The "romance" of Alexander the Great is a unique illuminated codex on his life and was the most widely-read romance in the ...

Historians were surprised when analyses revealed Catholic monks used pinniped hides for the protective outer layer on some ...

An international team of archaeologists, bioinformatic specialists, and historians has discovered that many medieval books ...

Humans have been making music for millennia. By the third millennium bc, sculptures and early written records suggest that ...

The material on the covers of books from a French abbey was too hairy to have come from calves or other local mammals.

The books hail from Clairvaux Abbey, founded in 1115 by Cistercian monks in northern France, and its daughter monasteries. Some tomes are nearly 900 years old. Researchers had thought they were ...

In 2023, a medieval comedy routine was found within the pages of a 15th-century text called the Heege manuscript in […] ...

Researchers have discovered a manuscript of one of the oldest versions of the story of King Arthur. How did they find and decipher it?

A medieval scribe copied stories about a knight and a wizard into a manuscript around 750 years ago. The knight […] ...

The stories are part of a French sequel to Arthurian legend, and its binding was repurposed in the 16th century ...

Before the first printing press was invented in the 15th century, books had to be made by hand. It was the monks who were usually put to work making parchment and ink, writing out text, and ...

Mariana Valencia, Jacklean (in rehearsal) (2025), with music by Jazzy Romero. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. What is scripted or planned versus improvised ...