Color In The St. John's Bible

Situated at the closing of the First Bible of Charles the Bald, or the Vivian Bible, the illumination has its provenance in a wider space of cultural expression which was characterised by the confluence of religion and spheres of power within the Carolingian dynasty. The image further extends to represent an intersection of the genre of speculum principis with that of the visuality of art, of which Diebold notes ‘the Bible was the most important mirror of the ruler in the Carolingian era’. It is thus necessary to emphasis the physical context of the miniature, as well as its origins in the monastery of St Martin of Tours during the ninth century. According to Dutton and Kessler, the manuscript of the Vivian Bible was produced in 845, in preparation

Compare and contrast the St. Matthew page from the Gospel Book of Durrow with the St. Matthew page from the Coronation Gospels.  What does this comparison demonstrate about the cultural and artistic influences exchanged in Europe?  Do these images reveal ties to earlier cultures?  Provide both context and formal analysis in the course of your answer while considering the production techniques required to create illuminated manuscripts.

The Butterfly Effect of the Printing Press One small invention can change everything. Gutenberg Created the printing press and it had a butterfly effect on religion, culture, education, literature, economics, and eventually it led to the development of technology. The printing press revolutionized the way people thought and lived. The power of the printing press made it possible to share ideas easily which changed people’s relationship with the church. Document A describes how monks had to write the Bible by hand.

In the book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, we see how the book can be used educationally inside of the classroom and out. This book shows the prejudice that has existed historically and provides a basis for understanding how such stereotypes can be overcome by recognizing similarities instead of focusing on difference. Therefore, it is imperative that high school students read, analyze, and discuss Huck Finn in school. Huck Finn is in many ways a very racist writing. The book celebrates and promotes racial stereotypes because racial slurs are used often and African Americans are portrayed as dumb and senseless.

Beginning with the conversion of the Irish Celts around the fifth century, Christianity began to spread across the British Isles. Around 630, an envoy of monks was sent from a monastery on the Scottish Isle of Iona to a small Northumbrian island (only about 4 square kilometers at high tide) situated in the North Sea of the Atlantic. An Irish monk, Saint Aidan, established a monastery on that small spit of land that would come to be called Lindisfarne, or simply Holy Island. Together with the monastery at Iona, Lindisfarne became an integral part of artistic creation in early medieval northern Europe (Kleiner 288), and from it’s workshop would emerge a new style of artwork that wove elements of pre-existing artistic styles of the British Isles, such as those of the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, with unfamiliar Christian imagery imported from Near East to create the Hiberno-Saxon, or Insular style. This style would be employed by the monks at Lindisfarne to create one of the most splendid texts of early medieval Brittania, the eponymous Lindisfarne Gospels. A wondrous illuminated manuscript worthy of its acclaim, these Gospels are a quintessential example of Hiberno-Saxon style, and its pages and iconography we can glean a look at the historical context of the book, as well as the

Discovered in the twentieth century, The Gospel of Thomas was founded by peasants that were digging for fertilizer close to the village of Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The peasants revealed a container containing thirteen leather-bound manuscripts that were buried in the fourteenth century. The container contained fifty-two tractates that represented “heretical” writings of Gnostic Christians. Dated back to 200 A.D., there was not much known about the Gospel of Thomas besides that there were only three small fragments from Oxyrynchus. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of literary works that contains 114 ‘opaque sayings’ of Jesus that were collected and written down by St. Didymus Jude Thomas, but nobody knows if St. Didymus Jude Thomas wrote the

William Herschel discovered the seventh planet from the sun, Uranus. This was the first planet discovered using a telescope. William Herschel started to question if Uranus was a planet or a star while looking at Uranus. From using a telescope, William Herschel was able to tell that Uranus was a planet and not a star. Previous astronomers thought that Uranus was a star and not a planet because they didn’t use a telescope. William Herschel named the planet Georgium Sidus (“Georgian Planet”) after the King of England. There was another astronomer named Johann Bode, who wanted to name the planet “Uranus” after an Olympian god of the heavens. By the 1950’s, the planet’s name was accepted as Uranus. The discovery of Uranus relates to the scientific

St. Peter Claver was a humble looking church, without the towering spires or detailed architecture that some churches possess in order to fill you with worshipful awe. In fact, it would have been almost unrecognizable as a church if it were not for the relatively small silver cross that hung above the door, not even raised above the line of the roof. Walking into the church did not change the sense of humility that the outside professed. Dark wood lined the walls and floor, and made up the pews. It felt almost like stepping into a cabin that had been built in the 1970’s. Along the walls there were small portrait sized depictions of the fourteen stations of the cross. Unlike St. Agnes’s eye catching and baroque decorations, St. Peter Claver’s artwork almost blended into the background, and was not immediately visible. It appeared that the artwork mirrored the nature of the building itself, almost as if the church wanted to dispense with frivolity and maintain its focus on the practice of its faith.

