Search Results (61)

A Sanskrit manuscript of the Prajñāpāramitā or Perfection of Wisdom in eight thousand verses, now in the Cambridge University Library, Add.1643, is one of the most ambitiously designed South Asian manuscripts from the eleventh century, with the highest number of painted panels known among the dated manuscripts from medieval South Asia until 1400 CE. Thanks to the unique occurrence of a caption written next to each painted panel, it is possible to identify most images in this manuscript as representing those of famous pilgrimage sites or auspicious images of specific locales. The iconographic program transforms Add.1643 into a portable device containing famous pilgrimage sites of the Buddhist world known to the makers and users of the manuscript in eleventh-century Nepal. It is one compact colorful package of a book, which can be opened and experienced in its unfolding three-dimensional space, like a virtual or imagined pilgrimage. Building on the recent research focusing on early medieval Buddhist sites across Monsoon Asia and analyzing the representational potentials and ontological values of painting, this essay demonstrates how this early eleventh-century Nepalese manuscript (Add.1643) and its visual program document and remember the knowledge of maritime travels and the transregional and intraregional activities of people and ideas moving across Monsoon Asia. Despite being made in the Kathmandu Valley with a considerable physical distance from the actual sea routes, the sites remembered in the manuscript open a possibility to connect the dots of human movement beyond the known networks and routes of “world systems”. Full article

Analyzing how spinners are represented in art is a way to understand the role of women’s work in the medieval and premodern periods. What do spinners signify? How is this work depicted? Who are spinners? Using a selection of imagery from northern European medieval manuscripts and premodern prints from the 14th to the 17th centuries allows us to see how pervasive the spinner was as a symbolic device. Characters such as Eve, Mary, Sardanapalus, and Hercules are unified by their spinning. As they work with the spindle and distaff, they are makers in addition to being religious or mythological figures. Though spinning does not always (if at all) appear in their textual narratives, it is part of the established iconography for each and persisted as a way to communicate or demean the value of women’s domestic enterprises. Full article

Over the last decades, plenty of ancient manuscripts have been digitized all over the world, and particularly in Europe. The fruition of these huge digital archives is often limited by the bleed-through effect due to the acid nature of the inks used, resulting in very noisy images. Several authors have recently worked on bleed-through removal, using different approaches. With the aim of developing a bleed-through removal tool, capable of batch application on a large number of images, of the order of hundred thousands, we used machine learning and robust statistical methods with four different methods, and applied them to two medieval manuscripts. The methods used are (i) non-local means (NLM); (ii) Gaussian mixture models (GMMs); (iii) biweight estimation; and (iv) Gaussian blur. The application of these methods to the two quoted manuscripts shows that these methods are, in general, quite effective in bleed-through removal, but the selection of the method has to be performed according to the characteristics of the manuscript, e.g., if there is no ink fading and the difference between bleed-through pixels and the foreground text is clear, we can use a stronger model without the risk of losing important information. Conversely, if the distinction between bleed-through and foreground pixels is less pronounced, it is better to use a weaker model to preserve useful details. Full article

The author analyzes various cases of breaking seal matrices in medieval Catalonia and other regions in this text. The manuscript notes of the Catalan sigillographer Ferran de Sagarra guide the exploration of the mechanisms of signification associated with an essential medieval political theology. Beyond the materiality of the sigillary matrix and the printed seal, one can decipher a series of iconic behaviors that allow the author to propose a method for understanding European cultural history through anachronistic narrative forms akin to those of Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, or, more recently, Georges Didi-Huberman. It is possible to demonstrate the historical validity of seals in the service of a cultural history and thought that transcends political or religious narratives, opening new horizons in the understanding of the Latin West from the Carolingian period to the apex of international Gothic. Full article

