristian basilica of old Palaiopolis, a magnificent structure in its day, which fell victim to successive invasions. It was first built in the fifth century, renewed in the eleventh but finally much destroyed by bombing during the Second World War.
The middle Byzantine church of Saints Justin and Sosipater is the oldest church on Corfu, dating to around 1000 and dedicated to two saints named in the Pauline Epistles and Acts who came to evangelize the island in their later years.
This not so tasteful monument commemorates that the monastery held the manuscript of the Weesobrunner Gebet, an old high German hymn or poem of creation written down in the early ninth century. Today it's in Munich as Clm 22053.
The secularisation of Bavaria in 1803 destroyed many great monasteries. Wessobrunn is one of the tragic cases, there's a Romanesque tower (called the Römerturm or Grauer Herzog) and some rococo corridors, all that remains of a place that claimed to be founded by Tassilo in the 8th century.
Kloster Seeon was founded at the end of the tenth century and received the special status of a Reichsabtei, directly under the Emperor, soon afterwards. The monks here produced some of the most brilliant manuscripts of Ottonian times it passed to the Bavarian state with the 1803 secularisation.
Lovely to see that the @bsbmuenchen.bsky.social have gone all out for the new exhibit on Japanese wood cuts: "Farben Japans". Here until 6th July.
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My amazing colleague and friend Pawel Figurski has joined us. Follow for learning about medieval Poland, state formation and kingship, plus there's no one who shows the importance of liturgy more clearly and lucidly. He even was in Der Spiegel recently!!!
bsky.app/profile/pawe...
My amazing colleague and friend Pawel Figurski has joined us. Follow for learning about medieval Poland, state formation and kingship, plus there's no one who shows the importance of liturgy more clearly and lucidly. He even was in Der Spiegel recently!!!
Which is to say I agree entirely with Sam and recommend the great article. How much the scholarship on the Middle Ages is actually about the Second Vatican Council always strikes me.
For the medieval liturgy views over the age of 50 still get reproduced, because expertise to challenge them is going extinct. Eg Vogel from the '60s is still the main reference I see cited for the early middle ages, a narrow narrative which new access to manuscripts can do so much to enliven.
In the Füssen Stadtmuseum now in the monastery buildings is exhibited this Carolingian bronze plate, showing Christ in a mandorla, discovered during excavations of the crypt. Probably originally covering a book, it can be dated to around the middle of the ninth century.