The steady stream of books on medieval manuscripts addressed to a popular audience over the past two decades coincides with the advent of tablets such as Amazon's Kindle. As the flatlands of the digital realm encompass more of life, nostalgia for a tactile realm of reading, whether in the making or the perception of artifacts, asserts itself, as does the desire to immerse oneself in the real space of the conventional book, as opposed to the virtual yet denatured spaces of the metaverse. No accident, then, that, following an introduction that gestures toward medieval subjects and to readers other than Christian, Wellesley's engaging, if episodic, account of medieval manuscripts (published in the United States by Basic Books as The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts) opens with a prologue in which she recounts her hands-on visit to a parchment maker, during which she tried to slough the...
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Review Article|
May 01 2024
Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers
Mary Wellesley,
Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers
(London
: Riverrun
, 2021
), 369
pp.
Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Jeffrey F. Hamburger is the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard University. His books include Color in Cusanus; The Birth of the Author; Nuns as Artists; The Visual and Visionary; The Rothschild Canticles; Script as Image; and Diagramming Devotion.
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Common Knowledge (2024) 30 (2): 207–208.
Citation
Jeffrey F. Hamburger; Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers. Common Knowledge 1 May 2024; 30 (2): 207–208. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-11236766
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