Deciphering Secrets: The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe (Coursera)

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).

Syllabus

WEEK 1: Course Introduction. Introduction to medieval world and manuscript studies

WEEK 2: Medieval European Kingdoms (Part 1) and Writing Supports and Book Formats

WEEK 3: Medieval European Kingdoms (Part 2) and the Writing case and the Architecture of the Codex

WEEK 4: A Glimpse of Spain's King Alfonso X "The Wise" and preparing the page for Writing

WEEK 5: Paleography and a historical case study and writing the codex

WEEK 6: Exploring the global middle ages and online collections and codex decoration

WEEK 7: Bookbinding and course completion