This paper examines the Nanatsu-dera manuscript of the Dafangguang Rulai Xingqi Weimizang Jing (RXWJ) through the lens of scribal practices, with a focus on variant characters (yitizi, 異體字) and textual transmission. As a “separately produced scripture” (bie sheng jing, 別生經), the RXWJ was not included in the woodblock-printed editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon, which limited its circulation and made manuscript copies—such as the Nanatsu-dera manuscript—critical for reconstructing its textual evolution, transmission, and scribal modifications. A detailed paleographic investigation reveals scribal variants, orthographic fluidity, and phonetic substitutions, illustrating both intentional adaptations and unintentional errors in textual transmission. Comparative analysis with Dunhuang fragments and the Taishō Canon further contextualizes these variations, shedding light on the interpretive challenges scribes and readers face. The findings suggest that the Nanatsu-dera manuscript underwent three stages of transmission: (1) it originated from the Fifty-Fascicle edition circulating in China, (2) it was used as a base text (diben, 底本) for manuscript copying in Japan, and (3) it was subsequently re-copied and preliminarily collated by Japanese scribes. By tracing scribal variants and textual transmission through a paleographic approach, this research underscores the critical role of manuscript culture in preserving texts outside the canonical tradition, offering new insights into the mechanisms of Buddhist textual transmission and adaptation in medieval East Asia. Full article

Scholarship in Buddhist Studies, particularly among philologists and philosophers, often overlooks cosmology, karma, and rebirth. This neglect is a legacy of a deep and long-standing anti-metaphysical spirit that pervades the empirical and philosophical frameworks employed in the discipline. This study engages in a philological close reading of four manuscripts of an unedited and untranslated Pali commentary on the Cha-gati-dīpanī “Light on the Six Realms”, a work on karma and rebirth composed possibly in Pagan, Myanmar, in the early second millennium. This text is particularly significant as one of the oldest Pali works from the region, drawing on now-lost Sanskrit (or possibly Prakrit) sources and offering unique insights into broader Buddhist debates, such as the ontological status of hell guardians. I examine the text’s depiction of the hell and animal realms and reassess some of our scholarly paradigms that often frame the kind of ideas the commentary presents as irrational, figurative, or “folk”. Ultimately, this study calls for greater attention to such works and their perspectival horizons to enrich our understanding of the intellectual life of medieval Buddhism beyond the constraints of modern empirical and philosophical assumptions. Full article

The text Poxie lun:Daojing shijingfo wen破邪論:道經師敬佛文 (Treatise on Refuting Heresies: On the Respect of Taoist Scriptures for Buddha) records twenty-three items of “miscellaneous ancient records in Taoist scriptures” 道教古經古事雜抄. Half of these entries align with contents found in Dunhuang manuscripts and pertain to the practice of “replacing Buddhism with Taoism”. The Dunhuang manuscripts that involve the content of “replacing Buddhism with Taoism” can be categorized into five situations: First, Taoist scriptures that retain Buddhist terminology which was later replaced by later generations; Second, instances where traces of Buddhist terminology remain, showing signs of having been altered or replaced; Third, cases where the replacement of Buddhist terminology has already been completed in the manuscripts; Fourth, instances where, after replacing Buddhist terminology, the sentence structure was also revised; Fifth, sections that were preserved which, in later generations, were deleted due to their content relating to the blending of Buddhism and Taoism. These instances of “replacing Buddhism with Taoism” may reflect efforts by Taoism to remove Buddhist elements amid criticism or an attempt by Buddhist monks to preserve Buddhism’s sanctity by altering Taoist texts. The Dunhuang Taoist manuscripts offer vibrant historical material for discussing interactions between Buddhism and Taoism in medieval China. Full article

