Illuminated Manuscript Quotes

Shame is Prides cloke.

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.

I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?

You-you’re a fucking illuminated gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried. I’m…I’m synaptic, while, while you’re synoptic…

A restaurant overlooking a starlit night sprang to my imagination like something out of an illuminated manuscript from the late Middle Ages.

To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.

There are no coincidences", Silette wrote. "Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs. To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.

You want gruesome? She also supposedly ripped out the Lord Ruler’s insides. I’ve seen it depicted in several illuminated manuscripts.” “Kind of graphic for a religious-type story.” “Actually, they’re all like that. I think they have to put in lots of exciting bits to make people read the rest.

It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. On holidays, we would visit museums and libraries where the same point was made. As a young child, I looked at the glowing gold of the illuminated manuscripts and believed in a more metaphorical illumination in ages of intellectual darkness. And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge. But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was leveled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off, and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

King Alfonso liked to claim, in a paraphrase of Plato, that “kings ought to be learned men themselves, or at least lovers of learned men.”16 His nickname, Il Magnanimo, owed much to his generous literary patronage. His personal emblem was an open book, while his punning motto was Liber sum (which meant both “I am free” and “I am a book”).

A rural Venus, Selah rises from the gold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweeps petals of water from her skin. At once, clouds begin to sob for such beauty. Clothing drops like leaves. "No one makes poetry,my Mme. Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,” I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it with our souls.” Desire illuminates the dark manuscript of our skin with beetles and butterflies. After the lightning and rain has ceased, after the lightning and rain of lovemaking has ceased, Selah will dive again into the sunflower-open river.

> The key to all mysteries and the source of all Illumination lies deep within the self. ROSICRUCIAN MANUSCRIPT

You spend years illuminating manuscripts,” said Baptiste, working off one boot, “and singing hymns, and tending the monastery gardens, but all anyone wants to talk about is the one time you fucked a werewolf.

It is, however, very important never to lose sight of the fact that the miniatures in illuminated books were not conceived as individual and independent paintings. They are book illustrations and are thus always intimately connected with a text.

Do you like books, Lady Murray?' Lavinia asked. 'Just to read,' Violet said. 'A mistake. A very big mistake. A poorly bound book disintegrates. Where would our learning be then? We need something permanent, solid. We need to treat words with the respect they are due. Treasure them. Adorn the books that contain these words with leather bindings, illuminate their words with gold. We shouldn't treat learning lightly.' 'But I would treat a word scrawled on a scrap of paper with the same respect as one written on an illuminated manuscript.

For a Latin work from ancient Rome to survive the next few centuries and beyond, it therefore needed to be transferred to parchment. But this conversion from roll to codex was reliant on the early Christians—the people who made the codices—deeming the writings of their pagan predecessors worthy of preservation and study.

One of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages--losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many manuscripts mysteriously entitled "Book of Hours", since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their title-pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons--ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only assume that these books were some ancient device for marking the passage of time and they associated themselves in my mind with sundials in old country yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head.

Copies of Ficino’s translations were owned by Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Racine in France, by Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands, and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in Germany.56 The Ripoli Press’s 1484 edition is recorded at Harvard in 1735, at Yale in 1742, and even, by 1623, in China.57 More than 120 copies have survived into the twenty-first century: thirty-six in Italy, the remainder scattered from Malta, Slovakia, and Sweden to libraries in California, Kansas, Oregon, and the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.

At school, my religious-education teacher expressly forbade us to write "Xmas." It was regarded as a foul blasphemy. How would I like it if people used an anonymous X in place of my name? However, it would seem that the word "Xmas" is not blasphemous after all. In the original Greek, "Christ" was written "Xristos," but the X isn't the Roman "ecks"; The Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories explains that it is the Greek letter "chi" (pronounced with a k to rhyme with "eye"--k'eye). The x is simply a stand-in for "the first letter of Greek Khristos--Christ." Indeed, the Chi-Rho (CH-r--the first two syllables of "Christ") illumination can be seen in the ancient Irish manuscript of the Gospels, The Book of Kells, which is housed at Trinity College in Dublin. This work dates back to the ninth century. Of course, strictly speaking, Xmas" should still be pronounced "Christmas" because it's an abbreviation, not an alternative word.

