The Gilded Page

The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts

A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII.

Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author’s status - part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer’s writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people - the grinders, binders, and scribes - in their creation and survival.

The Gilded Page is the story of the written word in the manuscript age. Rich and surprising, it shows how the most exquisite objects ever made by human hands came from unexpected places.

©2021 Mary Wellesley (P)2021 Quercus Editions, Ltd

Undergrad-level study

Pleasant in that it is clearly a labor of love read by the author; but she does have a chip on her shoulder and the feminist motivations come through more and more explicitly

Informative book plagued by basis.

This is a very informative book on medieval manuscripts. How they're made, authored, written, decorated, their history, how they survive, and pretty much everything you could want to know.

However, the author of this text has a very clear feminist bias that constantly rears it's head. It also causes contradictions in statements.

For example, she states that we cannot tell a female scribes work from a males. They are equal and so often not attributedto any person. But as soon as she starts talking about a known female scribe suddenly the work is very elegant and feminine and just gets praised as being distinctive.

This continually happens every time a female author or scribe is brought up. Constant praise, while the men are just reported on with the facts as we know them. But the women are given attributes like clever and profound when there's even less information to go off of.

The point that women have been silenced throughout this period is also brought up, constantly, over and over, throughout the entire book. Like we understand that and did the first time it was said.

We are also told that the scribes altering the author's work is just as important to the work and to history as the author's words themselves, except when it's a female author's work and then it's misogynistic.

The information in this book is very interesting and important to anyone who loves history and books, but the author's clear bias consistently gets in the way. And it only gets worse in the last couple chapters.

Not suited for audio

Well read, well written and researched, but descriptions alone just aren’t sufficient to make this book work. I don’t even know if the print version has images, but this subject just doesn’t work as audio alone. A pdf of images would be an improvement, but still probably not enough.