Started: [[2025-01-27]] ## Visit - [[Victoria and Albert Museum]] - It has a self-portrait of [[Simon Bening]] (P169) - [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]] in New York - Has another self-portrait of Bening. That is basically the same. (P169) ## Research & Further Reading - [[Matthew Paris]], monk of [[St Albans]] - Nonsuch Palace, owned by John, Lord Lumley ## New Words - Uncial script? ## Notes The concept of the uncontaminated hand of the great master was less of a thing in the Netherlands. Collaboration was more common. Rubens and Rembrandt worked with colleagues and pupils on artworks. The same was true of manuscript makers. Even more so in fact, because due to time, money or lack of speciality, the same person couldn’t do everything. Simon Bening worked with a Portuguese artist 1000 miles away. (P149) --- ## Highlights & Notes > I could never have been a monk. Everything about monasticism is alien to my world, including the obvious, and yet any time I have ever spent as a guest in a monastery, sharing for a few days an idealism and a rhythm of life that is thousands of years old, I have found myself wondering why anyone would choose to live in any other way. In addition to this, there are manuscripts, often hundreds of them. (P11) --- > The philosophical texts are what ensured Anselm's lasting reputation as probably the greatest intellectual author in Western Christendom between Saint Augustine in the early fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth. He writes with elegant reasoning on the very fundamental questions of human existence and their inseparability from Christianity. At a different level, Anselm's Meditations reached and still speak to an audience of private piety, like the later Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and for centuries Anselm's name was wishfully attached to popular prayers of every kind. (P34) --- > Wax tablets were used in Roman antiquity but they also survived far into the Middle Ages and beyond, for notes and drafts and taking texts by dictation. Pictures of tablets sometimes appear in manuscript illustrations, showing wooden panels, some with handles resembling table tennis paddles or laced together in pairs like adjacent round-topped windows. Their centres were carved into shallow rectangular troughs filled with coloured beeswax mixed with resin or oil. One can scratch text on the smooth surface with a metal stylus. The added colour, usually black or sometimes green, makes words clear to read. Tablets can be easily erased or corrected, rendering them ideal for making everchanging drafts, a luxury not enjoyed by authors again until the advent of word-processing. Unlike laptops or manuscripts, wax tablets can be used anywhere, even outside in the rain. Once very familiar to medieval scribes, wax tablets are a class of manuscript almost entirely lost to us. (P35) --- Documented genealogy and ancestry determined personal status in Tudor and Stuart England. Possession of land largely depended on knowing who had owned it or been granted it in previous generations. (P193) --- You’re not meant to relocate a Jewish grave. So graves tend to have graves heaped on top of them. P215 --- Putting flowers on graves in considered pagan. So little rocks are put down instead. P215 --- Jewish wealth in the 1600s tended to be in ready money, not land – which was where a lot of genteel money was tied up. P217 --- Rabbi’s are encouraged to have a trade – a day job. That way their teaching of the Torah would be for ‘free’ and not paid. P223 --- The [[Karaites]] are an ancient religious sect “beyond the acceptable fringes of mainstream rabbinic Judaism, recognising only the Torah as Devine law.” They survived the holocaust by arguing they were not really Jewish. P230 ---