medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear Bob,
One type of horizontal scroll that presumably would have survived all
the way through the Middle Ages is the Torah. Might the adoption of the
horizontal scroll be a reaction to that? I wonder, as well, whether
there might have been vertical scrolls in antiquity. Besides liturgical
scrolls, like the exultet rolls for example, there are medieval vertical
rolls surviving for genealogies, for which they are well suited. Many
thanks for raising an interesting distinction.
Jim
On 26/04/2012 12:17 AM, Robert Kraft wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> I'm fascinated by this image of John and Mark with their respective
> Gospels in hand. The formats of the books seem to represent scrolls
> written horizontally in "classical" fashion (rather than as rotuli,
> read vertically, as often depicted in Christian iconography after
> about the 6th century), unless normal codices were intended by were
> muddled in the restoration.
>
> I've been collecting images of horizontal scrolls in Christian
> depictions, and find that most of them are relatively early (many from
> Ravenna, for example), and that after about the 6th century, many
> artists understood scrolls to be vertical rotuli, like those used in
> liturgical (and legal) contexts. Of course, most frequently when
> "books" are depicted the codex format is represented. My interest is
> in the probable loss of awareness of the horizontal scroll especially
> in the west (at least one such scroll -- the "Joshua scroll" -- has
> been preserved from much later), the replacement of such scrolls by
> codices in the imagery, and the lingering awareness in some circles
> that "scrolls" were an early book format, but by the time the artist
> worked, "scroll" no longer meant the horizontal variety, but the then
> familiar vertically read rotulus.
>
> Any suggestions (or further examples) relating to this situation would
> be most welcome.
>
> Bob Kraft, UPenn
>
> On 4/25/2012 2:55 AM, John Dillon wrote:
>> Mark (at right; at left, St. John, apostle and evangelist) as
>> depicted in the restored eleventh-century frescoes of the Karanlık
>> kilise (Dark Church) at Göreme in Turkey's Nevşehir province:
>> http://www.pbase.com/dosseman/image/41566368
>>
>>
>
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