Hi! If you’ve landed on this page, you’re probably interested in where the images on my Twitter feed have come from. Ace! As you might have expected, both my profile picture and my header image are from manuscripts.
My profile picture is a detail from London, British Library, MS Royal 14 B VI. This manuscript (MS) is not, strictly-speaking, a codex (‘book’ in the modern sense); rather, it’s a genealogical roll that attempts to chart the ancestry of English monarchs up to Edward III (the Edward depicted in my picture is Edward I). The fantastic work undertaken by the British Library’s manuscripts department has meant that the entire document is available online: my image is on ‘folio’ 7r (in quotes because the notion of folios in a roll is somewhat contradictory).
The header image is another detail, this time from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 25516, fol. 4v. This is a manuscript containing a continental French verse version of Beuve d’Hamptone (Bevis of Hampton in the English tradition). I love it because of the somewhat … haphazard … restoration attempt that’s been made on the face of the woman on the horse (Béatrice, if you’re interested, who’s in the process of inflicting some rather nasty punishments on the wise man Soribaus). As ever, it’s online here. This kind of detail reminds me that these manuscripts are not just old, dusty objects to be kept in a museum, but that they had long lives after their production, and were interacted with for centuries. After all, for the image to be so poorly retouched, it had to have been rubbed off in the first place …
Edward Mills 