The marginalia of illuminated manuscripts is weird. When monks weren’t complaining about their jobs as they hand-copied line after line, they were inserting fart jokes into the margins. But one ...

Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī, author, ‘Dalāʼil al-khayrāt’ (between 1700–99), 344 unnumbered pages, illuminations, 17 cm (all digital images courtesy the Getty’s Open Content Program) (click to ...

In 2008, at the Munich auction house Ruef, a kind of miracle occurred: one of the world’s most glorious 16th-century illuminated manuscripts surfaced after sitting in obscurity in a German private ...

Christine de Pizan awakened by Reason, Rectitude, and Justice (detail), F. 1r from Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre des trois Vertus, Paris, France (c. 1405), Boston Public Library, MS f Med. 101 BOSTON, ...

This fall, six Princeton undergraduate students in the course “Arts of the Medieval Book” are exploring the technology and function of books through a historical perspective. Working firsthand with ...

To some, a title like “In the Beginning Was the Word: Medieval Gospel Illumination” evokes ideas antithetical to modernity: tradition, religion and non-reproducibility. A new J. Paul Getty Museum ...

Princeton University has placed a new digital library of 200 Islamic manuscripts online for scholars to consult and study. These manuscripts were selected from some 9,500 volumes of Islamic ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...