Douglas, J. D., and N. Hillyer. The Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity, 1980. Print.

The inscriptions of Bible verses in Low German in Christ Blessing, Surrounded by a Donor Family are also indicative of the influence on Protestant beliefs on the painting. Prior to the Reformation, the Bible (like all Catholic liturgy) was always read in Latin. However, Latin was a language that was only comprehensible to the clergy and to a small class of very well educated and wealthy individuals. The vast majority of Europeans did not comprehend Latin and, therefore, they had to rely on the clergy to interpret the Bible’s teachings. Moreover, prior to the invention of the printing press Bibles, like all other books, had to be copied by hand. Since this was a time consuming and expensive process, Bibles were not widely dispersed. At the start of the Reformation, Gutenberg designed the printing press. The revolutionary invention of the printing press enabled the mass production of books and a reduction in their cost, which allowed a much larger audience to own Bibles.5 Furthermore, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular allowed a much wider audience to read and interpret it for themselves.6 The wide dissemination of relatively inexpensive Bibles in the vernacular served as a powerful catalyst for the spread of Protestantism. The inscriptions on the painting are indicative of the Protestant desire to disseminate the Bible broadly. Moreover, they derive from a copy of Johannes Bugenhagen’s translation of the bible

In this paper, I will describe, compare, and contrast two paintings of the same name, The Annunciation by Gerard David and Joos van Cleve. Beginning with Joos van Cleve’s work, we see the virgin Mary kneeling down before an opened book. An illuminated dove with its wings spread is suspended above Mary. An angel is standing beside her, making a gesture. Both figures are inside an ornately decorated, well lit bedroom.

The Gutenberg Bible’s purpose was to spread the message of God that can view through the mass production of the Bible for the first time in history. Due to the moveable printer, the Bible were more accessible to a larger audience. According to Mark 16:15, “And He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,” the spreading of God’s Gospel is a message told by God for his followers to perform. Therefore, Johannes Gutenberg’s actions in producing the Bible was a sacred act through the following of God’s message. By following God’s message, the object that is used, The Gutenberg Bible, is then a religious item used for the religious act. Because of the newly invented Bible, the common man had an opportunity to have a material presence of God that wasn’t available to them beforehand. For the common man, The Gutenberg Bible represented the divine, as the book was the words of God and to the common man, God himself. Furthermore, The Gutenberg Bible’s aesthetic qualities are seen through the font of the Bible that serve to augment the religious qualities of the message sent by God. Just as mentioned in class, decorated text or calligraphy, the artistic qualities of the text brings the viewer into the text and entices them into the continual reading of the text. In the case of The

The third section dissects the formation of the New Testament with more historical context and views of other writings defined as Gnostic writing. Bruce explains the spoken words of the apostles carried as much authority as their written words and gives an in depth explanation how the Gospels and Pauline writings were viewed by the Church Fathers. The rest of the section demonstrates the Church Fathers and their views of what was to be considered scripture and the councils that affirmed the inspired scripture.

By comparing the watermarks from The Gutenberg Bible with the 36-line Bible, which was long believed to be the oldest book made with moveable type, Karl Franz Otto Dziatzko was able to conclude that in fact, the Gutenberg Bible was the older of the two bibles (McCarthy). Each copy of The Gutenberg Bible required about 50,000 sheets of paper, with about 1286 of those sheets in each completed book. It took about three to five years to complete the printing, and it completed in 1454 or 1455. Figure 3 holds an example of what a spread from The Gutenberg Bible looks like. This particular photo is taken from the copy at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas ("The Gutenberg Bible").

The process by which the English Bible, as it is known to the English culture today, was compiled is an extraordinary thing to see. The Bible consists of two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The process by which both Testaments were written and then canonized into one book transpired over a period of many years. Once the canonization of the Bible officially came to an end, it was translated into English. Since then, many versions of the modern Bible have been made. Since the individual books of the Bible became scattered as they were written, people set forth to preserve God’s Word by compiling them into one