- Monday, November 25, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
We welcome Thomas Rainer (University of Basel, Switzerland), for a talk titled “Polished Nails and Polished Parchment: Nægel-seax, Scraping Knives, and the Perfection of Writing in Insular and Carolingian Manuscripts.” Dr. Rainer writes:
Since antiquity, polished writing has been linked to polished fingernails. The poetic metaphor “ad unguem politus”—polished to the nail—was also visually expressed in late antique author portraits. Ancient nail art took on a new life in the early Middle Ages, when the knives that were used for cutting fingernails were also used for sharpening quills and removing flaws and errors on parchment by scratching and polishing. My talk will reconstruct this material and metaphoric link by looking at the polished nails of medieval evangelists in Insular and Carolingian Gospel books. To envision the perfect harmony of the sacred text, sharpened nails glide over the smoothly polished writing support without stumbling over the gap of the gutter. They sparkle with silver polish imitating the claws of the evangelist’s beasts. From the Mac Durnan Gospels to the Cutbercht Gospels and the Codex Millenarius, nail art, polish, poetry, and ornament are explored.
Thomas Rainer studied art history and ancient history at the University of Innsbruck and Freiburg im Breisgau and received his PhD from the University of Innsbruck in 2008. From 2008 to 2018 he was a curator at the Bavarian Administration of Palaces, Gardens and Lakes in Munich and from 2020 to 2024, he was a research fellow at the SNSF research project Textures of Sacred Scripture at the University of Zurich, in which capacity he coordinated the material analytical studies on dyes, pigments, and metal inks in Carolingian and Ottonian manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Austrian National Library, the St. Gallen Abbey Library, the Bamberg State Library and the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel. Since 2024, he has been Managing Director and Program Coordinator of the Center for the Theory and History of the Image, eikones, at the University of Basel. He is currently completing a monograph on Carolingian and Ottonian purple manuscripts and is working on a new book project on the image of the codex and the scroll in Christian and Jewish art.