The transcription of historical manuscripts aims at making our cultural heritage more accessible to experts and also to the larger public, but it is a challenging and time-intensive task. This paper contributes an automated solution for text layout recognition, segmentation, and recognition to speed up the transcription process of historical manuscripts. The focus is on transcribing Portuguese municipal documents from the Middle Ages in the context of the iForal project, including the contribution of an annotated dataset containing Portuguese medieval documents, notably a corpus of 67 Portuguese royal charter data. The proposed system can accurately identify document layouts, isolate the text, segment, and transcribe it. Results for the layout recognition model achieved 0.98 mAP@0.50 and 0.98 precision, while the text segmentation model achieved 0.91 mAP@0.50, detecting 95% of the lines. The text recognition model achieved 8.1% character error rate (CER) and 25.5% word error rate (WER) on the test set. These results can then be validated by palaeographers with less effort, contributing to achieving high-quality transcriptions faster. Moreover, the automatic models developed can be utilized as a basis for the creation of models that perform well for other historical handwriting styles, notably using transfer learning techniques. The contributed dataset has been made available on the HTR United catalogue, which includes training datasets to be used for automatic transcription or segmentation models. The models developed can be used, for instance, on the eSriptorium platform, which is used by a vast community of experts. Full article

This study offers an in-depth exploration of the visual representation of Roman Rite liturgical altars in medieval images from the 13th to the 15th centuries, presenting a fresh perspective on the altar as a central and complex element of medieval liturgical furnishings. It examines key iconographic themes, such as the introit Ad te levavi animam meam and masses celebrated by saints, often depicting divine interventions during the Eucharist. Additionally, the research investigates the role of performative visual elements, such as curtains, which contributed to the depiction of sacred space within altar scenes. These visual devices help convey the altar as a space imbued with spiritual significance. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary visual and documentary sources, the study traces the continuity and variation in the altar’s iconography, offering a nuanced understanding of its role in medieval Christian worship. By examining how artists employed visual symbolism to emphasize the sanctity of the altar, this research sheds new light on the ways medieval altars were imagined and represented in the broader context of medieval art. Full article

This microreview, conducted by interdisciplinary teams, examines complex heritage material systems, such as medieval colors and modern and contemporary artworks. Our multi-analytical approach, a significant aspect of our research, is a means to this end. The conservation of works of art is our shared goal, as it ensures their accessibility and the transfer of cultural heritage to future generations. We seek to interpret the damage, usefulness, and innovation of the experimental design in this context. As Jan Wouters rightly points out, “The terminology used nowadays to describe the potential damage to objects caused by analysis should be refined beyond the destructiveness/non-invasiveness polarization. A terminology should include at least degree level intervention (low, medium, high), usefulness, and innovation”. Complementing micro- or sub-micro-sampling with the appropriate analytical methods is crucial, as exemplified in medieval, modern, and contemporary collections studies. Finally, a novel perspective for exploring the information contained in the multiscale heterogeneity of organic historical materials is envisaged, and it includes UV/Visible photoluminescence spectral imaging using a low-intensity ultraviolet synchrotron beam. Full article

Manual transcription of music is a tedious work, which can be greatly facilitated by optical music recognition (OMR) software. However, OMR software is error prone in particular for older handwritten documents. This paper introduces and evaluates a pipeline that automates the entire OMR workflow in the context of the Corpus Monodicum project, enabling the transcription of historical chants. In addition to typical OMR tasks such as staff line detection, layout detection, and symbol recognition, the rarely addressed tasks of text and syllable recognition and assignment of syllables to symbols are tackled. For quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we use documents written in square notation developed in the 11th–12th century, but the methods apply to many other notations as well. Quantitative evaluation measures the number of necessary interventions for correction, which are about 0.4% for layout recognition including the division of text in chants, 2.4% for symbol recognition including pitch and reading order and 2.3% for syllable alignment with correct text and symbols. Qualitative evaluation showed an efficiency gain compared to manual transcription with an elaborate tool by a factor of about 9. In a second use case with printed chants in similar notation from the “Graduale Synopticum”, the evaluation results for symbols are much better except for syllable alignment indicating the difficulty of this task. Full article

