These are beyond cool! This is from the Luminarium Blog from Anniina. I don’t think she’ll mind if I share one of the images from her post since I’m sending everyone there.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing but I was encouraged to do this. I’m going to tweet things that I think are interesting but don’t rate a full post on the blog. The link to the feed is at the bottom of the left sidebar of this page and here. Today’s tweet is a retweet of a link to the crazy things monks wrote in the margins of the books they were copying.

I came across two news stories this morning about some of my favorite things. The first is, of course, about illuminated writing and an exhibition at the Ghetty in southern California. I’m always feel a little sad that I never made it to the Ghetty while I lived in San Diego but it was a very long and tedious drive. Danna Staff has a wonderful post in her physics blog titled The Caligrapher’s Golden Touch. I think she captures the joy and excitement that we feel as admirers of illuminated writing.

I was not a gum-chewing child–but I was an amateur calligrapher, in addition to being infatuated with illuminated manuscripts. After looking at Ingmire’s series at the Getty, I thought, “Maybe I’ll try this when I get home!”

The second news item is from the Guardian: Force of habit: who are your favourite fictional monks? I vote for Brother Cadfael. I love that series and I have it all on DVD. Who is your favorite fictional monk?

Be there or be square! I’ll be there on and off as time permits.

From The University of Tennessee’s events calendar:

“Grounding the Book: Readers, Writers, and Places in the Pre-Modern World”

The 2012 Marco Symposium, co-organized by Thomas E. Burman (history), Maura Lafferty (Classics), and Anthony Welch (English) will bring together up to ten scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the complex interaction between pre-modern writers and readers, their books, and the places-libraries, museums, monasteries, university classrooms, the courts of patrons-where they wrote and read them. A substantial amount of recent scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of the history of reading has made clear the countless ways in which understanding the materiality of texts sheds fascinating light how on those texts were read and deployed. The layout of a copied or printed page, the other works with which a text appears in a book, the marginalia that so frequently appears in margins: all these and many other aspects of the ‘material text’ open valuable windows through which we can catch glimpses of writers and readers interacting with texts.

Read the rest here.

This is fantastic.