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| The Grandma in Sant Pere de Rodes |
Today, The Grandma has visited the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes in El Port de la Selva. This monastery was witness of the creation of one of the most important and amazing manuscripts of the 11th century: The Rodes Bible, a wonderful work which you can see in the National Library in Paris.
The Rodes Bible is a manuscript written in the 11th Century. It was originally a book with 566 pages but, in the 18th Century, it was divided into four books. It was written on vellum, a parchment made of unborn animal skin. The preparation of the pages for writing is easy to see, with the page divided into three columns with spaces for the miniatures.
More information: Ajuntament del Port de la Selva
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| Miniatures. The Rodes Bible. |
The Bible is written in Latin in the Carolingian script of the early 11th Century, combining titles and certain other phrases in other types of script. The handwriting of six different scribes can be identified. Many of the pages are illuminated, with illustrations occupying either a small section or the entire page, particularly in the books of the Old Testament.
There are three groups of miniatures -the initial capital letters, depictions of scenes and characters from the Bible, and representations of animals. Depending on the text that they accompany, they occupy one or two columns or the entire page. Just as in the case of the scribes, the work of different miniaturists can be discerned.
More information: Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes
Normally, the writing was completed first and the scribe left a blank space for the monk who specialized in drawing the miniatures. However, this was not always the case throughout the entire book.
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| Miniatures. The Rodes Bible. |
The miniatures of the Rodes Bible are a great source of knowledge about the medieval world of the Catalan earldoms. Although the clothes, gestures, furniture, soldiers' weapons and relationships between characters were supposed to depict the people and scenes from the ancient world, they are all taken from the everyday lives of 11th Century monks.
The Rodes Bible was written in the first quarter of the 11th Century in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll when Oliba was the abbot. Abbot Oliba commissioned three large-scale Bibles to be written and illustrated with miniatures. One of these Bibles was given as a gift ini an unfinished state to the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes, possibly to mark the ceremony of the consecration of the Monastery's church in 1022.
More information: Monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll
The Bible remained at the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes until it was stolen at the end of the 17th Century by the Duke of Noailles as part of the spoils of war. The Rodes bible was one of the manuscripts that formed part of the private collection of the Noailles family until it was purchased by Louis 15th along with 200 other manuscripts in 1749, to add to the french royal collections. Today, it is kept at the National Library in Paris.
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| Miniatures. The Rodes Bible. |
Sant Pere de Rodes was a monastery of the Benedictine Order under which, among other duties, a compulsory daily period of reading was imposed. This required books which were obtained by copying them from other collections.
The term Scriptorium is used to refer to a room in monasteries set aside for writing. however, in medieval monasteries, scribes normally wrote at a small table in the cloisters or in their rooms. The word scriptoria refer to the written works produced in the monasteries rather than to a physucal place. A monastery's scriptorium is also associated with the existence of a library which, in many cases, was no more that a closer or trunk located in the cloister or in a passageway. In the case of Sant Pere de Rodes, it is known that an archive existed in which, among other books, there was a luxurious Bible which was stolen at the end of the 17th century.
The Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes is one of the most important medieval monasteries in terms of Catalan Romanesque art. The monument that we see today is a set of building constructed between the 4th and 18th Centuries.
The Monastery's golden age was from the 10th to the 12th Century, a period in which it received several donations and lands from nobles, primaily from the Counts of Empúries, which great benefited the Monastery.
The monks abandoned Sant Pere de Rodes in 1798 after a long period marked bad financial management, attacks from pirates and continuous wars with France.
More information: Bibliothèque Nationale de France
The notion that human life is sacred
just because it is human life is medieval.
Peter Singer
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