Wedding rituals and ceremonies have been depicted in various forms of literature, art, and illuminated manuscripts in medieval times. These representations offer valuable insights into the cultural, religious, and social aspects of weddings during that period. This article considers the state of research on visual representations of the wedding ceremony in the Middle Ages and how these pictures reflect legal, religious, and cultural/social aspects of medieval life in Europe. Using examples from various religious, literary, and legal texts, several questions will be addressed: In which contexts were the pictures of wedding ceremonies created? What is depicted and what is not? Which legal, religious, and cultural aspects are reflected in the medieval visualizations of the wedding ritual and how do the visualizations correspond to the religious, legal, and cultural setting of the wedding ritual in the Middle Ages? Illuminated legal manuscripts, particularly the Liber Extra, the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, reveal much about the rituals that signified the essence of the medieval wedding ceremony: the exchange of consent, the joining of the right hands (dextrarum iunctio), and the blessing of the union by a priest. Since the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, marriage was considered a sacrament by the Church, making the ritual a fulcrum of religious life. However, only the consummation of a marriage was able to bring the property-related effects of marriage into effect, and some pictures from a secular context refer to this part of the wedding ceremony. The primary function of these visual representations of marriage was the illustration of the text, in both canon law manuscripts and medieval literature. Therefore, they are, besides the textual transmission, valuable sources and crucial interpretive keys for understanding the legal and socio-cultural dimensions that shaped the institution of marriage in medieval Europe. Full article

This study focuses on the material characterisation of a collection of 19th-century watercolour replicas that reproduce ancient Egyptian mural paintings and illuminated decorations from medieval manuscripts. Non-contact analyses, including macro-X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and fibre-optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), were employed to examine the composition of the painting materials, particularly the pigments. The findings are contextualised through archival research into 19th-century technical sources on historical painting and illuminating practices, as well as contemporaneous pigment catalogues that reported commercial prices. Ultimately, this research aimed to explore whether 19th-century artists engaged with historical material practices beyond mere visual representation in their depictions of historical subjects. The results obtained from the replicas of medieval illuminations are groundbreaking, as they challenge prevailing scholarly assumptions. Notably, the use of pigments such as minium and ultramarine blue, which were held in high regard during the Middle Ages, along with the use of chalk in the preparation of the support, suggest that, in an industrialised world where engagement with material culture was increasingly driven by commercial profit, some academic circles still sought to explore and preserve selected historical material practices in the art of painting. Full article

This article documents the discovery of ‘bismuth white’ on three late eighteenth-century portrait miniatures in the Victoria and Albert Museum collections, painted by renowned English artist George Engleheart. Metallic bismuth and bismuth-containing minerals have been known for centuries and were used on various types of artistic production, from German Wismutmalerei to medieval manuscripts and Renaissance paintings. However, until now they had never been documented on portrait miniatures, despite documentary evidence that suggests their use. The Raman analysis of the three miniatures shows that bismuth oxychloride (BiOCl, corresponding to the mineral bismoclite) is present, and XRF data prove that this material was used as a white pigment in its own right. This work is a pilot study: it represents the first step in the rediscovery of bismuth white as an artist’s pigment, and hopes to provide encouragement to other institutions to look deeper in their collections and map out the use of a relatively rare white material which until now had not been detected or documented in fine art objects. Full article

Medieval colors used in illuminated manuscripts from the 12th to 15th centuries can be at risk. Knowing the binding media used, the medieval tempera, is fundamental to developing new and greener methodologies to increase sustainability in Cultural Heritage. A closer look at the tempera used in medieval illuminated manuscripts kept in Portuguese collections, namely, the Ajuda Songbook (13th c.), the winter breviary (14th to 15th c.), the books of hours (15th c.), and a Renaissance Charter (1512), shows that most of the paints analyzed used a tempera similar to gum mesquite. Infrared spectra were the basis for the differentiation between the gums used in medieval times originating from Prosopis spp. and Senegalia spp., gum mesquite and gum arabic, respectively. The ethnobotanical uses of gum mesquite further engage the reader. This micro review represents a significant step forward in Heritage Conservation, offering new perspectives for innovative and greener treatments. Our research, focusing on the differentiation of gums used in medieval times and the identification of the binding media, has the potential to revolutionize our understanding and the preservation of illuminated manuscripts in Cultural Heritage. Full article