 to the British Library and thanks for braving the heat to join us tonight and to all of those who are joining us online. I'm delighted to introduce Professor Lucy Freeman Sandler for her lecture entitled Golden Books as part of a series accompanying the exhibition Gold, 50 Spectacular Manuscripts from Around the World which is now on at the British Library just downstairs until the second of October. I'm Kathleen Doyle, the lead curator of illuminated manuscripts here at the library and one of the curators of the Gold exhibition. Lucy is the Helen Gould Shepherd Professor Emerita of Art History at New York University where she was chair of the department until 2003. I hope Lucy won't mind me saying that she's been studying and thinking about manuscripts for around 70 years and so she's one of the world's leading experts on Western European and in particular English illuminated manuscripts. Her list of publications and invited lectures runs to 15 pages so you'll be relieved, I'm not going to be reading that out to you tonight, but many of you will be familiar with her seminal work on English 14th century manuscripts, Gothic manuscripts 1285 to 1385 as well as monographs on the Omnibonem, the Peterborough Salter, the DeLio Salter and the Ramsey Salter. I can see from the audience that I'm not alone in seeing Lucy as a real inspiration in so many ways and as a model for a productive retirement as seven books and numerous pages of the 15 of the article's date from after 2003, including illuminators and patrons in 14th century England, the Salter and Hours of Humphrey de Boone and the manuscripts of the Boone family published by the British Library in 2014. During lockdown when many of us were struggling to get out of our pajamas, Lucy researched and wrote her latest book, Pend and Painted, the Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, published in May and she'll be signing copies of her books after the lecture tonight just downstairs by the bookstore where you can acquire one for her to sign. Pend and Painted is written for a general audience in which Lucy includes an introduction followed by succinct one page analyses of 60 British Library manuscripts illustrated by full-color illustrations. Lucy included some of the most famous British Library manuscripts in her book and featured several that you will have seen or will see, I hope, in the Gold Exhibition. And about every week when we were at home during lockdown, Lucy would send me an entry and I remember often thinking she can't possibly find anything new to say about this manuscript. And every time Lucy would surprise me with discoveries from close looking and her erudite thoughtful, insightful and beautifully written text and I say without American hyperbole that it is truly a wonderful book. Lucy's talk tonight will be drawn in part from her work on Pend and Parchment but I know that she's written this lecture specifically to address some of the issues raised in the Gold Exhibition, in particular the varied uses, function and meaning of gold in illuminated manuscripts. Her lecture will be about 45 minutes and then Lucy will take about 15 minutes of questions. If you'd like to ask a question and you're here with us in the entrance hall, raise your hand and a microphone will be brought to you and if you're listening online you can participate too by using the question box just below the video. Now please join me in giving Lucy a warm welcome to the British Library. Good evening everybody. I want to thank Kathleen for such a lovely introduction and I want to thank the British Library for asking me to give this talk and I want to thank the whole staff of the Department of Manuscripts for many years of help and in particular Callum Coburn for his help with the pictures that I'm going to show tonight. When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to give a lecture about golden books she said immediately, oh, little golden books. This is the cover of one of the earliest little golden books published first in 1942. It's a series that's still going on today. The only vestige of material gold or gold color is, as you can see, at the edge of the spine. But when I thought of other associations of golden books that are still current, I called to mind my own copy of the Bible, neatly bound in black leatherette, stamped in gold on the cover, and with gold in four edges. The gilding of the edges of the pages of the holy scriptures is an ancient tradition. Those of you who've seen the British Library exhibition won't have found any tangible examples on show, however, because for the most part manuscript leaves have been clipped just as most manuscripts have been rebound many times. But representations of books in manuscripts, like the one here on the right, often show the bulk of the pages between the covers as golden, suggesting the precious both materially and conceptually. This is just one of the many ways that we can talk about books as golden. My aim today is to explore with you the visual ramifications of the phrase golden books and to think out loud about what the multiplicity of uses of golden manuscripts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance meant to their commissioners, makers, and users. Because we're here in the British