Daily Medieval

The BBC once suggested it was "Medieval Europe's greatest treasure." The Book of Kells is a Latin Gospel (with added material...

Among the many ancient books we have now thanks to Robert Cotton's hobby of collecting and cataloging medieval manuscripts, the British...

Where did medieval manuscript illuminators get their colors? Well, first thing to realize is that they weren't re-inventing the wheel: R...

Marginalia—comments, doodles, annotations, etc., made in the margin of a manuscript or book—came in many forms. Here we talked about the at...

When the oak gall wasp lands on a species of oak, it secretes a chemical that interferes with the tree's normal growth, producing a bulb...

You see it everywhere, yet we never give it a moment's thought. Almost everything printed uses ink. (There are heat-sensitive labels/rec...