The discovery of original bookbinding finishing tools at the monastery of St. Catherine’s (original) (raw)

Binding or Rebinding at St Catherine's Monastery of Sinai

Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding, 2023

The monastic library of St Catherine's is known to hold one of the largest collections of early and undisturbed bookbindings from several different East Mediterranean bookbinding traditions, including Greek, Arabic, Georgian, Ethiopic and Slavonic. How have these books survived to date, what was their use and how does their use relate to the need for bookbinding renovations in the monastic environment? This paper examines the major bookbinding tendencies in the monastery and discusses the relationship between manuscript production, bookbinding and the renovation of manuscripts by binders at St Catherine's monastery throughout the centuries.

Book fastenings and furnishings : an archaeology of late medieval books

2016

Throughout the late medieval period, books were an integral part of religious monastic life, and yet such objects have received little attention from an analytical archaeological perspective, despite the significant quantity of metal book fittings recovered from archaeological sites. This thesis explores the archaeological collections held by English Heritage together with published excavation reports, investigating late medieval book fittings, dating between the mid-eleventh and mid-sixteenth centuries, which have been archaeologically recovered from English monastic sites. This work presents the first typology of these artefacts and considers in detail the many and varied forms of late medieval book fittings. In order to contextualise and give a clear understanding of this material, this study investigates late medieval book production, monasticism, and the types of books housed within monasteries and the locations in which they were used and stored. This research goes on to exami...

Reconstructing a Dismembered Coptic Library [1990b]

In: Gnosticism and the Early Christian World: In Honor of James M. Robinson, edited by James E. Goehring, Charles W. Hedrick, Jack T. Sanders, and Hans Dieter Betz, 145–161 (with bibliography on pp. 162–184, passim). Forum Fascicles, vol. 2. Sonoma: Polebridge Press, 1990

The Device for Reading. Books as a Technique for the Preservation of Texts in the East and the West from the Middle Ages to Today 3rd – 5th November 2015, Library of the Custody of the Holy Land, St. Saviour, Jerusalem

This exhibition tells the story, through 40 examples, of the ways in which texts from different languages, cultures and religious tradi-tions have been preserved, right up to today’s digital mechanisms. Seen from this perspective, the ‘history of binding’ becomes the history of different cultures and societies, showing ways in which what we call the ‘book-object’ has been transformed through time, while re-maining a specific apparatus suitable for transcribing, preserving, transmitting and reading texts. The book-objects (in whatever form they take) are indispensable tools for accessing book-texts.