Associate Professor of English Edward Wheatley presented an interactive videoconference lecture on the process of making a book in the Middle Ages to high school students in Ohio and Tennessee on November 4.
Wheatley in Multimedia
Wheatley took the students through the process of making a book in the Middle Ages: parchment-making, ink-making, copying, illuminating, gold-leafing, and binding. He used the college's manuscripts to show the results of these processes. They also talked about the shift to book printing in the 15th century, and made comparisons between the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages and current computer culture;both of these are more user- and reader-based, while print culture is more author- and text-based.
Wheatley showed one of Hamilton's manuscripts, a northern Italian antiphonal from around 1475. It's the first page of the mass of Saints Peter and Paul. Wheatley said,"The initial has St. Peter in it, and I believe the picture was literally 'defaced,' which is to say that the image was probably scraped away by iconoclasts. This book is made up of portions of other mass books bound together; there is a wide variety of styles. When the book was rebound, the binder didn't see the page in the photo, and so he cut the book down so it would all match the smallest section in size. In doing so, he chopped off a lot of the border of the page, which originally would have been the width of the bottom border all the way around."
