Studium Generale has organized a series of lectures accompanying the ‘City of books’ exposition in de Lakenhal. This week’s topic concerned the book production in Leiden during the last part of the ‘Dark Ages’. The lecture was delivered by Ed van der Vlist, curator of medieval manuscripts at the Royal Library. Van der Vlist tried to show, making use of typical Dutch ‘dry humor’ how hard it is to date and locate medieval manuscripts. This applied also to the city of Leiden. The only book left from the library of Philips van Leyden was by lucky accident swapped with the Germans during WWII in the name of Heimat. Now it is one of the treasures of the Leiden University Library.

        From 1300 onwards we can distinguish a growing amount of legal and administrative pieces originating from Leiden. But in the 14th century the production of books also started to rise. The convents of Leiden smelled an opportunity in the growing demand for all kinds of reading material. Because of the lack of colophons in medieval handwritings, manuscripts were mostly dated by their miniatures. In Leiden three groups of manuscript illustrators dominated the scene, of which the Masters of Hugo Jansz. van Woerden probably produced their works in Leiden and the Suffragiën Masters most probably. Probably they worked from the convent of Lopsen, near Leiden. A great amount of beautiful illustrated miniatures are shown by Van der Vlist to illustrate the difference in style between the two groups. Especially the Suffragiën masters use a very colorful underground to their border decorations filled with realistic flowers. They are seen as an important late blossoming of the northern Dutch manuscript production. The coming of the print (r)evolution brought an end to this in the second part of the 16th century.

        Van der Vlist spiced up his talk with examples of the Leiden ‘spiky script’ and anecdotes about how Gumbert would smell in his books to get more clues: the sour smell of the ink seemed to please him!

        Wonder how André Bouwman is gonna top that during next weeks lecture about the production and consumption of late medieval texts. You can find more information about the lectures here:

http://www.voorzieningen.leidenuniv.nl/studium_generale/serie3.jsp

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