Copulating Cats and Holy Men The Story of the Creation of the Book of Kells   In the year 791 A.D an Irish monk named Connachtach brought together a team of the finest calligraphers the world has ever seen, on the island of Iona, a sliver of limestone rock off the northwest coast of Scotland. They came from Northumbria in England, from Constantinople, from Italy and from Ireland. All of them had worked on other illuminated manuscripts. But Connachtach, eminent scribe and abbot of Iona, as he is described in contemporary annals, wanted from them the most richly ornamented book ever created by man’s hand. It was to be more beautiful than the great book of Lindisfarne: more beautiful than the gospel-books made at the court of Charlemagne: more beautiful than all the Korans of Persia. It would be known as the Book of Kells. Eighth century Europe was in a state of cultural meltdown. Since the end of the Pax Romana, three centuries earlier, warring tribes had decimated the continent. From the East the Ostrogoths had blundered into the spears of the Germanic tribes to be overrun, in their turn, by the Huns. Their western cousins, the Visigoths, plundered along a confident north- east, southwest axis from Spain to Cologne. The Vandals did what vandals do. As though that wasn't enough, a blunt-faced raggle-taggle band of pirates and pyromaniacs came looting and raping their way out of the freezing seas of the North. For a Viking there was no tomorrow, culture something you stuffed into a hemp sack; happiness, a warm sword. Wherever they went they extorted protection money: the Danegeld. Fighting drunk on a mixture of animist religion and aquavit they threatened to plunge the house of Europe into total darkness. The Book of Kells was to be a rainbow-bridge of light thrown across the abyss of the Dark Ages. Its colors were to burn until the end of time.   #

Book-writing is the province of specialists, living is the business of us all. Moral life, sentimental life, religious life, whatever is above the terre à terre of mere existing, also consists of illuminations which once departed return no more. A diary, a few old letters, a few sheets containing thoughts or meditations, may keep up the connection between us today and our better selves of the past. I was deeply impressed as a youth by the advice of a spiritual writer to read one's own spiritual notes preferably to even famous works. All saints seem to have done so. The moment we realize that any thought, ours or borrowed, is pregnant enough not to be wasted, or original enough not to be likely to come back again, we must fix it on paper. Our manuscripts should mirror our reading, our meditations, our ideals, and our approach to it in our lives. Anybody who has early taken the habit to record himself in that way knows that the loss of his papers would also mean a loss to his thinking possibilities.

he was no mountaineer when he decided to climb the Hindu Kush. A few days scrambling on the rocks in Wales, enchantingly chronicled here, were his sole preparation. It was not mountaineering that attracted him; the Alps abound in opportunities for every exertion of that kind. It was the longing, romantic, reasonless, which lies deep in the hearts of most Englishmen, to shun the celebrated spectacles of the tourist and without any concern with science or politics or commerce, simply to set their feet where few civilized feet have trod. An American critic who read the manuscript of this book condemned it as ‘too English’. It is intensely English, despite the fact that most of its action takes place in wildly foreign places and that it is written in an idiomatic, uncalculated manner the very antithesis of ‘Mandarin’ stylishness. It rejoices the heart of fellow Englishmen, and should at least illuminate those who have any curiosity about the odd character of our Kingdom. It exemplifies the essential traditional (some, not I, will say deplorable) amateurism of the English. For more than two hundred years now Englishmen have been wandering about the world for their amusement, suspect everywhere as government agents, to the great embarrassment of our officials. The Scotch endured great hardships in the cause of commerce; the French in the cause of either power or evangelism. The English only have half (and wholly) killed themselves in order to get away from England. Mr Newby is the latest, but, I pray, not the last, of a whimsical tradition. And in his writing he has all the marks of his not entirely absurd antecedents. The understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited; finally in his formal self-effacement in the presence of the specialist (with the essential reserve of unexpressed self-respect) which concludes, almost too abruptly, this beguiling narrative – in all these qualities Mr Newby has delighted the heart of a man whose travelling days are done and who sees, all too often, his countrymen represented abroad by other, new and (dammit) lower types. Dear reader, if you have any softness left for the idiosyncrasies of our rough island race, fall to and enjoy this characteristic artifact. EVELYN

Locke had traveled to France and Versailles. He had seen Louis XIV’s petite levée and watched the elaborate rituals of absolute kingship, of total rule by one man. Locke’s one goal in life was to make sure the same thing never happened in England. But whereas others tried to fight for freedom with guns or plots or revolutions, Locke would fight for it with ideas. His weapon at hand was the manuscript under his arm. “Absolute monarchy,” it read in part, “is inconsistent with Civil Society, and so can be no form of Civil Government at all.” His book revealed why governments must serve the interests of everyone, rather than one person; and why one-man rule was the perversion, not the perfection, of nature—particularly the nature so brilliantly illuminated by his friend Isaac Newton.

In the appendix to Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, there is a dialogue between the editors of the book and the author: “Why do you believe these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?” Ehrman’s response is illuminating: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

Around the time Vespasiano reached his fortieth birthday in 1462, a humanist in Milan wrote that the most beautifully made books came from Florence. “There is one Vespasiano there,” he wrote, “an excellent bookseller, with expert knowledge of both books and scribes, to whom all of Italy and foreigners as well resort when they want to find elegant books for sale.”1 According to one of his scribes, Vespasiano was princeps omnium librariorum florentinorum (prince of Florentine booksellers). One client simply declared him rei de li librari del mondo—king of the world’s booksellers.

Zanobi di Mariano.

Twenty years after he returned from exile, Cosimo de’ Medici still ruled over Florence, as Vespasiano put it, “discreetly, with the utmost caution.” His two sons, Piero and Giovanni, had been carefully groomed to take over from him. Piero, the eldest, born in 1416, was destined for politics whereas Giovanni, five years younger, was tipped to run the family bank. Cosimo made sure that both received excellent educations aimed at turning them into wise and

Tomorrow, after the vote, we shall make the proclamation.”4 Bessarion would have made a fitting successor to Nicholas, no doubt using the papacy to promote his ambitions to unify Christendom, liberate Constantinople, and further humanistic studies. However, a last-minute challenge arose to his candidacy. He was vehemently opposed by a French cardinal who indignantly exclaimed: “So we’ll give the Latin Church to a Greek pope, will we? … Bessarion hasn’t even shaved his beard, and he’s going to be our head?”5 If the French cardinal’s words are to be believed, Bessarion’s long beard cost him the throne of Saint Peter. Instead of Bessarion, the cardinals elected a seventy-seven-year-old Spaniard, Alfonso de Borja, who was installed as Pope Calixtus III.

The man who rescued the crusade, Giannozzo Manetti, then fifty-nine years old, was the close friend and mentor of Vespasiano.

The man who rescued the crusade, Giannozzo Manetti, then fifty-nine years old, was the close friend and mentor of Vespasiano. For many years he had been at the heart of Florence’s humanist movement, one of the men who gathered in Vespasiano’s bookshop, “admirably disputing great things.” The son of one of Florence’s wealthiest merchants, he had studied alongside Tommaso Parentucelli, whose secretary he later became and for whom, when Tommaso became pope, he made translations from both Greek and Hebrew. He was a dedicated scholar, sleeping no more than five hours a night in order to devote more time to his studies. Like his friends Poggio and Leonardo Bruni, he was also a busy civic official, serving Florence numerous times as an ambassador to Venice, Genoa, Milan, Naples, and Rome. He took up the thankless post of governor of various Florentine dependencies such as Pistoia and Scarperia, where, as Vespasiano observed, he “found everything in great disorder and full of deadly feuds.”16 Manetti’s greatest claim to fame was his treatise On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, which he completed in 1452 and dedicated to King Alfonso of Naples. The tribute was a rare diplomatic misstep on Manetti’s part, because Alfonso was at war with Florence at the time, leading to mutterings in Florence of Manetti’s treason. Vespasiano prudently waited until 1455 and the Treaty of Lodi before producing a copy of the manuscript. As with the “Decades of the King,” the manuscript was elegantly and expertly produced, featuring the “new antique letters” and white vine-stem decorations in which Vespasiano had come to specialize. Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459): scholar, businessman, diplomat, writer.

Manetti was influenced by his readings of the ancients, generously citing in his defense authors such as Cicero as well as Aristotle. But he was clearly inspired, too, by his home city of Florence. God had created the world in six days, but since then humanity was responsible for discovering and adorning it. He used the frescoes of Giotto (“the best painter of his time”), the cupola of Brunelleschi (“the greatest architect of our age”), and the cast-bronze baptistery doors of Lorenzo Ghiberti (“the preeminent sculptor of our day”) as evidence not only of pleasurable sights but of the divinity of the human mind—the excellence to which humanity, at its best, could rise. He concluded with a resounding endorsement of humanity as having “a nature and a destiny of dignity and excellence.” Life on earth was to be celebrated and enjoyed, not disdained and grimly endured in hopes of its sole bonus, relief and respite in the afterlife.

All evil is born from ignorance,” as Vespasiano wrote. “Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.” This darkness he and his friends hoped to dispel by casting onto their fractured and unhappy times the pure radiance of the past, one scribe and one manuscript at a time.

1249 A.D. The Keeper pulled the illuminated manuscript from its hiding place and spread it on the stone hearth. The golden border caught the fire's light, and its reflection looked like an eye flashing open. At once the illusion vanished, but something else caught the Keeper's attention, and the shock of it took his breath away. Within the enlarged first letter, the miniature of the goddess unlocking the jaws of hell had changed; her beauty was gone, replaced by the cruel gaze of a Follower. Was this another change the Scroll had wrought upon itself, or had someone tampered with its magic again? The Keeper dipped his paintbrush in brown pigment and began drawing a tree on the parchment, curving its limbs over and around the calligraphy until the words were hidden in a maze of twisting branches. For centuries he had devoted himself to uncovering this forbidden knowledge, and now he had assumed the duty of protecting it. He wished he could follow the Path, but the Prophecy was clear; only the child of a fallen goddess and an evil spirit could follow the steps without fear of the Scroll's curse. Many had died trying to use its magic, but that wasn't the reason the Keeper now kept it hidden, denying its existence. A dangerous transformation had taken place. The Scroll had somehow come to life, as if the words written on the parchment had infused it with an instinct for survival. He could feel it now, alert and suspicious beneath his fingers. When it was no longer watching him, he dropped his brush, grabbed a reed pin, dipped it into the glutinous black ink, and wrote one final instruction on the last page. His deception awakened whatever lived within the manuscript. Intense light shot through him with deadly force, binding his existence to that of the Secret Scroll for all time.

Today I bring you victory over the Turk,” the discoverer, Giovanni da Castro, announced to Pope Pius II.2 Mines quickly went into production, and alum was declared a papal monopoly (overseen by a three-man committee featuring the ubiquitous Cardinal Bessarion) whose profits were dedicated to a crusade.

Pope Paul II died in the Vatican at the age of fifty-four in the summer of 1471,

Giovanni da Castro,

Federico da Montefeltro enjoyed a tremendous reception in Florence in the summer of 1472 following his brutal conquest of Volterra.

The ciarlatani likewise plied their trade in the streets—men who removed teeth and sold miraculous remedies (and who gave us the word “charlatan”).

The billows and swells of the Platonic revival generated in Florence soon became a deluge that washed across the European intellectual landscape. Plato would so dominate the Western philosophical tradition for the next half-millennium that in 1927 the British philosopher A. N. Whitehead could famously declare in a lecture in Edinburgh: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Plato advanced into domains far vaster and more exotic than merely the pipe-smoke-garlanded realms of university philosophy departments. His ideas shaped countless cultural and intellectual trends: ideas of love, of magic and the occult, of art and imitation, of creativity through the divine frenzy of the “mad poet.” His theories on the structure of the cosmos influenced such pioneers of the Scientific Revolution as Johannes Kepler (who used the Platonic solids described in the Timaeus to determine the number of the planets and their distances from the Sun) and Galileo (who credited Plato with the theory of the common origin of the planets). His theories of the soul have been said to prefigure Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the psyche, while Friedrich Nietzsche argued in The Birth of Tragedy that Plato’s dialogues inspired the novel. Few things in heaven and earth were not dreamt of in Plato’s philosophy.

Ficino’s translations were the means by which for many centuries readers across Europe gained access to Plato. His complete Latin translation was republished twenty-four times over the following century.

Chasing Away the Darkness

The other is Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino’s friend and fellow Plato enthusiast: a tall, green-eyed intellectual virtuoso who can read, among other languages, Aramaic and Chaldean, and who can recite the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy both forward and backward. The awestruck Ficino regards him as a member of “a superhuman race.”5 “They wanted to see everything in our library,” Brother Gregorio later notes of his distinguished visitors.

All too often these walls proved minor impediments. Court records in Tuscany describe how men secretly entered convents to satisfy what one document called their “libidinous desires.” Included among them was a man who in 1419 managed to live for five months in a Dominican convent in Pisa, and a priest who, two years later, entered a convent of Poor Clares thirty miles west of Florence “and stayed many days, knowing carnally day and night one of the recluses who wore the nun’s habit.”17 The most notorious convent in Florentine territories was undoubtedly Santa Margherita in Prato, scene in the 1450s of the love affair between an Augustinian novice and a Carmelite friar: Sister Lucrezia Buti and the amorous painter Fra Filippo Lippi (the painter Filippino Lippi would be the result of the liaison).

These men were manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, notaries, priests, and booksellers—bookworms who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and tried to imagine and to forge a different world: one of patriotic service, of friendship and loyalty, of refined pleasures, of wisdom and right conduct, of justice, heroism, and political freedom; a world in which a life in a better society could be lived in the fullest and most satisfying way possible.

Sprezzatura is a style of elegant nonchalance.

it happens, Bussi’s claim of a printed book costing a fifth of the price of a manuscript held true in the case of The City of God.