Library, almost all my examples will come from the fabulously rich collection of this institution. I have to begin with some disclaimers. This is not a talk about techniques of gold application. I'll be dealing with end results with effect, so to speak, and I leave precise descriptions of the processes of making and employing gold to experts on the craft of illumination, a craft nicely demonstrated by the way in a video in the gold exhibition. And also, I'm going to limit the range of my talk to manuscripts produced during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Western European and the Eastern Mediterranean world. Like many of you who've seen the British Library exhibition, I've been simply amazed by the golden treasures from far away India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Myanmar, Tibet, and Turkey. But like an old shoemaker, I'm sticking to my last. And the kinds of manuscripts about which I can claim any familiarity are those produced in Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean between the 6th and the 16th century. Let's begin simply with depictions in manuscripts of things that are actually gold or gold colored in the real world. Apart from the symbolic meaning of gold, which we'll come to in a while, gold has always been considered as materially precious, and medieval illuminators used gold leaf, gold paint, or gold colored paint to represent valuable things made of gold. First, of course, is monetary gold, minted in the form of coins. The picture you're looking at is one remarkable example in a manuscript produced in Genoa in the 1330s, and I included a discussion of this miniature in my book. The volume contains a treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins that was commissioned by a Genoese merchant of the Kokoreli family for the moral, educational, and civic education of his son. This miniature illustrates usually a subdivision of the vice of avarice by showing the interior of a pawn shop with the pawn broker making an offer to a client for a now tarnished silver object. On the table in the front are piles of gold coins, like the 14th century Genovino, which you see on the right. The coins are to be given, of course, in exchange for the deposits. Off to one side is the clerk who's recording the transaction and hanging on the wall in the background are objects that have already been pawned, all gold. Among them, as you can see, a gold sword, two gold belts, a gold ewer, a gold plate, and a gold seborrheum. The depiction of real gold, real gold coins, leads us to the much more common representation in manuscripts of gold coins that have a symbolic meaning in Christian terms. When the three magi came to venerate the newborn Christ child, they brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In manuscript illustration, the gift of gold was often shown in the form of gold coins. As we see here, this is the early 14th century English Queen Mary Salter. It's open in the exhibition, but to another page. Here, the container of the gold coins is a golden seborrheum, the liturgical vessel used to hold the sacramental eucharistic wafers of the mass. So the golden coins given by the king can also be understood symbolically as the offering of the body of Christ and the kneeling figure as the priest who makes the offering at mass. Here, blessed by the Christ child himself. As we can see here, manuscript images were and can often be read in multiple ways, one meaning enriching another. Now I'm going to focus on the uses of gold in manuscripts where the precious metal does signify more than material riches and has a symbolic meaning. Let's start with manuscripts themselves written in gold. Here's a magnificent book open to this page in the exhibition. The manuscript was produced around 800 under the patronage of the emperor Charlemagne, and it's famous today as a golden Gospels. Every word of the text is written in gold, and each page, as you see, is framed like a precious object with a protective pattern gold border. Gold here, of course, is equated with the holy scriptures, the sacred word of God, the creator and ruler of the universe. In the Middle Ages, gold was also considered as the appropriate vehicle for writing texts relating to secular rulers, whose rule in the medieval way of thinking was sanctioned by the deity. Here, for example, is a page with a detail of the last lines from the charter presented in 966 by the Anglo-Saxon King Edgar to New Minster Winchester on the occasion of the New Minster's refoundation as a Benedictine abbey. This part of the text that you're looking at concerns the king's benevolent intentions, and the detail includes the Latin words for our kingdom. The generous gifts of the king are worthy of being described in valuable gold script. Now here, oh, we've switched. We have to go back. There. Now here is another case of the use of gold script in connection with earthly rule. We're looking at a page from a slim picture book with miniatures of the kings of England from the time of Edward the Confessor in the 11th century to Edward I, who reigned from 1270 to 1377. This manuscript was produced between 1280 and 1300 while Edward I was still alive. Each picture, except for that of Edward, is accompanied by a short