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 r...
Even today, the automatic digitisation of scanned documents in general, but especially the automatic optical music recognition (OMR) of historical manuscripts, still remains an enormous challenge, since both handwritten musical symbols and text have...
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,...
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 He...
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 c...
This pioneering work studied the medieval color palette of four manuscripts produced in the scriptorium of Alfonso X, king of the Crown of Castile (r. 1252-84), including the Songs of Holy Mary (Cantigas de Santa Maria, in Rich Codex and Musicians&rs...
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 th...
Paleography is the study of ancient and medieval handwriting. It is essential for understanding, authenticating, and dating historical texts. Across many archives and libraries, many handwritten manuscripts are yet to be classified. Human experts can...
This article examines the living images of the Virgin through the illustration of one of the most important collections of miracles of the 13th century, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame by Gautier de Coinci. In this case, I will focus my attention on manu...
Although the academic study of hagiography continues to flourish, the role of comparative methods within the study of sanctity and the saints remains underutilized. Similarly, while much valuable work on saints and sanctity relies on materialist meth...
Crucifixion scenes in late medieval Ireland, as was typical elsewhere in Europe at the time, largely present a pitiful image of a wounded and tortured Christ. This paper examines the iconography of these scenes across various media including manuscri...
There is an increasing interest in the automatic digitization of medieval music documents. Despite efforts in this field, the detection of the different layers of information on these documents still poses difficulties. The use of Deep Neural Network...
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 li...
The final 15 folios of the Nepalese illuminated palm-leaf manuscript of the Sanskrit Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra of c. 1100 have more paintings per page, larger picture planes, and different types of scenes than are found on the leaves surviving from the first...
Visión deleytable is a fictional tale based in the Aristotelian philosophical and Neoplatonic mystical beliefs of the Judeo-Arabic tradition of medieval Iberia. This fifteenth-century work of imaginative fiction, a “best-seller” am...
This article studies the role of the earliest books printed in the Dutch vernacular in the religious practice of lay individuals and the devout home. Many of the texts disseminated in these early printed books have received little attention and schol...
The introduction of regular religious life in the Nordic region is less well-documented than in the neighbouring kingdoms of northern Europe. In the absence of well-preserved manuscript and material remains, unfounded and sometimes distorting supposi...
This research explores the figurative culture that flourished in Sicily during the 12th and 13th centuries, focusing on the interplay between artifacts of different types, materials, techniques and uses. Paintings, sculptures and objects that share a...
The monastery of Holy Savior has been the subject of much scholarship, but the liturgical reform requested by King Roger II of Sicily and carried out by the first archimandrite, Luke of Rossano, and the latter’s struggle to establish seemly equ...
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...
This paper deals with the effect of exploiting background knowledge for improving an OMR (Optical Music Recognition) deep learning pipeline for transcribing medieval, monophonic, handwritten music from the 12th–14th century, whose usage has bee...
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 p...
Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu (c. 1385–1470) was one of the most prominent surgeons of the early Ottoman period, particularly noted for his systematic and visually documented surgical approaches to breast tissue. His principal work, Cerrahiy...
A systematic investigation of medieval copper green pigments was carried out based on written sources: 21 manuscripts, dating from 50–70 to 1755 AD, were sourced and 77 recipes were selected, translating into 44 experiments. Reconstructions from medi...
Þingeyrar Abbey was founded in 1133 and dissolved in the wake of the Lutheran Reformation (1550), to virtually disappear with time from the face of the earth. Although highly promising archeological excavations are under way, our material points of a...
This article presents an novel approach inspired by the modern exploration of short texts’ patterning to creations prescribed to the outstanding Islamic jurist, theologian, and mystical thinker Abu Hamid Al Ghazali. We treat the task with the g...
This essay explores circular compositions in medieval and early modern art. Delving into the intersection of religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas, the text examines the prevalence of circular depictions in medieval and early modern aestheti...
This article examines the paintings on the five surviving illuminated palm-leaf folios and the interiors of the two wooden covers of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s almost complete Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, or the Aṣṭasāhasrik...
The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” of the Exeter Book reveals a long process of creating intelligibility and order out of a complicated and obscure manuscript context. Understanding t...
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 northe...
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...
This article examines two aspects of the ubiquitous, but oft-overlooked, set of paratexts known as the Euthalian Apparatus. The Euthalian apparatus supplements Acts, the Pauline Epistles, and the Catholic Epistles in a variety of manuscripts, framing...
Scholarship on representations of sonic events in the medieval world has often focused on literary productions, analysing the ways in which texts describe sounds and their effects with words. What has not been thoroughly examined is the relationship...
This paper presents the findings of the first multi-analytical investigation of the Book of Uí Mhaine, one of the largest Gaelic Books surviving from the medieval vernacular period. A combination of protein analysis, point X-ray fluorescence s...
Hebraic written stones represent the primary surviving physical testimony to the Jewish past in Portugal, apart from a Medieval synagogue in the city of Tomar. As it is true for other religious objects, medieval Hebraic epigraphic stones have become...
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 “s...
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 ancie...
The imagery of the vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezek 37. 1–14) still fascinates theologians and historians of religion with its exegetical and liturgical significance. Rarely represented in medieval art, the iconography of this singular topic r...
This manuscript focuses on a quality assessment of DJI’s new sensors: the Zenmuse L1 and P1, which are LiDAR and photographic payload sensors, respectively, for UAVs/UASs. In particular, metric and statistical analyses aim to evaluate the data...
The illuminated manuscripts at the Gulbenkian Museum were produced in the 17th century, in scriptoria of the Armenian diaspora. In this work, we selected analytical methods that can be used in situ to study the colors of the illuminations. Scientific...
In this text, the author analyzes the notion of charisma that appears implicitly in the medieval political theology of Ernst H. Kantorowicz. The text to be analyzed is Synthronos, a manuscript from 1951 on the iconography of the sharing-throne betwee...
The apocryphal account of the birth and childhood of Mary, mother of Jesus (and to a lesser degree Jesus himself) known most commonly as the Protevangelium of James is one of the most influential early Christian texts outside of the New Testament. It...
The article has two primary objectives: it presents an analysis of the representation of animals in selected Italian literary works; and it utilizes that analysis as an example of how to incorporate the visual arts in teaching literature in the under...
Copies of the Foshuo tiandi bayang shenzhou jing 佛説天地八陽神咒經 (Scripture of the Divine Spell of the Eightfold Yang of Heaven and Earth Spoken by the Buddha) (hereafter Bayang jing) recovered...
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-ra...
Holy Week, the most significant period of the Christian liturgical year, was marked by solemn and complex rituals enacted within the sacred spaces of medieval religious communities. In the case of Cistercian female monasteries, scholarly attention ha...
In this article, I analyze the translation commissioned in 1511 by Cardinal Francisco Ximénez Cisneros of the Life of Catherine of Siena by Raimundo da Capua, which includes the legendae of Giovanna (also known as Vanna) da Orvieto and Margher...
The body and blood of Christ are essential to Christian liturgy and passion devotion. In medieval devotional books, this came to the fore in an overtly material way. The skin of the pages, the red ink, the words, and the images constituted more than...
Numerous images embedded in the painted decorations in early modern Central and Eastern European synagogues conveyed allegorical messages to the congregation. The symbolism was derived from biblical verses, stories, legends, and prayers, and sometime...
The 6th century Codex Sinopensis or Sinope Gospels (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France) is one of the most precious purple codices that survive from the Late Antique period. Together with the Vienna Genesis (Wien, Österreichische Nat...
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