The Book of Judges

Recto

Verso

A leaf from an illuminated 13th-century Bible is one of the items in the De Gregorio collection. Sacred illuminated manuscripts were produced by Muslims, Christians, and Jews to glorify their respective deities. Illumination in its final form appeared by the 6th-century. Illuminated means "lit up" with colors, and the gleam of burnished gold.

The leaf from a Latin Vulgate Bible is a beautiful example of illumination, illustration, and calligraphy (hand-formed letters). St. Jerome translated the entire Greek Bible into Latin between 382 A.D. through 417 A.D., completing the work not long before his death. His version is known as Latin Vulgate.

The Latin Bible was the best-known book of the Middle Ages, the greatest era for the production of illuminated manuscript Bibles. This was the age of the great Gothic cathedrals. The towering pillars and elegant stained-glass windows are strikingly similar to illuminated manuscripts of the period.

Early manuscripts demonstrate collaboration among the Scribe, who wrote the text in precise, hand-formed script; the Illuminator, who created the tiny, intricate designs; and the Rubricator, who completed page headings and section markers in red. The pointed letterform is Gothic or Blackletter, the movable type font used by Gutenberg for his 42-Line Bible, circa 1450 A.D. Below is an example of the font.

The Thirteenth-Century Bible: An Essay, with an Original Leaf from a Latin Manuscript Bible, by Bruce Ferrini, published in 1994, is #15 of 1,000 hand-numbered copies. The imprint includes an explanatory essay and an illuminated leaf on parchment, or vellum (animal skin scraped repeatedly until white), circa 1200-1250 A.D. The nearly microscopic calligraphic text is the first section of The Book of Judges. On the recto (front side), there is a lustrous majuscule, a large capital with elaborate designs drawn inside the spaces of the letter, extending into the margins (marginalia). On the verso (reverse side), there are minuscules, smaller, rounded capitals (Roman uncials), the basis of our modern alphabet, and marginalia drawn in red and blue.

The leaf is from a personal book of devotion in the codex format. Early Christian evangelists created the codex, the modern form of the book, far easier to carry than heavy scrolls when traveling to spread the word of their faith.