In the 1470s, a Flemish scribe left some meticulously drafted pages of an illuminated manuscript out to dry, only to find out the next day that his cat had trod over them, leaving inky paw prints on ...

Master of the Chronique scandaleuse, “Denise Poncher before a Vision of Death” (Paris, France, about 1500), tempera colors, ink and gold on parchment; Leaf: (5 1/4 × 3 7/16 inches) (courtesy the J.

Shortly after Christmas last year, Gina Hurley and Eric Ensley visited the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s facility on Winchester Avenue where one of the world’s great collections of ...

Students have discovered lost text on 15th-century manuscript leaves using an imaging system they developed as freshmen. By using ultraviolet-fluorescence imaging, the students revealed that a ...

Those who study human culture must grapple with what amounts to an incomplete data set, since researchers are limited to poring over the books, manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts ...

Usually, when people hear the term “illuminated manuscript,” they think of enormous, leather-bound books, produced painstakingly by the hands of medieval European monks, and filled to the brim with ...

Yearning princesses locked away in castles, heroic knights, hawkish Vikings — fragments of medieval European stories have permeated nearly every aspect of contemporary culture, from Taylor Swift songs ...

At first glance, the writer of an eighth-century biography of Saints Willibald and Winnebald offers few clues regarding her identity, describing herself only as an “unworthy Saxon woman.” Upon closer ...

The medieval prayer book looks modern from the outside, with its sleek white leather cover added by a conservator for safekeeping. Open the pages, however, and peer into a bygone era. There, images of ...

While nowadays you might have some chicken soup to fight a cold, a new project unearthing manuscripts up to 1,000 years old reveals the bizarre medical remedies recommended by those in the medieval ...

It’s an approximately 600-year-old mystery that continues to stump scholars, cryptographers, physicists, and computer scientists: a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable ...