About this course: Perhaps no other relic of the European Middle Ages captures our imagination more than illuminated medieval manuscripts, or those documents decorated with images and colored pigments. Serving as windows unto a lost world of kings, ladies, faith, war, and culture, they communicate complex visual and textual narratives of Europe’s collective cultural heritage and patrimony. In this fashion, illuminated manuscripts are dynamic messages from our communal past that are still relevant today in fields like graphic design and typography. In this seven-week course, students will explore the material creation, content, and historical context of illuminated medieval European manuscripts. Students will acquire an introductory knowledge of their distinguishing characteristics, their cataloguing and periodization (when they were created), the methods utilized to produce them, and their historical context and value. Student achievement will be assessed using not only traditional multiple-choice quizzes, but more importantly will be evaluated based on individual student projects. In their final projects students will either (1) produce a board of commented images about medieval manuscripts or (2) prepare a physical manuscript using medieval methods. The best of these peer-evaluated projects will be posted on the Deciphering Secrets website, which is our collective citizen scholarship web presence that encourages and supports our global citizen scholars appreciation and contributions to transcription of medieval manuscripts. Finally, we wish to highlight that this course is an exciting international collaboration between the University of Colorado (USA) and Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain).
Who is this class for: The general public with an interest in the European Middle Ages Bibliophiles and collectors of medieval manuscripts in facsimile Students of European history and the history of arts Students of library and information science Students of cultural heritage and patrimony Graphic designers wishing to deepen their understanding of the roots of modern image, color, and icon design.
Taught by: Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila, Associate Professor
History
Taught by: Ana B. Sanchez-Prieto, Dr. in Medieval History, Dr. in Education Sciences
Historiographical Sciences and Techniques
| Level | Beginner |
| Language | English |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
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Great course, very informative, and left me inspired to learn more!
Very illuminating and interesting Course! I really enjoyed the combination of theory and hands-on!
I'm still going through the course but it's excellent course if you enjoy studying history, art, warfare, chemistry and of course illuminated Manuscripts this is a course you will devour. They have created a very professional course, there is a lot of new information I have never read or came across before and i'm not even half way through the course, I look forward to the rest of the course. I would HIGHLY advise you to take this course if you love art and history from ancient to around the 16th century.
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I loved it! Although one can only touch the surface of this field in such a short time frame, I learned a lot. I liked the combination of medieval history and manuscript making. It helps putting it all in perspective.