The Beinecke collection provides a number of examples of how scribes created their indices. By using the term “index,” do bibliographers risk anachronism, imposing modern expectations of the back-of-the-book index on a premodern book? When scribes labelled the “indices” in their manuscripts, they usually described them more broadly as tabulae (sometimes also repertoria or inventaria, ‘aids for finding’), terms which also encompassed various other textual apparatus from tables of contents to lexica and glossaries to concordances and synopses. With a modern book, the reader consults the index, looks up a key term and then locates the relevant pages or chapters in the main text, but this is not necessarily a good model for medieval reading. For more images and details of the exhibition, visit Atlas Obscura or the exhibition page itself.What is an index? The “index” is in some ways a misleading word for medieval manuscripts. Organized by the Morgan Library and Museum, the exhibition includes illustrations of jewels and gemstones from inside the manuscripts. If you are in New York, you can visit Magnificent Gems: Medieval Treasure Bindings - a unique exhibition running through January 7, 2018.
The elevation of the jewel clusters has a practical purpose as well as an aesthetic one it protects the rest of the cover when the book is open.Ī handful of libraries around the world hold such books, but not many treasure-bound manuscripts have survived the centuries. Jewels line the edges and sit on raised clawed legs around a repoussé (metal worked on the reverse side to create an image in relief) figure of Christ. The intricate metalwork on the back cover only hints at the extravagance of the front cover, which was made nearly a century later. One particularly notable example is the Lindau Gospels, dating to ninth-century France. Either the very wealthy or the very pious (or both) commissioned the books. In rare occastions, these included treasure binding: metalworkers were employed to emboss patterns of silver and gold and set precious stones. The Luneborch Prayer Book, however, is far from the only stunning example of Medieval and Renaissance art. In the medieval period, monks usually produced books. At the time, German and Dutch cities were competing, and so far we did not have much evidence of illumination art trade between them. Beyond its indisputable value as a work of art, the book indicates that a German, Hans Luneborch, had appointed a Dutch master to illustrate his personal prayer book. The manuscript came from Lübeck, in northern Germany, which in the 15th century was the most important harbor of the Hanseatic League, a trading bloc that stretched from the Baltic to the North Sea. The Dutch artists who illustrated its pages are known the Masters of Dark Eyes, one of the most prolific groups of illuminators from Renaissance Holland, known for the dark, heavy shadows around the eyes of their figures. Strangely enough, for 40 years there is no record of anyone trying to sell the book. The operating theory is that someone from the thief’s family found it and decided to return it to its rightful place. Then, the Peabody Library received an anonymous envelope, with no return address, containing the long-lost Luneborch Prayer Book. But all attempts to locate it were in vain and in 1970, after many inquiries from academics, the Peabody wrote off the Luneborch manuscript as “lost.” According to the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, the Luneborch Prayer Book, containing 44 illuminated pages, was at the Peabody.
But sometime between then and the 1970s it had disappeared. The book had been donated to the Peabody in 1909 by a European art collector. Known as the Prayer Book of Hans Luneborch, it had been commissioned in 1492. The manuscript is one of the rare examples of vernacular spirituality-meaning it was for personal use, not in a church-from early Renaissance Germany.
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