inacom:

British Library, Add MS 47682, detail of f. 34r. Bible (the ‘Holkham Bible Picture Book’) c. 1327-1335

fotofacade:

This is a simply beautiful ‘Stonehenge’ moment #rightplacerighttime

- captured a once in a year event last night over in Manchester - sunlight through the Italianate/Byzantine Campanile of Walters former Congregational Church in Castlefield

medieval:

Doodles by a child in Medieval Novgorod. 

The Art of Onfim: Medieval Novgorod Through the Eyes of a Child

Just as visible Nature is populated by an infinite number of living creatures, so, according to Paracelsus, the invisible, spiritual counterpart of visible Nature (composed of the tenuous principles of the visible elements) is inhabited by a host of peculiar beings, to whom he has given the name elementals, and which have later been termed the Nature spirits. Paracelsus divided these people of the elements into four distinct groups, which he called gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders. He taught that they were really living entities, many resembling human beings in shape, and inhabiting worlds of their own, unknown to man because his undeveloped senses were incapable of functioning beyond the limitations of the grosser elements. 

Link to Salamander image http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/bbb/0318/12v/medium

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inacom:

A scribe copies from an exemplar, L’Estoire del Saint Graal (British Library MS Royal 14 E III, fol. 6v), c. 1300-1315.

(via upennrels)

theoddmentemporium:

Guillotine Toy

Following the bloody conclusion of the French Revolution “The toy shops put on the market little guillotines with which little patriots could behead figures of aristocrats. There still survive some specimens of this pretty and diverting machine, of which one bears the date 1794 [above].

In December, 1793, [one man] asks his mother in Frankfurt to get him such a toy guillotine for his son … and in her reply he certainly got some home-truths. In her decisive manner she wrote to him by return post: ‘Dear Son, Anything I can do to please you is gladly done and gives me joy;—but to buy such an infamous implement of murder—that I will not do at any price. If I had authority, the maker should be put in the stocks and I would have the machine publicly burnt by the common executioner. What! Let the young play with anything so horrible,—place in their hands for their diversion murder and blood-shedding? No, that will never do!”

erikkwakkel:

A time capsule from the Middle Ages emerges - In the Book History class I am running with the book historian Paul Hoftijzer we recently discovered the remains of a medieval archive. It concerns 132 notes, letters and receipts from an unidentified court in the Rhine region, jotted on little slips of paper. Such objects rarely survive from medieval society because they were normally thrown away after use. In fact, the same happened with these slips, be it that an early-modern bookbinder fished them out of the bin and recycled them as boards. The importance of the notes is not just connected to their low survival rate, but also because they tell us every-day things that we normally rarely hear about in historical sources. “Could you please send me 6 guilders?,” writes the Steward to the Chamberlain. “Could you please send me some wild roses, preferably not yet in bloom?,” says a note from the duke himself. Here are five samples from the large pile, charming and vulnerable stowaways that traveled through time hidden inside a binding. The book with the archive is part of the Bibliotheca Thysiana, a seventeenth-century library in Leiden. The discovery featured in Dutch and Flemish national newspapers on 25 April, 2013. The images in this blog were taken by Giulio Menna (@sexycodicology). Check out some other discoveries made in our Book History course on our Flickr stream. I am tweeting new discoveries via #thysiana (@erik_kwakkel).

erikkwakkel:

Musings: Funny letters - It was not particularly fun being a medieval scribe. “The fingers write, but the whole body hurts,” was a popular saying in the scriptorium. Still, humor brought a bit of warmth in a scribe’s miserable existence. This image shows such a little ray of sunshine: practice letters in a 12th-century book that are deliberately shaped so as to bring a smile to the beholder’s face. Two monks forming a letter B, a man trapped in a duck that is the letter S. I think the trick worked then as it does now. And what a great thought that is: that we can share a moment, a joke, with a witty scribe that lived almost 900 years ago.
(Pic: Leiden, University Library, BPL 111-I, 12th c)

theoddmentemporium:

Hex: The Chained Oak Legend

In a small woodlands known as Barbary Gutter near Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire, England, lies a great oak tree shackled by thick, rusted chains, which provides the eerie setting to a famous 19th century legend:

Returning to his home, Alton Towers, by carriage one autumn evening in the 1840s, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was accosted by an elderly woman who appeared suddenly in the road. She begged for a coin but was cruelly dismissed by the Earl, who ordered her off his land. In a rage the woman called after him, “For every branch that falls from this old oak tree, a member of your family will die,” cursing, legend has it, him and his entire family.

Initially the Earl paid her no heed, but, later that night, when a violent storm tore a branch from the tree and his son inexplicably died, the devastated Earl ordered that the branches should be chained up to prevent any future tragedies.

A slight variation in the tale has the son riding through the woods the next day when the branch falls on him, which is slightly more plausible as there are records of a riding accident in the area at this time. In fact, various elements of the original story have a factual basis, for example, the tree, which, as aforementioned, still exists, did once sit beside a roadway the Earl would have frequented to get to the nearby church, and he would have been the only person with the authority to have the tree chained. In 2007 one of the main branches collapsed, the chain having become integral to the tree’s structure and rusting through, but the family confirmed no one died.

[Sources: Photographs are mine | Chained Oak | Alton Towers Heritage]

abandonedography:

Beneath Greenock lies an old line which once ran to the Princes Pier Station at the now Ocean Terminal. It originally ran from St Enoch through Paisley and Kilmacolm however that part of the line closed many years ago. Surprisingly the rails are still in place which is probably as a result of it being used to run freight to the container terminal.

Greenock Tunnels by Bora Horza