account of the life of the ruler written in various arrangements of gold and blue script, as you can see here in the miniature that shows Henry III. Henry is shown as the patron builder of Westminster Abbey, a model of which he holds on his lap. The Anglo-Norman text below, in alternating lines of blue and gold, begins with a line in gold saying, quote, after John, his son, Henry, the third, ruled for 16 years. And I think the detail gives a good idea of the brilliant polish of the golden letters, literally glorifying the name Henry. Golden letters were often greatly enlarged at the beginning of manuscript texts. The New Minster Charter that we just saw has a striking example, a page which begins with the overlapping Greek letters, chi and row, for the name Christ, a monogram that looks like XPI at the start of the phrase, quote, Christ, all powerful author of the whole fabric of creation, which is written in large golden capitals. Another monogram is shown in the exhibition, as you can see here on the right. It comes at the beginning of a long document composed in 1395 by a courtier of Charles VI, King of France, addressed to Richard II, King of England, pleading for peace between the two nations and for a joint crusade in the name of Jesus Christ, whose sacrifice for humankind is underscored by the crown of thorns radiating golden rays over the crowns of France and England. In the main section of the miniature, the golden letters YHS for Jesus are projected against a heraldic background of gold French fluridoli and gold English lions. On the facing page, a miniature which I reproduce in my book shows the presentation of this very work to Richard II. The miniature is painted above the textual prologue written in alternating lines of gold, red, and blue. The entire ensemble uses gold pictorially and textually as both sacred and royal symbol, and even includes a portrait of the manuscript itself on the right, showing it as covered in a binding richly decorated with gold. Now, among the dazzling manuscripts in the gold exhibition is the Salter of Nell ascend, Queen of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, painted in Jerusalem around the middle of the 12th century. The page shown is the enlarged initial B for Bayardus, Blessed, the beginning of Psalm 1. Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the Council of the Ungodly. Here, as you can see, the entire image is golden, figural and decorative motifs and background as well. The elements of the design are outlined in black as if engraved in metal. And some details are picked out in white. King David, traditionally the author of the Psalms, appears in the lower part of the letter, seated and playing his harp. All the other figural elements in the initial, that is the fantastic animals and the birds, are ensnared in the stylized foliage. But David is free of these entanglements, his prominence visually evoking his importance as a ruler, an ancestor, and even an Old Testament figure of Christ himself. In medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, gold was used not only to enhance the value of the text and initial letters, but also to surround the text with rich borders, one example of which we've already seen. Later in the Middle Ages, such borders often consisted of golden foliage. For instance, small-scale stylized leaves on curving black stems that form a sparkling network scrolling across the surface of the page. I might mention here that the surfaces of manuscript pages are rarely completely flat and certainly curve when the pages are turned so the effective gold is usually enhanced when books are actually handled. But decreased in most documentary photographs, as you may have noticed in the slides I'm showing today. The example we're looking at here is from a solter made in the early 15th century for a Prince of France and given to King Henry VI of England. Every one of the text pages of the book, more than 500 of them, was treated in the same labor-intensive way, literally illuminating the word of God with gold. The latest development in the use of gold in the borders of manuscript pages was illustrated in the exhibition with this early 16th century French Renaissance book of ours, an extraordinary example of the mesmerizing trompe-leux representation of details of the natural world. Here flowers and insects casting shadows against the muted sheen of the gold background. In the age when printed books were becoming increasingly common, this handwritten and hand illuminated manuscript for a connoisseur of the art of illusion evokes the sheer wonder of God's creation. Let's move on now from borders to manuscript images of themselves. Where's gold used in pictures? First, we'll look at gold in the setting or background. Such large areas of gold are the artistic equivalent of light, light from the sun or from the deity. This on a screen now is a page from the Greek language Bernie Gospels. It's a miniature painted in Constantinople that is Istanbul in the 12th century. The manuscript is in the exhibition open to a miniature of Saint Mark, but I'm showing you a page that I illustrated in my book. It's the evangelist John turning his head to hear the voice of God and dictating his gospel to ascribe. The background of the figures