ARTH 4195 - Seminar in Medieval Books and Production Practices

The course will assess conceptual, technological, and practical developments of medieval book production form CE ca. 400 to ca. 1500. Students will gain practical experience with the "archeology of the book," a method to expose the technical processes of the hand-produced parchment codex. Scholarship on monastic scriptoria and secular workshop practices will guide discussions on the diverse visualization strategies applied to a broad range of religious and secular literary genres. Each student will develop a semester-long research project with one of the modern facsimiles of a medieval illuminated manuscript to investigate a major theme such as patronage, word-image relationships, reading experience, or transmission of ideas.