All Good Things

February 19, 2012

Filed under: Astronomy, Meteorology — Tags: adolescence, age, Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus, All Good Things, brain, British Library, British Museum, butterflies, children, colour, comet, convex mirror, De natura rerum, dentist, eclipse, Edict of Expulsion, Edict of Expulsion 1290, Edward III, George IV, historiated initial, illuminated manuscript, James le Palmer, jews, miniature, Omne Bonum, pigments, Royal Collection, solar eclipse, sun, teeth, Thomas of Cantimpré, tornado, toys, trepanation, Valenciennes Municipal Library, waterspouts — Pavel Voronin @ 11:25 pm

Exhibit A:

This is a very interesting historiated initial from a very interesting manuscript. Illustrating a small text about a comet, it comes from one of the earliest encyclopaedias in the modern sense of the word. Organized alphabetically, Omne Bonum (literally, All Good Things) was composed and written circa 1360s-1370s by James le Palmer, clerk of the Exchequer, probably for Edward III. A team of illuminators, almost certainly instructed by the author, added hundreds miniatures, making this book one of the best windows into the fourteenth-century mind we have.
Having stayed in the Royal Collection for some four and a half centuries, it was eventually donated, along with thousands of other books, to the British Museum by George IV in 1823. Now in a special section of the British Library (a section almost impossible to get access to), it is also available online: MS Royal 6 E VI, MS Royal 6 E VII (it’s actually in four volumes now, but they kept the old nomenclature).
I enjoyed browsing it immensely. Here’s a selection of some of the more curious images:

Teeth: dentist at work	Age: сhildren playing with toys and catching butterflies	Jews (expelled from England in 1290)	Adolescence (note the convex mirror)	Brain: trepanation	Colour: artist mixing pigments
I found this gem thanks to the BBC’s Illuminations: The Private Lives of Medieval Kings.
You can see a couple of excerpts from it on my new blog: 1, 2.

Exhibit B:

Now, this miniature is a good example of how you shouldn’t believe your intuition when interpreting old images. At least one texbook and one generally reliable photo bank tell us that this is a very early depiction of multiple waterspouts bursting from a cloud lit by lightning, from a 13th century manuscript De natura rerum by Albertus Magnus. A few places on the web repeat this very believable claim, and so, at first, did I.
But then I found the manuscript itself and a dissertation about it. The text of the manuscript and other illustrations in it are unambiguous: this is supposed to be a solar eclipse. You’d never think you could mix up those two, would you?
The circular spinning top, half-hidden behind the clouds, is in fact the Sun (compare it to the vista of the night sky from the same chapter, and to a roughly contemporary parallel — both shown below). And those wavy things are either light rays or some kind of emanating matter\energy (the very next page has a star or a comet with a similar tail, and an earlier example shows God moving primeval substances in a similar manner — ibid).

They got the author wrong, too, by the way. The text was actually written by Albert’s friend and student Thomas of Cantimpré. Full reference, for posterity: Thomas of Cantimpré, “De natura rerum”, Valenciennes Municipal Library MS 320, folio 196v, miniature of a solar eclipse.
P.S. I would like to thank Christopher Chatfield and Chet Van Duzer for helping me to get to the bottom of this.