and the rocky landscape is a shimmering expanse of gold, identifying the space and the event as sacred filled with the light of God. Medieval illuminators devoted a great deal of attention to gold backgrounds. Often to heighten the interplay between actual light and shining metal, they incised patterns that enliven the surface of the page. Here's an example from the exhibition, a detached leaf showing the enunciation from a solter of around 1200 that was produced in Flanders. The background is tooled with finely incised linear spirals and stylized foliage, overlaying the gold of the heavenly and the eternal with allusions to the earthly, the temporal of the natural world. A similar treatment of the background appears in one of my all time favorite manuscript images, which I couldn't resist showing today. The Virgin and Child of the Solter of Robert de Lille, painted in London in the first decade of the 14th century. Here, the five pointed leaves in the elaborate pattern incised into the gold ground are silhouetted against fields of closely spaced dots. I think introducing a sense of oscillation, not only across the surface, but from the front to the back. We could almost say that the pattern is a kind of visual metaphor of the ever changing motion, a movement of the universe. Now there's time to show one more variant of the treatment of gold backgrounds. This is the use of shaped metal punches to tool gold leaf grounds. That is to create regular rather than freehand patterns. The background of this page from the Golden Haggadah, which is in the exhibition, provides my example. The manuscript was made in Barcelona in the 1320s. Here, the pattern is composed of a diagonal linear grid ruled with a pointed instrument punctuated by star-like punched motifs at the intersections. The Golden Haggadah contains the service that takes place in Jewish households at Passover, marking the freeing of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. The page you're looking at has four scenes from the lives of Jacob and Joseph, events mentioned in the book of Genesis. And the detail shows Joseph's two dreams. First, that his chief of corn would stand upright while those of his 11 brothers would lower themselves. And second, that the sun and moon and 11 stars, which you perhaps can see in the picture, that they would worship him, that is, Joseph. These are dreams of God's favor or favoritism, which arouse the anger of Joseph's father and brothers, and that's depicted in the lower right hand section of the whole page. As in Christian manuscripts, the gold backgrounds are equated with the sacred, here with the sacred history of God's relation to the Israelites of the Old Testament. Gold in the backgrounds that we've been looking at is not a representation. It is simply put a visual witness of the presence of light and all its attendant meanings. But light was also represented in medieval manuscripts using gold. Here is, to me, a breathtaking example from a biblical manuscript of the type called a Biblist Real, a history Bible, written in French and illustrated in Paris in the early 15th century. We remember that at the beginning of the book of Genesis, God said, quote, let light be made, quote, and quote, so that the light that it was good, and he divided the light from the darkness. So in this miniature, at God's command, the pale golden light of the upper hemisphere illuminates the blue sky above, and the black below casts the surrounding area into darkness. God's work on the first day of creation. More often, light was represented in the form of its source in our cosmos, that is, the sun. And gold was regularly used to depict the sun and its radiance. No. This example is from a Hebrew manuscript, another Hebrew manuscript, a miscellany compiled in northern France over a period of time from the late 13th to the early 14th century. The miniature shows, as the Hebrew caption says, quote, the sun and the moon and stars within the wheel. The term wheel evidently related to the idea of the rotational movement of the spheres of the universe. In a circle, which is the conventional medieval visualization of the spherical shape of the universe, we can see the gold sun with curving rays, a crescent moon, and small gold discs of the stars against a deep blue background. Another brilliant example is this illustration of the 14th century Italian poet Dante's Divine Comedy for one of the cantos of Paradise, the final section. This miniature was painted in the 1440s by the famed Sienese artist Giovanni Di Paolo. I discuss, actually, a different Paradise miniature in my book, but the one we see here shows the journey of Dante and his companion Beatrice toward the fourth sphere beyond the earth. In medieval cosmology, it's called the heaven of the sun. The blazing golden rays of the sun in the center beam down on the terrestrial landscape below. For Dante, the heaven of the sun was the realm of the souls of wise human beings enlightened by the message of the Christian deity. So the sun and its rays here can be understood as a symbol of God bestowing his wisdom on the earth and its human inhabitants. Golden rays, like those here, have multiple meanings in medieval imagery, but most often they symbolize the third person of the Christian