![]() Medieval Manuscripts Are a Blaze of Glorious Colour Mary Magdalene in blue.Įven now, we still talk about red-letter days, days of special importance. ![]() Margaret in dark red, and in the seventh the festival of St. In the fifth line, we see the feast of St. Regular saints’ days alternate between bright red and dark brown. The heading for the month of August appears in gold lettering. Created in England in about 1320, it shows a complex use of different colours. One good example is The Calendar of the Queen Mary Psalter (BL. In some Calendars, the hierarchy of days is more complex: Scribes wrote the minor feasts in black, wrote slightly more important feasts in red, and wrote the very important feasts (such as Easter, Christmas, the Enunciation) in blue or gold. A very basic Calendar shows saints’ days and church feasts written in black, with major festivals in red. These are found at the beginning of most liturgical scripts, in Books of Hours, and sometimes in domestic books such as books of home medicine or books of legal statutes.Ĭalendars consist of lists of saints’ days for every day of the year. One of the most common uses of red in the Middle Ages is in the writing of Calendars. Red Letter Days: Special Events in the CalendarĪ Calendar page from the Queen Mary Psalter. The term rubrication comes from the Latin rubrico, to colour red. The rubricators were specialised scribes. These are the rubrications, written in red, instructing when to sing, when to kneel, and so on. The second set of text addresses the clerics and monks who use the book. One text consists of the prayers, psalms, hymns etc. ![]() Books created for use in church services, and for devotion at home, have two distinct sets of text. Red headings are particularly common in liturgical manuscripts of Christian Europe. When referring to manuscripts, miniature has nothing to do with the size of the picture. In classical Latin, the word for red is minium, from which comes our word ‘miniature,’ meaning illustrations in a manuscript. Vermilion (mercuric sulphide) and red lead were both readily available across Europe since ancient times. Why red? Most likely red was the most convenient and easily-created colour. ![]() Changes in the size and colour of initials break up the text visually, making it easier to read. Passages in medieval manuscripts were often written in one solid block with few breaks or division. The Hierarchy of Lettering in Medieval ManuscriptsĪ change of colour or size alters the importance of an initial, a word or a sentence – the larger the letter, the more important the text that follows it. Just put your preference in the “I Would Like to Support” Box after you Click to Donate Below: Support This Expert’s Articles, This Category of Articles, or the Site in General Here. Would you like to see more articles like this? In any case, when you see red in a medieval manuscript you know something important is happening. Subsequent headings mark the divisions between chapters.Īt the end of the text, the final words, known as the colophon, often written in red, might indicate the date, the place of preparation, and occasionally the name of the scribe. Since medieval manuscripts have no title or content pages, the opening heading of a book might contain such information as the author’s name and the title of the text. Using red pigments for headings dates back to late Antiquity and was standard practice from the fifth century onwards. Alternatively, key words might be plainly written but in set in highly ornate boxes to make them stand out. Important initial letters or entire words or phrases might be decorated with floral tracery, inhabited by animals, grotesques and other strange items, or even embellished with brilliant gold. It must have been extremely difficult navigating through hundreds of pages of text – so the scribes wrote key words or headings in red or other colours such as blue or green. Today we have the advantage of page numbering, but medieval manuscripts had no page numbering system. We could apply other typographical variations such as capitalising or italicising the entire heading, or changing the colour. But what did medieval scribes do and how have books changed? Medieval Manuscripts: How Times Have Changed The font is larger than the text that follows and it stands alone at the top of the text.
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