First was a very handy little book called The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, by Daniel V. Thompson. This book covers a tremendous amount of highly useful and fascinating material on the subject of medieval illumination and other kinds of medieval painting.
If you’re not an artist, the chapter headings can be a little confusing. Chapter 1, for instance, is entitled, “Carriers and Grounds”. However, I merely jumped straight to the subheadings in the chapter of particular interest to myself and my story: “The importance of book making”; “Parchment making”; “Vellum”; “Qualities of parchment”; and “Preparations”. These sections (which I heavily highlighted) taught me in detail how parchment was made, the difference between common parchment and vellum (“‘vellum’ means calf skin and nothing else, while parchment is a general term applicable to any kind of animal skin, including vellum”); and how parchment was prepared for the painting of illuminations. These sub-sections are followed by others not pertinent to my story, though they may be pertinent to yours, such as painting on wood, the use of gesso, creating a polyptych (multiple panels set in wood frames), and painting on canvas or plaster.
The second two sections that provide an absolute treasure trove for a researcher of medieval illuminations, are chapters 3 and 4, which cover the wide variety of pigments available to the illuminator and how these pigments were derived, breaking them down into their individual color groups: black, brown, white, red, blue, purple, green, and yellow (Chapter 3), followed by a lengthy section of colors derived from metals, with an emphasis on creating the gold gilding (Chapter 4) that truly gave manuscripts the brilliant, reflective “light” that “illuminated” their pages.
If only for this extensive and detailed section on pigments alone, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting is well worth having in your library of resource books!
Finally we come to The Medieval Book, by Barbara A. Shailor. While similar in format to the research books I cited in an earlier post about illuminated manuscripts (i.e., lacking a useful index, but filled with helpful marginal headings to help you quickly navigate to the particular information essential to the story you are writing, as well as being liberally sprinkled with reproductions and photographs), The Medieval Book differs from those earlier sources by focusing on what it’s title suggests: books in general, rather than illuminated manuscripts in particular.
Not that illuminated manuscripts are neglected in this volume. They are indeed discussed, as any comprehensive resource on medieval books would require. But Shailor spends much more of her time describing how medieval books were made. Subjects covered include: pricking and ruling in preparation for the text to be added; ruling with sylus and crayon (the latter an innovation of 12th Century Europe outside of Itay); pattern books (mentioned in a previous post, and an important plot device in Illuminations of the Heart); the various styles of medieval scripts used by the scribes who created the text of the books; borders and miniatures (again, a nice section on illuminations); followed by how medieval books were actually put together (sewn, board attachments, pasteboards, headbands and edges, decorative stamping of the covers, and much, much more!).
These are by no means the only resource books available for information on medieval illumination, painting or book making. They are simply the titles I used in researching these subjects for Illuminations of the Heart. If you see comments listed on any of my posts, you’ll want to take time to check them out, as readers often share additional titles they’ve found useful on these subjects, thus widening all of our research knowledge on this wonderful and fascinating subject!
Beginning Monday you’ll be able to read a month’s worth of reviews of Illuminations of the Heart between August 10th – September 18th (excepting weekends and Labor Day). I’ve listed the dates and links in the sidebar on the right side of this page, so you can follow along each day or click along randomly to see what people are saying about my new book. And there will be prizes involved if you leave a comment at any or all of the reviews: 3 $10 online gift certificates will be awarded towards the purchase of a copy of Illuminations of the Heart (one each to Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, and DeseretBook.com), plus an autographed copy of Illuminations of the Heart--4 prizes in all! You'll receive one entry for every comment you leave on any of the reviews during the blog tour.
Next Monday, August 10th, kicks off a month long Book Blog Tour for my new medieval romance, Illuminations of the Heart! From Monday, August 10th through Friday, September 18th (excepting the weekends and Labor Day), you’ll be able to read daily reviews of Illuminations of the Heart by various bloggers, intermingled with an occasional online interview with me. And although copies of Illuminations of the Heart have been available online for a few weeks now, it’s finally beginning to appear in the bookstores, so I’ve decided to have a party to celebrate both events.
Where will this party be held? Over on my companion blog, at JDP NEWS! The fun will kick off at 9:30 AM PST with an Introduction. Then beginning at 10 AM PST, I’ll be giving away a prize an hour for a full eight hours, the final, grand prize being an autographed copy of Illuminations of the Heart! To find out what the other prizes are…well, you’ll just have to show up on Friday and see. :-) (I'll drop just a hint for you guys, however...some of my early prizes may be more appealing to true medieval history buffs than the general reader, so you might want to check in early. ;-) )
So don’t miss the fun. Circle August 7th on your calendars. Pop in throughout the day to enter my contests and “chat” with me through the comments feature on my blog. Invite your friends to join us!
Hope to see you there!
I promised in my last post that I would finish telling you about my experiences with two of the books I mentioned there but ran out of room to discuss: The Illuminated Manuscript, by Janet Backhouse and Illuminated Manuscripts, by D.M. Gill.
Unlike Harthan’s The Book of Hours, which had separate sections for historical information (in the front matter), followed by pages of manuscript reproductions, both The Illuminated Manuscript and Illuminated Manuscripts intermingle the historical research information with manuscript samples.
The historical research information in The Illuminated Manuscript, by Janet Backhouse, lacks the helpful subject headings of The Book of Hours and Illuminated Manuscripts, with all the information running in one long narrative form between the pictures. One is therefore required to pretty much study the entire text, at least up through whatever century you have chosen to place your story in. It’s all easy, non-intimidating reading, though.