trinity, the Holy Spirit. And two of the main pictorial subjects where the golden rays appear are the enunciation and the Pentecost. Here's a 14th century Florentine miniature of the enunciation. It's a cutting from a choir book used in the mass, and this page is in the exhibition. There's a brilliant gold leaf background against which the lushly ornamented initial letter R is displayed, encircling a scene of the enunciation, the appearance of the angel Gabriel to tell the Virgin that the Holy Spirit will, quote, come upon her, and she will conceive a sun. In the upper part of the composition, the Lord sends down the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove flying on fine linear golden rays, which pass over the middle of the initial. And if you look very hard on the far right, you might be able to see this tiny white bird approaching the dove of the Holy Spirit, approaching the head of the Virgin Mary. Now here are two miniatures of the Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit that inspired the apostles to preach the gospel. On the left is a detail from the 12th century Winchester Salter, where we see flame-like golden rays descending from the dove of the Holy Spirit to the gold haloed heads of the apostles, who themselves are wearing gold-bordered garments. Gold is the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, and the transmission of the Holy Spirit to the apostles is underscored by the profusion of gold in the delineation of their robes. Now there on the right is a majestic and serene Pentecost with the Virgin Mary in the center. The miniature is a detached leaf from a book of hours of the very end of the 15th century that was illustrated in tour, France, by the well-known artist Jean Bourguignon. Here the Pentecost scene is viewed close up, almost as if we're right there in the circle of apostles. The golden rays are thin beams of light emanating from a sun-like circular aura, a kind of halo around the dove of the Holy Spirit. The aura of the holy was codified in the Middle Ages in the form of the golden halo, as we can see in these two Pentecost miniatures, in the one solid gold disks in the other transparent gold outline circles. Along with golden halos, other sacred symbols of the deity are often represented in gold. The idea of God's dominion over the entire universe is visualized in images called Christ in Majesty, where the Lord holds a golden orb. As we see here, this is a 12th century English manuscript known as the Schaft's Very Salter. Such images ultimately descend from ancient Roman imperial portraits. As they're reflected in medieval pictures of emperors, such as this famous image of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, painted around the year 1000. And this is one picture from a manuscript that's not in the British Library, but in the State Library of Munich. Another golden symbol of the deity, beside the orb is the chalice. If the golden orb alludes to the Lord as ruler of the universe, the chalice refers to the Lord as sacrifice for the sake of humankind. In the Christian mass, the sacramental wine in the chalice is changed to the blood shed by Christ at the crucifixion. Here in the Salter of Robert Deleel, a manuscript I mentioned before, Old Adam, the first man, the original sinner, holds a chalice, holds up the chalice containing the blood that's being shed by his redeemer, Christ, who was called the new Adam. The Eucharistic chalice itself was venerated and represented in gold. As we see here in two examples, the left is a miniature illustrating the reading for the feast of Corpus Christi, that's the body and blood of Christ, in a mass book completed around 158 on the commission of a mayor of London, his name was Stephen Jennings. And on the right, another golden chalice, the opening illustration of a register of all the names of the members of the Guild of Corpus Christi of Boston Lincolnshire as of the 1460s. Even more fundamental than the chalice as a Christian symbol is the cross itself. And while the cross of the crucifixion was often represented in manuscripts as wooden, tan, or brown, or sometimes green, as a symbol of the Christian faith itself, it was frequently represented in gold. Here, for example, is a modest, historiated initial at the beginning of the 13th century copy of a treatise on the virtues and vices perhaps produced in France, showing a personification of faith as a woman holding a disc with a golden cross, a golden chalice, and a golden orb. The lower section of the initial has the opposing vice identified there as idolatry and a pictorial example showing a man worshiping a monstrous idol. The cross is the Christian symbol par excellence. Now here is the full page cross where gold is a brilliant yellow pigment. This is a 10th century image from a Spanish book of readings from the mass. As you can see, hanging from the arms of the cross are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and omega, referring to Christ's words in St. John's apocalyptic vision, I am the beginning and the end. The inscription at the bottom of the page, again in bright yellow equivalent of metallic gold, and also continued in now dulled silver, says, quote, the sign of the cross of Christ the king. In the Christian liturgy, the