Tea at Trianon: The Destruction of Medieval Manuscripts

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, December 12, 2021

The Destruction of Medieval Manuscripts

From Medievalists:

The final way (that I will mention here) that medieval manuscripts have been destroyed across history is through the practice of taking cuttings.Many medieval manuscripts contain spectacular illuminations. It’s one of the things for which they’re most famous. So, throughout history, people have cut up manuscripts to extract images. They would use a knife to extract a single image or cut out whole pages to display or sell.
While this practice comes from a place of appreciation, it results in the destruction of the surrounding text and sometimes the whole manuscript because whatever text is on the back of that image or whatever text surrounds that image is lost. So, an entire chunk of a significant medieval text can be lost because someone, at some point, liked the picture and cut it out. This happened to one of the most famous surviving manuscripts of medieval romance – the Auchinleck Manuscript. It is missing many chunks of text because someone at some point went through and cut out all the images. (Read more.)