"Ik heb altijd gedacht dat het Paradijs een soort bibliotheek zou zijn" - Jorge Luis Borges

Books before print

Donderdag, 25 april, 2019

Geschreven door: Erik Kwakkel
Artikel door: Wouter van Dijk

An introduction to medieval book culture

[Recensie] Manuscript expert and book historian Erik Kwakkel has written Books before print as a handbook for students in their lectures on medieval books. For some years now, in various academic History courses at home and abroad specializing in book history is possible. As a lecturer at several of these programs, Kwakkel lacked a concise manual that could serve as an introduction to this branch of historical science. That is why he decided to write such a publication himself. After all, that is what the books were part of. When studying a medieval manuscript you have to deal with many difficulties, the script type itself is already a challenge to decipher, but it can also tell you a lot about the period in which the text to be researched was written. Furthermore, frequent use was made of abbreviations, which you also have to solve if you want to understand the text.Paleography is therefore an indispensable element in the study of medieval books.

. In the Netherlands you can still see them in street nowadays, at traffic lights for cyclists. It is interesting that although the form of certain ways of book use has changed over the centuries, the essence has often remained the same, for example in the case of maniculae, although nowadays we use arrows instead of tiny hands.

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