cross stands on or above the altar. So here are two pictures of golden crosses in situ. On the left is a miniature commemorating the gift around the year 1031 of a golden cross to the church of New Minster Winchester by the Danish conqueror King Knut and his consort El-Gifu. And on the right is a Parisian miniature around 1440 to 50, showing members of the worldwide Christian community adoring a giant de-jewel golden cross on the altar of a chapel. The setting and the two-armed shape refer to an altar cross of a chapel erected in Jerusalem over the site of the crucifixion, which was only a distant memory in the Middle Ages. But the gold material and the rich array of jewels recalls reliquaries made throughout the period to house fragments of what was the relic of the true cross. As it happens, both of these manuscripts that I'm showing here appear in my book. And the 15th century image, no. The 15th century image is from a book of ours that was used for the cover of my book, which Kathleen showed you before, on which we see St. Luke the Evangelist in his study surrounded by books. Whether the giant size of the reliquary cross in the Parisian miniature records the dimensions of an actual object, we don't know. Certainly the gold material and the large scale underscore its symbolic importance. Like this cross, other containers of sacred relics were depicted in manuscripts as golden. Here's an example from a solter made in England in the second quarter of the 15th century. The initial for the psalm that begins sing to the Lord a new psalm shows David crowned in gold with his golden harp, adoring the golden arc of the covenant containing the 10 commandments. The historical biblical basis for the use of gold here is the detailed description of the arc of the covenant in the Old Testament book of Exodus. From the time of Moses, the arc was carried by the Israelites in all their wanderings until finally David brought it to Jerusalem. As the book of Kings says and our picture shows, quote, with joyful shouting and sound of trumpets. Now here are two contemporary English images of another golden shrine. This time that of a Christian saint, the martyred ninth century East Anglian kid Edmund, whose perfectly preserved body was venerated at Barry St. Edmund's, a major pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages. From Christmas 1433 to Easter 1434, King Henry VI even stayed at the Abbey of St. Edmund's, a visit commemorated in the miniature on the left, which shows him worshiping at the golden shrine of St. Edmund, which was encrusted with jewels and precious marbles. With some variations, St. Edmund's shrine appears repeatedly in this manuscript, whose text is the verse account by the contemporary Barry Monk John Lidgate of the life and veneration of the saint. The picture on the right shows the author himself praying at the shrine. I'd like to turn now to the representation, to gold in the representation of human figures. Sometimes gold is used for precious metal ornaments such as crowns, collars, belts, or richly woven or embroidered garments. But here as we've seen before, gold can have a symbolic meaning, referring to earthly power and sacred dominion. In the exhibition is this miniature from a ninth century solter named for the Carolingian Emperor Lothar where the entire image of the ruler has been transformed into a golden ornament studded with pearls, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires from his crown to the brooch at his shoulder to his sword and even to the cushion under his feet. I'm showing a detail of Lothar along with a bejeweled ninth century Carolingian reliquary, the so-called talisman of Charlemagne meant to protect its original female owner and display her religious devotion in material form. It's the same purpose as Lothar's fictive garment. The Lothar solter also includes a miniature of David playing the kind of stringed instrument called a Scythera in the Book of Psalms. He's shown as a hallowed youth, a divinely chosen prefiguration of Christ according to the verses praising him on the facing page. What's surely significant here is the treatment of his garment whose folds are articulated by a gold linear pattern, a motif that marks David especially favored by the Lord. Gold pattern drapery is a rare phenomenon in the Carolingian era, but it's a hallmark of the work of the French Renaissance painter Jean Bourgogne, whose Pentecost miniature we see here again. And here from the same dismembered late 15th century Book of Hours is the beautiful miniature that's included in the exhibition the Virgin Mary of the Annunciation meditating over her reading as the Holy Spirit flies in from the upper left. Bourgogne has melded soft natural flesh with supernatural drapery and a kind of pictorial magic only possible via the art of the illuminator. Now we're going to leave the illuminated pages of manuscripts to consider the use of gold in their covers. Very, very few original book covers have survived from the Middle Ages or even the Renaissance, especially those of the kind known as treasure bindings composed of precious metal, ivory, enamel, and inset jewels. Such bindings were fit materially and conceptually for the deity and for kings and queens. Here's an example from