History glee
Apr. 2nd, 2009 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tilly_stratfordOh my God oh my God that was SO COOL!
I mean, you can go to a museum and look at dramatically lit stuff behind bulletproof glass, but man when you walk into an ordinary room and there's parchment laid out right there on the table older than the Durham cathedral...
I know I always say awesome this and awesome that, but it's not often I'm just honestly awed. This isn't just dry bits of parchment with ink on, this is history. All us poor fresh students were terrified we might breathe too hard and destroy something so inconcievably rare.
And you won't believe how incredibly beautiful some of those Medieval pages are. There are letters so crisp and dark they look like they were written this week, and initials and illustrations in bright blues and reds and with gold leaf.
And a first movable type edition of the illustrated Aeneid, regrettably bound in the parchment of a much older copy of the Venerable Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. Man, those Reneissance bookmakers and their cold disregard of beautiful things...
If there's one thing I've learned from studying the Middle Ages is how much misplaced prejudices there are - not only among the public but historians as well. And I, in turn, get more and more prejudiced against the Reneissance. "Hey guys, let's burn some witches! Oops, that was a bad idea. Let's blame it on the Middle Ages! And let us cut up the parchment and wash away the ink on Medieval Bibles and bind our legal papers in it. Oh we're so clever guys!"
I take it as a good sign that, although I have my bouts of "oh god what the hell am I doing with my life. Medieval history, what the hell?", I can still get so blown away by these things. If I ever make it to the British Museum reading room I'll probably burst into tears.
Well the lecture on Norse literature was cancelled, so since I rarely get some free time at this hour of the day I intend to go for a stroll with my camera. Watch this space.
I mean, you can go to a museum and look at dramatically lit stuff behind bulletproof glass, but man when you walk into an ordinary room and there's parchment laid out right there on the table older than the Durham cathedral...
I know I always say awesome this and awesome that, but it's not often I'm just honestly awed. This isn't just dry bits of parchment with ink on, this is history. All us poor fresh students were terrified we might breathe too hard and destroy something so inconcievably rare.
And you won't believe how incredibly beautiful some of those Medieval pages are. There are letters so crisp and dark they look like they were written this week, and initials and illustrations in bright blues and reds and with gold leaf.
And a first movable type edition of the illustrated Aeneid, regrettably bound in the parchment of a much older copy of the Venerable Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. Man, those Reneissance bookmakers and their cold disregard of beautiful things...
If there's one thing I've learned from studying the Middle Ages is how much misplaced prejudices there are - not only among the public but historians as well. And I, in turn, get more and more prejudiced against the Reneissance. "Hey guys, let's burn some witches! Oops, that was a bad idea. Let's blame it on the Middle Ages! And let us cut up the parchment and wash away the ink on Medieval Bibles and bind our legal papers in it. Oh we're so clever guys!"
I take it as a good sign that, although I have my bouts of "oh god what the hell am I doing with my life. Medieval history, what the hell?", I can still get so blown away by these things. If I ever make it to the British Museum reading room I'll probably burst into tears.
Well the lecture on Norse literature was cancelled, so since I rarely get some free time at this hour of the day I intend to go for a stroll with my camera. Watch this space.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 06:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-03 12:00 am (UTC)Medieval history sounds like fun actually.