There are always surprises when upgrading from old black and white images to the beautiful colour reproductions that the British Library allows us to use today. This one was no exception.
Mary Magdalen is more usually portrayed in medieval art wearing red, symbolising her sin. She was the patron saint of redeemed sinners. This example shows her in a beautiful blue robe, a colour usually reserved for the Virgin. Her sins truly are redeemed. And is that a purely decorative frieze behind her legs, or are those shadows of seated human figures? Maybe getting a little over-imaginative here.
Also in relation to Medieval Writing, it has been notable that I have been steadily adding new websites to the Paleography Links page, as more material creeps its way online. I really thought things would happen more quickly in this area than they have. Some vintage presentations survive, and still work, but some others have vanished. Recently I have added several links to the Spanish and Portuguese section, which shows that things have improved since I once googled "Spanish paleography" and the first item listed was a page from my own website which said that the only things I knew about Spanish paleography came from a 19th century book which I had downloaded from The Internet Archive. The body of online knowledge in this area is steadily increasing.
Now to my wish list. The steadily growing corpus of digitised manuscripts online, especially those allowing free access for use of the images, contains amazing numbers of beautiful illuminated books. It would be sooo nice to have some images of documents - charters, petitions, accounts, wills and the like - to be able to use. I think I get more emails from people trying to read documents than those wanting to read books, for a whole bunch of different reasons. Mostly I'm stuck with the old grungy black and white images from antique paleography books.
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