the exhibition, the partially 12th century binding of a German gospel book intended to rest on the altar. A case of such reverence for the word of God that a manuscript whose text was written a hundred years earlier was covered with this splendid new binding of gold, rock crystal, and colored enamels surrounding a golden relief of Christ crowned blessing and holding a golden book. And here is one of the stars of the gold exhibition, a tiny book truly fit for a queen to wear on her belt. Even though L.A. Jackson, one of the show's curators has now discovered that this so-called solter of Queen Anne Boleyn was probably not really hers but belonged to another 16th century lady. And those of you who've seen the show will remember the minuscule size and skilled factor of this amazing golden book. I'm going to end this talk as I began with images of books, the golden books of my title. As you've heard from Kathleen Doyle when she introduced me, the theme of my book, Pendant Painted, is images of books in books, that is representations of books in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Among the examples that I discussed were several where books themselves were depicted as golden, either with gold bindings, gold forages, or gold script. We've already seen this miniature of the evangelist John from an 11th century gospel book from Cologne. And now here, here's a page from the 12th century Melisand Solter, who saw one initial we've also seen. This miniature shows Christ and throne between the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist. As himself, the word of God, Christ holds a richly jewel golden book that contains the word of God. Yes, and finally, here's a page from the late 10th century book of Episcopal Blessings, the benediction of the saintly Anglo-Saxon Bishop Ethelwald that really sums it all up. The golden haloed Christian Lord in the golden initial O of the abbreviation for omnipotence almighty, identified in golden script below as the Trinity, quote, the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, framed in a pointed golden arch of heaven, seated on a golden arc of earth, wearing a golden garment and holding a golden book. This is a resplendent example of the painted image of the book as a symbol of the sacred. And for me, it's the ideal picture with which to end this talk. Thank you. Thank you, Lucy, for really stimulating and thought-provoking lecture, which I'm sure will have stimulated questions both here in the audience. And just to remind you, if you haven't submitted a question online, there's a question box just below the video. And my colleague, Joan, is going to be reading out any questions that you have from our online audience. So if I may start in the room, is there anyone who has a question for Lucy? I see a hand just here in the back. Quran have miniatures and golden inscriptions. So the question was whether a Quran would also have in golden inscriptions and miniatures. The Quran is the sacred book of Islam and figural images are prohibited in Islam. There are Quran's, however, written in gold script. And there's an example in the exhibition. So a great deal of devotion, a devoted attention was paid to the calligraphy itself, the sacred text, and Quran's often have beautiful decorated borders decorated with gold as well. But no figural imagery. Wait for the microphone, and then... Would that be corrected saying that gold is sometimes associated with wisdom? Yes, and I think that the picture from the Dante manuscript that I showed is a sort of example of that because the gold sun, which is the emblem of God, is beaming down and it represents the wisdom of God that's transmitted to humankind. I think we have a question from our online audience that Joan is going to read out. Yeah, we've got a question here from Catherine Reynolds. Oh. Thank you for a wonderful lecture. Do you have any sense of how much a book like the Golden Gospels would have been used for its texts or was part of its function to glorify the word of God simply through its creation and existence? Well, let's say it's a ceremonial benedictional. There's always a question in relation to these very precious manuscripts so full of gold, particularly I think it's a question in relation to gospel books, were they actually used or were they there as sacred objects to rest on the altar? Now a benedictional contains these Episcopal blessings. I think that maybe even a bishop would probably have had to read from some text if he actually performed these ceremonies but I don't think that Ethelwald ever actually had to use this book to perform any of his Episcopal blessings. Maybe I can while you're waiting if anybody else has anything to add. Could I, you've looked at a lot of images to select these and to choose them for your book. What was the most surprising discovery you made in this process after looking at probably thousands of manuscripts in your career? Oh, that's a very hard question. That's a very challenging question. Well, it's a very challenging question. When I was working on the book, it was like a surprise a day. I mean, I started by, I started before COVID and then COVID happened and thanks to the wonderful digital resources of the British Library, I was able to compile a list of books