The map of Florence, a bird’s-eye view from the north, shows the city embraced by a diamond-shaped circuit of walls and split in half by the River Arno, spanned by its four bridges. Many of Florence’s churches and various other monuments are shown inside the walls, all identified by inscriptions helpfully added by a scribe in reddish ink. The artist, Piero del Massaio, even included the copper ball that in 1471 Andrea del Verrocchio added to the lantern at the top of Brunelleschi’s dome. The map also shows, on the south side of the Arno, between the Ponte Rubaconte and the Ponte Vecchio, a handsome private home. The reddish ink clearly identifies the occupant: Domus Vespasiani—the house, that is, of Vespasiano. The inclusion of Vespasiano’s home in Via de’ Bardi indicates his friendship with Duke Alfonso, who must have appreciated this little in-joke, and who may have been a visitor to Vespasiano’s house during his stay in Florence. It also gives proof of Vespasiano’s eminence: his house, like that of Niccolò Niccoli many years earlier, had become one of the sights of Florence.

This convent, San Jacopo di Ripoli, was home to a community of forty-seven Dominican nuns.1 It stood on the western outskirts of Florence, in Via della Scala, close to the Porta al Prato and a ten-minute walk from the great Dominican basilica of Santa Maria Novella.

Here the nuns were safely sequestered in a sprawling complex completely surrounded by walls. Theirs quickly became the most populous convent in Florence, housing more than a hundred sisters by 1300 and boasting a giant wooden crucifix painted by the great Cimabue and a series of frescoes showing scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary.

But he didn’t share them, not before he said to Athalar, “Luna’s Horn was a weapon wielded by Pelias, the first Starborn Prince, during the First Wars. The Fae forged it in their home world, named it for the goddess in their new one, and used it to battle the demon hordes once they made the Crossing. Pelias wielded the Horn until he died.” Ruhn put a hand on his chest. “My ancestor—whose power flows in my veins. I don’t know how it worked, how Pelias used it with his magic, but the Horn became enough of a nuisance for the demon princes that they did everything they could to retrieve it from him.” Ruhn held out his phone, the picture of the illuminated manuscript glaringly bright in the thick shadows. The illustration of the carved horn lifted to the lips of a helmeted Fae male was as pristine as it had been when inked millennia ago. Above the figure gleamed an eight-pointed star, the emblem of the Starborn. Bryce went wholly still. The stillness of the Fae, like a stag halting in a wood.

He’d spent months tracking down the book, so tiny it would fit in a doll’s hands, but so precious it had cost him an indecent amount of money. A miniature illuminated manuscript, crafted by the skilled hands of the smallest of the lesser Fae—one of the first printed books in existence. It hadn’t been meant for reading—but he’d figured that someone who adored books as much as Nesta would savor this piece of history. Even if she resented all things Fae. He’d regretted throwing it into the river the moment it had vanished under the ice, but … he’d been foolish that night.

In a way he could not quite describe (he was a bad talker, framing his ideas with difficulty) he was attached to his books, not only for what was in them, but as entities. He had written once in a manuscript book in which he sometimes wrote things, "I like the feel of them and I know the feel of them in the same way as one likes and knows the feel of a friend's hand. And I can look at them and read them without opening them in the same way as, without his speaking, one looks at and can enjoy the face of a friend. I feel towards them when I look at them in the shelves,—well, as if they were feeling towards me just as I am feeling towards them." And he had added this touch, which is perhaps more illuminating. "The other day some one had had out one of my books and returned it upside down. I swear it was as grotesque and painful to me to see it upside down as if I had come into the room and found my brother standing on his head against the wall, fastened there. At least I couldn't have sprung to him to release him quicker than I did to the book to upright it.

Since washing the body happened so seldom, it ceased to be a subject for painters. In place of the medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts that pictured warmly sensuous bathhouse scenes came painterly odes to linen.

A historian has recently argued that by the 1460s Vespasiano’s bookshop was “a political nexus … and even a listening post for the subversive, the disaffected, or the potentially so.”31 A few years earlier his bookshop was said to have “Aragonese doors” whose threshold Angevin supporters dared not darken (though in fact many Angevin supporters, such as Piero de’ Pazzi, freely came and went). By 1466 there was a danger that the bookshop could have been perceived as a site of anti-Medici activity.

Vespasiano was, as Ferrante told Piero de’ Medici, someone on whom the king relied for “information and experience.” Though Ferrante may not have initiated these reports, he certainly welcomed and encouraged them once they started arriving. In November 1467 he wrote Vespasiano to thank him for a letter sent ten days earlier, saying he was gratified to receive his news and urging Vespasiano to be diligent in reporting “the things happening there.”33 In another letter written a few weeks later, Ferrante thanked Vespasiano for supplying “a great deal of diverse news,” then wrote of making a great effort against “those who have disturbed the peace of Italy”—a reference to the Venetians and the ruler of Ferrara, Borso d’Este, who supported the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples, and who was, like so many other involved parties, Ferrante included, one of Vespasiano’s customers.

