Get Sealed In Parchment: Rereadings Of Knighthood In The Illuminated Manuscripts Of Chrétien De Troyes Imagined By Sandra Hindman Mobi
found this a really useful and interesting book, I read it for professional reasons, but I think it has enough context about both the plots of Chrétien de Troyes's romances and the historical context of manuscript production that you wouldn't have to be superduper into those things to enjoy it though you would have to care about this fairly niche subject.
Essentially, what Hindman is doing is going through the programs of illustrations in the relatively limited number of illuminated manuscripts of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, a twelfthcentury French writer who was extremely influential in the development of what we might call 'novels' about King Arthur in the Middle Ages, but whose work survives in comparatively few manuscripts, mostly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for reasons connected to things like the growing trend for prose rather than verse romance and the eventualwell, let's call it a declineof the genre of chivalric romance more generally and other things I'm not going to get into because who has time for that
Anyhoo, Hindman devotes each chapter to examining one or two manuscripts in depth, talking about the relationship between their illustrations and their text and sometimes surprising disconnects between those two aspects of the book, and connecting to these choices in book production to historical trends like the growth of the centralized monarchy in France or the family feuds of the nobility in Picardy.
I've read a couple of reviews of the book in scholarly journals that argue a that she goes a little far in making the illustrations correspond to historical events and b that the discussion of the transition from oral to written cultures as represented by the manuscripts is underdeveloped.
Sure, maybe. But that frankly didn't detract from its value to me, because what I really wanted was the kind of indepth discussion of individual manuscripts that she provides.
She also includes many, many images from the manuscripts in question alas, black and white except for the opening plate, but color illustrations are pricy, which is so helpful in illustrating her points.
For me I think it'll be a great starting point for other research on these manuscripts, Chretien de Troyes was France's great medieval poetinventor of the genre of courtly romance and popularizer of the Arthurian legend, The fortyfour surviving manuscripts of his work ten of them illuminated pose a number of questions about
who used these books and in what way.
In Sealed in Parchment, Sandra Hindman scrutinizes both text and images to reveal what the manuscripts can tell us about medieval society and politics.
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