in books mounted to about 180 examples. And then I siphoned them, I broke them down. But as I, I mean, I was attracted of course by the fact that there was a book in the picture. But then as I began to look at them for every, almost every manuscript, I just had a kind of surprise. It was because they were pictures in manuscripts many of them had been written about but they hadn't been, but the representation of books in those books hadn't been written about. And so, you know, just to shift your focus a bit enables you to have this wonderful exhilaration of seeing something new in the picture. I can't be more specific. I would. That sounds like you had some fun in actually doing the work. I think there's another question online. Yeah, another online question. This time from Brigitte. She is actually gilding while listening to you. Could you please tell me the technical name for gold backgrounds? I heard it once at a Society of Guilders Conference in 2019 and I've been trying to remember it ever since. I don't know. As I said, I listened here the other night at the British Library to Patricia Lovett who was an expert calligrapher and she talked about the application of gold. I'm not a craftsperson myself and I know very little actually about the technique. You can learn quite a lot, I think, from the exhibition itself but I don't know whether you'll learn the name that was used in the Middle Ages for gold backgrounds. I mean the general name for gold is Aoram, but... There's a question just here. Yeah, thank you. This was a really wide-ranging talk that took us through such different meanings for the presence of gold and made me wonder whether there might be some cases where you would hesitate between assigning different meanings to the gold or whether there might even be more than one meaning deliberately evoked by the gold in a particular case. There might be more than one... Well, I think that's... Multiple meanings are... Multiple meanings are not only the result of our distanced view but I think they're inherent in the work, in the design and the execution of the works themselves at the time. I mean, sometimes images are the results of very complex thinking on the part of the people who designed them and executed them. One more question in the back, perhaps. Thank you, Professor, for a really interesting talk, lecture. Just carrying on from your thought on what you said about the Bishop's book, Ethelwald, was it? Ethelwald. Ethelwald, yes, thank you. You said you didn't think that he would have used that book. Do you have reason to think that? Or is it more of an impression from maybe the good state of it? And have you written about it? Well, I'm not the person who's written about it. I mean, I have skipped over... One could not say that I've written in depth about the Benedictional or St. Ethelwald. I think my impression that it wasn't actually used in the actual ceremonies that the text contains, that's because of the character of this particular book. But the relation to Ethelwald is very certain. I think we have one last question from the online audience. So this question is from Rosemary. She thanks you for an amazing lecture. Why do you think that these types of golden books fell out of favor later and in more recent centuries? Why did they fall out of favor? Well, it's the advent... I suppose it's the advent of printing and the inexpensive... I mean, printed books at first were very expensive. And sometimes they were decorated by hand and sometimes the initials were gold and the borders were filled with gold. But as printed books really took over, I suppose we're in a situation of some kind of technological change now. But at some point by 1600, printed books more or less replaced manuscripts. And even the one with the wonderful borders with the flowers and the insects. That was made at a time when books of that sort were really for connoisseurs. And I think by that time a book of ours for daily use, even by the devout, would have been a printed book. Thank you all for coming to tonight's event, either here in person or by watching online. And I hope that you've enjoyed it as much as I have. And from the comments we've heard, it seems that that is the case. We welcome your feedback. If you're watching online, you can add some feedback by using the menu just above the video to do this or to make a donation. And although our online audience won't be able to join us for the book signing in just a few minutes, if you'd like to get a copy of Pendant Painted or indeed the little exhibition highlights book Gold, you can use the book tab on the screen to do that. And we'd also love to welcome you back to the British Library for more exhibitions, lectures, conversations, and performances. So keep an eye on the what's on pages of our website for that information. And you can also watch any past events in this series or in other series and see a 20-minute highlights video about the exhibition on the British Library Player. And do make a note in your diaries of the library's next major manuscript exhibition, Alexander the Great, The Making of a Myth, which opens on the 22nd of October. So thank you so much for joining us. And please join me in thanking Lucy once again for a really wonderful lecture. Thank you.