Where the rattle of ducats failed to produce a result, Cincinello deployed other, more drastic means. When he was ambassador to Rome he arranged for the kidnapping of one of Ferrante’s enemies who was slipping in and out of the kingdom on some nefarious business. Determined to “get his hands on him,” Cincinello lured his victim beyond the gates of Rome, where he had him seized and gagged by a band of horsemen, then bundled to Naples and hauled before Ferrante. The king enjoyed taking his vengeance through such baleful whimsies as strangling his enemies and then embalming them for display in a museum of mummies in the Castelnuovo. This latest enemy did not, apparently, become the latest exhibit, because as Vespasiano, in a statement that strains the bounds of credulity, claimed, Ferrante was “a most clement man who had no wish to do violence,” and the offender was released with a caution. Vespasiano did admit that Cincinello’s actions, here and elsewhere, raised certain uncomfortable moral questions. “Now in this case,” he wrote of the kidnapping, “whether I agree or not, I pass no judgment, knowing Antonio to be a man of good conscience.

The slaughter of so many people in the streets of Mainz in October 1462, followed by the exile of eight hundred more, is often seen as the catalyst for the spread of printing beyond the Rhine Valley—for an exodus of printers, the workshop assistants of both Gutenberg and Fust, who made their separate ways across Germany, into France and, ultimately, over the Alps to seek their fortunes in the lucrative Italian market. As a Carthusian monk in Cologne wrote, “printers of books multiplied across the land.”7 Gutenberg, Fust,

Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini): a humanist on the throne of Saint Peter.

Cosimo heard was the Philebus, in which Socrates, arguing against the hedonistic Philebus, declared that “wisdom and thought and memory and their kindred, right opinion and true reasonings, are better and more excellent than pleasure.”22 At which point, as Ficino wrote, Cosimo “was recalled from this shadow of life and approached the heavenly light.”23 At Cosimo’s bedside as he passed from the shadow of life was his grandson, the son of Piero, a fifteen-year-old boy named Lorenzo.

They quickly selected the nobleman known as the “Cardinal of Venice”: Pietro Barbo, the forty-seven-year-old nephew of Pope Eugenius IV.

Since his father’s death in 1464, Piero de’ Medici had done his best to maintain his family’s preeminent position in Florence. According to a chronicler, Piero enjoyed “great authority, many friends, wealth, and a power similar to his father’s.”24 By 1466, however, Piero, at fifty years old, was increasingly disabled by gout. As a result, government meetings and ambassadorial receptions were held not in the Palazzo della Signoria but in the Palazzo Medici, which increasingly served as the seat of government. Moreover, Piero lacked his father’s shrewdness and experience, and his power and grandeur soon provoked indignation among the citizens. His father had faced similar crises due to rivals and malcontents, most recently in 1458. On that occasion, the Medici maintained their power thanks to Cosimo’s longtime ally, the duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, who sent troops to quell an insurrection. As mercenary troops poured into the city, Cosimo took the opportunity to arrest 150 opponents, torture a few others, and strengthen his grip on power. However, the death of Sforza in March 1466 robbed Piero, so soon after losing his father, of this reliable supplier of military might.

The differences between Christianity and Islam might fade with the final blast of heavenly trumpets, but those between Plato and Aristotle were, for George, forever entrenched.

Federico da Montefeltro was the hereditary ruler of Urbino, a city-state of seven thousand inhabitants a zigzagging 125-mile journey from Florence through the hills and valleys of the Apennines. Federico was almost exactly the same age as Vespasiano. Born in 1422, the illegitimate son of Guidantonio da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, he was at first welcomed by his father since the count’s twenty-five-year marriage had failed to produce a legitimate heir. However, he found himself shunted aside when Guidantonio’s first wife died and his second marriage resulted, in 1427, in a legitimate son, Oddantonio. Federico was educated in Venice and then Mantua, and as an adolescent he distinguished himself with a series of narcissistic poems celebrating his amorous achievements. Federico’s true destiny, however, involved conquests of a different sort. At the age of fifteen he entered the service of the warlord Niccolò Piccinino, commanding a cavalry of eight hundred horses and proving himself a brilliant warrior through such feats as capturing a hitherto impregnable fortress from the ferocious Sigismondo Malatesta.

Once you had your man, you let all your accomplishments go. You don’t sew or sing any more, you haven’t illuminated a manuscript in years—and

Priceless works of art, Arab mosaics, Greek and Russian icons, Western oil paintings, and other valuable articles, had been collected by curators as time passed and placed in the monastery. Only the Roman Vatican had a larger collection of illuminated manuscripts: 3,500 volumes written in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Slavic, Syriac, Georgian, etc.

