A brief history of writing will serve as an introduction to the study of the illuminated manuscript. The passage from the scroll to the codex, with all the transformations that this discovery produced, namely writing on parchment instead of papyrus, opened the way for the creation of illuminations on a stable support.

It will be the production of the codex understood as an artistic work, linked to the monastic scriptoria and later to the secular workshops of the Christian West, that will be the subject of our study. The importance of the commission, the status of the illuminators, the text-image relationship and the evolution of illumination understood in its materiality and in a parallel path to that of the other arts, but with its specificities, function and uses, will be studied using, whenever possible, illuminated manuscripts in Portuguese libraries and archives.

 

Biographical notes:

Maria Adelaide Miranda has a degree in History from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon (1975) and a PhD. in History of Medieval Art from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Nova University of Lisbon (1996), having been an associate professor of History of Medieval Art in this institution. She is a specialist in Medieval Enlightenment and as a researcher at the Institute of Medieval Studies she created one of the youngest and most dynamic medieval study groups, “Images, Texts and Representations”.

Luís Correia de Sousa has a Master’s and PhD. in History of Art – Medieval, and a Degree in Musicology from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He is a Researcher at the Institute of Medieval Studies (IEM) and the Center for Sociology and Musical Aesthetics Studies (CESEM); he has developed work in the field of medieval iconography, especially musical iconography. In recent years he has worked essentially in the field of medieval illumination, having completed a Post-Doctoral project on portable Bibles from the 13th century.

Ana Lemos graduated in History, a variant of Art History at FL-UL in 1991. In 1996 she attended the Master’s Units in History of Medieval Art and Medieval Painting and Iconography, at the University of Paris IV / Sorbonne. She collaborated as a researcher in the project “Color in Portuguese Medieval Enlightenment”. Specialist in medieval illumination and iconography, he is developing a doctoral project on books of hours in partnership with the Department of Conservation and Restoration at FCT-UNL. She has participated in International Congresses, regularly publishing articles in this area, both nationally and internationally. She is currently a researcher at the IEM at FCSH-UNL and a Secondary History teacher at the French Lyceum Charles Lepierre.