What do you like best about illuminated manuscripts? Do you like following the twiny knotted ornament in the borders, challenging your eye to discover whether it's all one strand? Do you enjoy identifying the flowers and plants, so precisely rendered that botanists have used medieval manuscripts as evidence for geographic occurence? Do you glimpse the freezing monks in their freezing sweatshops, laboriously copying out texts just as if they were handstitching counterfeit Fendi handbags?
Or is it that the pages of 500-year-old manuscripts, so tightly closed for so long that they have forgotten light, still glow with color and life?
From the Carrow Psalter, ca. 1250 CE. East Anglia, England. Walters Art Museum.
Or grim death, in some cases.
All those things are things that I love, when I walk through the galleries of the Walters Art Museum or the Morgan Library. Qu'rans, choir texts, devotionals the size of matchbooks an inch thick, breviaries, books of hours... all luxury items packed full of glitzy color in a world where manufactured color was itself a luxury. What is not to love?
This is why I was so eager to get my hands on The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane. It's one thing to show kids a batch of fancy painted books, but unless you can tell them the story of their manufacture, they're just... a batch of fancy painted books.
C.M. Millen has invented a scamp of an Irish monk named Theophane, curious about the world around him, weary of brown ink, eager to express himself instead of merely copying the words of others. Theophane is set to the task of boiling up brown ink, but when he runs out of bark and goes into the woods to collect more, he becomes inspired. He returns to the monastery with berries, cabbage, woad, crocus... natural substances known to have been used in the manufacture of pigments.
I can see Brother Theophane, like Dave the Potter, inspiring a lot of art projects this year. This book can extend in so many directions - we can use it to talk about history, creativity, religion, and science. Links to ink recipes (provided) can lead to ingredient lists that can inform nature and garden walks, or even trips to the grocery or hardware store. And have I even mentioned the art? I have not even mentioned the art!
Andrea Wisnewski's art in this book is masterful. Rich, detailed, appropriate, bursting with identifiable flora and fauna, done up in a palette of jewel colors. And not that most kids will get this, but some pages and border elements - who knows, maybe all of them - are mimics of compositions in actual medieval manuscripts. I am thinking the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Soane Hours. Yes, I'm showing off. I'm still paying for that education I'll have you know. But also, still reaping its benefits.
If you ever have a little time, spend a productive, marvelous hour nosing around in the medieval manuscripts that have been scanned, transcribed, presented online by people who love this stuff even more than I do. Support the foundations that fund them. Speak nicely to them when you pass them in the halls.
Getty Museum MSS collectionAmazing Rare Things exhibit
Free Library of Philadelphia collection
The Bodleian Library medieval MSS collection
The Digital Scriptorium, at Columbia University
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