One of the first people to take an interest in Vespasiano, to draw him into this charmed circle of wise and valorous men, was a cardinal named Giuliano Cesarini. Vespasiano would have been about sixteen when the two of them met in Michele Guarducci’s bookshop.

then gone to Rome to find employment in the Curia. Here he worked, unhappily and for little pay, dreaming of a life “free from the bustle of civilization,” with plenty of leisure for writing books and, even more, for collecting them.14 Another regular visitor to the shop in those early days was Poggio’s friend Niccolò Niccoli who, like Cardinal Cesarini, was always eager to help young students of modest means. Vespasiano met him as early as 1433 or 1434, when Niccoli was in his late sixties, a fat, handsome, fastidious man who dressed in a long plum-colored robe.

Nothing.” I hastily drew the manuscript toward me, my skin prickling when it made contact with the leather. Sean’s fingers were still holding the call slip, and now it slid easily out of the binding’s grasp. I hoisted the volumes into my arms and tucked them under my chin, assailed by a whiff of the uncanny that drove away the library’s familiar smell of pencil shavings and floor wax. “Diana? Are you okay?” Sean asked with a concerned frown. “Fine. Just a bit tired,” I replied, lowering the books away from my nose. I walked quickly through the original, fifteenth-century part of the library, past the rows of Elizabethan reading desks with their three ascending bookshelves and scarred writing surfaces. Between them, Gothic windows directed the reader’s attention up to the coffered ceilings, where bright paint and gilding picked out the details of the university’s crest of three crowns and open book and where its motto, “God is my illumination,” was proclaimed repeatedly from on high.

Records show that witches and wizards in Europe were using flying broomsticks as early as A.D. 962. A German illuminated manuscript of this period shows three warlocks dismounting from their brooms with looks of exquisite discomfort on their faces. Guthrie Lochrin, a Scottish wizard writing in 1107, spoke of the “splinterfilled buttocks and bulging piles” he suffered after a short broom ride from Montrose to Arbroath.

including the partial copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.

All of these works Poggio copied and sent to Bruni and Niccoli in Florence. The city was becoming renowned more than anywhere else in Europe as a place where ancient manuscripts were collected, where the classics were studied, preserved, and esteemed. Thus, by the time Vespasiano was born in 1422, all of this ancient knowledge, after its migrations around Europe, after flowing back and forth across the Channel and the Alps, after finding refuge in monasteries where new codices were produced, and after centuries of eclipse and neglect, of disintegration and loss, was finally coming to Florence. “How much the men of letters of our age owe these men,” Vespasiano later wrote of Poggio and his friends, “who shone such a light.

All of these works Poggio copied and sent to Bruni and Niccoli in Florence. The city was becoming renowned more than anywhere else in Europe as a place where ancient manuscripts were collected, where the classics were studied, preserved, and esteemed. Thus, by the time Vespasiano was born in 1422, all of this ancient knowledge, after its migrations around Europe, after flowing back and forth across the Channel and the Alps, after finding refuge in monasteries where new codices were produced, and after centuries of eclipse and neglect, of disintegration and loss, was finally coming to Florence. “How much the men of letters of our age owe these men,” Vespasiano later wrote of Poggio and his friends, “who shone such a light.”19 When he went to work in Michele Guarducci’s bookshop it was therefore possible, thanks to men like Niccoli and Poggio, to dream of the rebirth of the ancient world,

Bookmaking was a trade in which, like wool and banking, the Florentines excelled.

In Florence, more than anywhere else, large numbers of people could read and write, as many as seven in every ten adults. The literacy levels of other European cities, by contrast, languished at less than 25 percent. 1

The Street of Booksellers, Via dei Librai, ran through the heart of Florence, midway between the town hall to the south and the cathedral to the north.

the Street of Booksellers was home to eight cartolai. They took their name from the fact that they sold paper (carta) of various sizes and qualities, which they procured from nearby papermills. They also stocked parchment,

cartolai offered far more extensive services than just selling paper and parchment: they produced and sold manuscripts. Customers could buy secondhand volumes from them or hire them to have a manuscript copied by a scribe, bound in leather or board, and, if they wished, illuminated—decorated with illustrations or designs in paint and gold leaf.

Florence was celebrated in those days for its writers, especially for its literary scholars and philosophers (from philosophos, “lover of wisdom”): men who expertly sifted and scrutinized the accumulated wisdom of the ages, especially the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Many of these texts, lost for centuries, had recently been rediscovered by Florentines such as Poggio Bracciolini, who, amid much rejoicing, had recovered long-lost works by Roman writers such as Cicero and Lucretius.

Cesarini had suffered poverty in his student days. He had been forced to copy out his own textbooks because he could not afford to buy them and, when he served as tutor to the sons of a wealthy family, had collected the stubs of candles after their splendid banquets in order to prolong his studies into the evening—for the acquisition of knowledge in those days required not just books but also a good supply of candles to read by.

