These are beyond cool! This is from the Luminarium Blog from Anniina. I don’t think she’ll mind if I share one of the images from her post since I’m sending everyone there.

I came across two news stories this morning about some of my favorite things. The first is, of course, about illuminated writing and an exhibition at the Ghetty in southern California. I’m always feel a little sad that I never made it to the Ghetty while I lived in San Diego but it was a very long and tedious drive. Danna Staff has a wonderful post in her physics blog titled The Caligrapher’s Golden Touch. I think she captures the joy and excitement that we feel as admirers of illuminated writing.

I was not a gum-chewing child–but I was an amateur calligrapher, in addition to being infatuated with illuminated manuscripts. After looking at Ingmire’s series at the Getty, I thought, “Maybe I’ll try this when I get home!”

The second news item is from the Guardian: Force of habit: who are your favourite fictional monks? I vote for Brother Cadfael. I love that series and I have it all on DVD. Who is your favorite fictional monk?

Be there or be square! I’ll be there on and off as time permits.

From The University of Tennessee’s events calendar:

“Grounding the Book: Readers, Writers, and Places in the Pre-Modern World”

The 2012 Marco Symposium, co-organized by Thomas E. Burman (history), Maura Lafferty (Classics), and Anthony Welch (English) will bring together up to ten scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the complex interaction between pre-modern writers and readers, their books, and the places-libraries, museums, monasteries, university classrooms, the courts of patrons-where they wrote and read them. A substantial amount of recent scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of the history of reading has made clear the countless ways in which understanding the materiality of texts sheds fascinating light how on those texts were read and deployed. The layout of a copied or printed page, the other works with which a text appears in a book, the marginalia that so frequently appears in margins: all these and many other aspects of the ‘material text’ open valuable windows through which we can catch glimpses of writers and readers interacting with texts.

Read the rest here.

One of the rarest and most beautiful illuminated manscripts dating from the 12th century is missing from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. It is the Codex Calixtinus. The miniature of Saint Jacob above is from this guidebook. It is a book that will literally take your breath away with it’s beauty.  Here is the link to the story on the BBC News site.

Here is a second link to the story in the Guardian with a beautiful leaf from the codex.

I want to  share a link on the NY Times site to an Op-Ed article by Sara Lipton on Anthony Weiner and other public figures with the same propensities. Lipton is an associate professor of history at SUNY-Stonybrook. I think it is an interesting and humorous perspective.

Also, I’m working on the next tutorial on illuminated writing and I should have it up very soon.

Enjoy.