Otfried,
Many thanks for your considered response to my posting.
Most informative. I am inspired enough to begin a
literature search and perhaps make a collection of some of
this material, on what I think is a most fascinating
subject, as colour seems so important to our perceptions.
Any further bibliographical information people can drop by,
on an ongoing basis, would be most appreciated!
I wonder what led Miss Hillard to believe that there
existed a 'mystical language of colours.'
I remember that I first heard of 'perse' in the press a few
years ago, at the time of the Gulf War. Someone had picked
up that Saddam Hussein was wearing dark blue, and that
Nostradamus (always one of the 'usual suspects' rounded up
in such orgies of punditry) had stated somewhere in the
Book of Centuries that the Anti Christ was to be found
wearing a robe of 'perse.'
Good Wishes
Graham.
On Wed, 02 Feb 2000 15:57:16 +0100 Otfried Lieberknecht
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Graham,
>
> I am afraid that there was no such thing as a "formalised 'mystic language
> of colours'", but rather a great variety of frequently contradicting and
> partly unstable conventions. The most common form of interpreting a given
> colour was by associating it a) with an object of the same colour and b)
> deriving it's meaning from other properties/qualities of this object. The
> best sources for studying medieval colour symbolism seem to be biblical
> commentaries explaining colours (or coloured objects, e.g. gems, plants,
> textiles) in the Bible, exegetical handbooks or encyclopedias compiling the
> traditionals meanings of the properties of biblical or other things (De
> proprietatibus rerum), and liturgical handbooks explaining the meaning of
> colours in liturgy. Some time ago Christel Meier and others were preparing
> a _Lexikon der mittelalterlichen Farbenbedeutungen_ (as a follow-up to
> Heinz Meyer and R. Suntrup's now indispensable _Lexikon der
> mittelalterlichen Zahlenbedeutungen_), but it seems not that they ever
> published more than a preliminary version of the article on 'red' (in
> _Fru"hmittelalterliche Studien_) and I believe that the project has been
> abbandoned.
>
> "Perse", by the way, is a Gallicism in Italian, and the meaning is
> (originally) "Persian blue" > "dark blue", by extension > "dark". As I
> recall it (without currently having access to my books or other resources),
> in Old French it was often associated with expensive (dark blue) textiles,
> hence -- maybe -- its appropriateness for being associated in a more
> general sense with nobility.
>
> Best,
>
> Otfried
>
----------------------
Graham Williamson-Mallaghan
School of Classics and Theology
Queens Building
Queens Drive
University of Exeter
EX4 4QG
01392-676239
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