Vespasiano’s biographies were crucial, therefore, to the formation of one of history’s most famous and endearing (if sometimes misleading) narratives: how the rediscovery of ancient books refreshed and “rebirthed” a disoriented and moribund civilization.

Burckhardt was a Swiss professor of history who had spent the winter of 1847–48 in Rome. While there he read a book published from an old manuscript recently discovered by an Italian cardinal in the Vatican Library and first printed in 1839 as Vitæ CIII Virorum Illustrium, or The Lives of 103 Illustrious Men. The author of this work, according to the volume’s editor, was Vespasiano Fiorentino—“ Vespasiano the Florentine”—about whom, in 1839, almost nothing was known.

work contained biographies of famous men (and one woman) from the fifteenth century: everyone from popes, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops to assorted scholars and writers, including Niccoli and Poggio. What these illustrious figures had in common was that Vespasiano knew them all.

this series of biographies quickly turned his interests and attention from the visual arts to the vibrant intellectual life depicted in Vespasiano’s pages: from paintings and statues to manuscripts and libraries. The journey through the century, with this well-connected, name-dropping bookseller as a guide, proved exhilarating. Vespasiano was, Burckhardt declared, “an authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth century,” 7

Latin and Greek classics that had been lost or ignored for centuries. Vespasiano’s writings helped him trace the intellectual developments and achievements of the fifteenth century, a “revival of antiquity,” as he called it, that “achieved the conquest of the western world.” 8

one of the most compelling and creative theses in the history of modern historiography, virtually creating the “idea of the Renaissance.” 9

Under what circumstances was the wisdom of the ancient world lost? By what means, and from what sources, was it recovered? Why should Christian scholars have wished to recover pagan writings in the first place? And how did Vespasiano, a young man from humble origins with poor prospects and an apparently limited education, become so crucial to this story?

The loss of so many ancient books could be blamed on something more than the apathy of feudal lords and the negligence and greed of unscrupulous monks. It could be blamed, too, on circumstances beyond the inevitable and indiscriminate destruction of floods and fires, or the pernicious appetites of mice, warble flies, and bookworms. All these things played their part, but there was another reason so few texts survived, and that was technology: how books were made.

The Latin verb “to fasten” was pangere, from which, via the Latin pagina, the word “page” descends. Suddenly it was possible to read a document by turning pages of parchment rather than unspooling a roll of papyrus.

Since books were not mass produced, each of these two hundred manuscripts was slightly different from the others, the product of an individual scribe at a particular point in time copying out the product of another individual scribe, and so forth. Manuscripts were often unreliable because of the errors and inaccuracies introduced over the centuries and then compounded as one flawed manuscript begat an even worse version.

Petrarch complained that, so sloppy were the scribes of his day, and so full of errors were the manuscripts they produced, “an author would not recognize his own work.” 7

It was all too easy for errors in transcription to creep into manuscripts. To produce new copies, scribes needed to decipher handwriting that was sometimes several hundred years old and in a style very different from the one they knew.

A convent was not merely a place of prayer and seclusion. It also operated as a business enterprise—and, in the case of San Jacopo di Ripoli, a thriving one whose assets had steadily been built up over the course of the previous century through shrewd investments, mostly in property. In the 1470s the convent owned some ten houses in Florence that it rented to a variety of tenants, including woolworkers, a butcher, a sawyer, a kiln worker, and a chicken seller. It owned a workshop rented out to a linen merchant, two mills, nine farms, as well as various fields, orchards, and vineyards scattered around the countryside.

In Florence, more than anywhere else, large numbers of people could read and write, as many as seven in every ten adults. The literacy levels of other European cities, by contrast, languished at less than 25 percent.

dwellings are prostrate; walls are toppling; churches are falling; sacred things are perishing; laws are trodden underfoot; justice is abused; the unhappy people mourn and wail.

Florence’s scribes, scholars, and booksellers were at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge.

These men were manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, notaries, priests, and booksellers—bookworms who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and tried to imagine and to forge a different world: one of patriotic service, of friendship and loyalty, of refined pleasures, of wisdom and right conduct, of justice, heroism, and political freedom; a world in which a life in a better society could be lived in the fullest and most satisfying

An old saying went back to the time of the Venerable Bede: “As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall.”11 The Roman people seemed sorely neglectful of this vital harbinger of the world’s fate. It was used as a limestone quarry, as an open-air market, and, in the case of the Frangipane and Annibaldi clans, as a fortified palace from which to wage violent feuds against their enemies.

Historians now agree that, relatively speaking, the years 1000 to 1300 in Europe—the period traditionally called the “High Middle Ages”—were prosperous and productive.