Some other facts I learned that played parts in my story:
There were other fascinating bits of information I picked up from The Illuminated Manuscript, but since they did not appear in my novel, I will reserve my discussion of them until they work their way into a future story of mine. :-)
D.M. Gill’s Illuminated Manuscripts similarly interweaves text with picture replicas. However, t his book is broken down into helpful subsections: A Short Chronology; Early Middle Ages, divided between Sixth to Ninth Centuries, Ninth to Eleventh Centuries, and Twelfth Century; Late Middle Ages, which covers the Thirteenth through Sixteenth Centuries; Materials and Manufacture; Other Cultures, focusing on Jewish and Spanish illumination; and a Conclusion bringing us up to the printing press.
I found the section on Materials and Manufacture to have the most practical application for my story. This section discusses (in greater detail than Backhouse’s book) how parchment was made; how pages were “ruled’ in preparation for adding the text; what kinds of pens and inks were used; how paints of various colors were prepared for the illuminated miniatures (including another reference to lapis lazuli); the application of gold or silver leaf; how the final, completed book was assembled; and even how much some “professional illuminators” charged for their work. I was not able to use a fraction of this information in my novel, Illuminations of the Heart, but I certainly now have a treasure trove of interesting facts for future projects!
I have a few more titles related to illuminated manuscripts to share with you in my next blog. Until then, you might check out the comment left by writemedieval on my last post to check out two books on illumination by Christopher de Hamel. I’ve already put both of these books in my Amazon shopping cart!
Okay, so I admit it. It’s been, like, forever since I’ve blogged here. My apologies. I kind of got lost in “life” for awhile. There’s good news, though. Remember that detour I told you about, putting my next medieval novel, Illuminations of the Heart, on hold while Leatherwood Press re-published Loyalty’s Web? Well, not only has Leatherwood decided to publish Illuminations of the Heart as well (under a new imprint of theirs called Walnut Springs Press), things have proceeded along so swimmingly that the book has been typeset, the cover art has been finalized (see right), and ARCs are being sent to reviewers, even as I type this! You can read the back cover blurb on my companion blog, JDP NEWS, and the first chapter there as well, if you like. If you do so, you’ll discover that the heroine of my new medieval romance is a medieval illuminator. So it only seems appropriate that I resume my posts to medieval research with joyce by sharing with you a few sources I used for my novel regarding medieval illumination.The chief problem I discovered with researching books about medieval illumination was the indexes…or to be more precise, the lack in most instances thereof. Three of the initial source books I used for my research were: Illuminated Manuscripts, by D.M. Gill; The Illuminated Manuscript, by Janet Backhouse; and The Book of Hours, with a historical survey and commentary by John Harthan. Now indexes are my favorite method of “short cutting” research. Instead of reading an entire book on a subject that might contain only a fraction of needed information for one’s project, one can look in a good index and zero in on a subject, such as, let’s say in the case of medieval illumination, “inks”, “paints”, or “writing implements”. However, I discovered that many books about illuminated manuscripts are treated as art books, rather than research books, and whoever the powers-that-be are who are in charge of assembling such books tend to place the emphasis on the undeniably beautiful examples of illuminated manuscripts through the ages, rather than the process by which such manuscripts were made. Hence, the bulk of the three books listed above are made up of page after page after page of examples of beautiful artwork from medieval manuscripts. But an index? Only one of these three books had one, and the exception—in The Book of Hours—was made up almost entirely of the names of artists, names of manuscript collections, and names of historical personages. Hence…no short cut to the research process in the back matter.
Fortunately, however, each of these books had plenty of front matter preceding the replica portions to provide me with lots of information on how the replicas to follow were originally created. And in this front matter, two out of three of these books broke this information down into subject headings which did assist in speeding along my research.
For example, my heroine in Illuminations of the Heart had no intention of creating a Book of Hours, at least for the duration of this part of her story. (What she might have created after I typed “the end” is another matter entirely!) But the front matter of The Book of Hours is broken down into these categories: “Historical Evolution”; “Contents”; “Decoration”; and “Social Aspects”. The historical evolution of the Book of Hours was not pertinent to the story I was telling, so I could simply skip over this part. Under the heading, “Contents”, I did find some useful information regarding the Gradual Psalms, and since my heroine did, in fact, illuminate a psaltery in my book, this portion of the front matter was very helpful. Most of the information under “Social Aspects” did not prove pertinent to the current needs of my book. Hence, I zeroed in on the part about “Decorations”. This, for the purposes of my novel, proved the most helpful portion of The Book of Hours. This section taught me about pattern books (books designed to show a patron examples of the illuminator’s range of artwork); how books were first ruled by the scribe, prior to either calligraphy or miniatures being added; how spaces were deliberately planned out ahead of time and left in the text for illuminated letters or images to be added later; and the method by which such decorations were ultimately added. All of this was discussed in very brief detail, requiring me to seek out further sources that would provide me with greater depth of information, but this section did prove an excellent starting point for suggesting to me what kinds of information I needed to delve into more deeply. And its description of decorative letters inspired a scene in my book where my heroine paints an image of the Biblical shepherd-king, David, inside the loops of a large, illuminated “B” in the word “Blessed” at the beginning of the first verse of the Gradual Psalms. (Granted, I used the English, rather than the Latin, form of this Biblical text, but that was to impart a greater emotional impact of the verse on the reader.)
I was going to share with you information on illuminations gleaned from the other two source books I mentioned above, but I think this post is long enough as it is. So here I will stop, but this time I promise to return, sooner rather than later (certainly sooner than eight months later!), and share with you my experiences with Janet Backhouse’s The Illuminated Manuscript and D.M. Gill’s Illuminated Manuscripts.
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Argh!!! Once again, I discover that one of my treasured research books is apparently out of print. But once again, there appear to be multiple used copies of The Book of Hours by John Harthan available on Amazon, so my guilt at referring you to another out-of-print book is slightly salved. It hasn't been the first time, and unfortunately, it more than likely won't be the last!
