Marginaalnotities: een onderzoek naar de productie van geïllustreerde manuscripten in de veertiende eeuw in Italië aan de hand van de analyse van instructies voor de miniatuurschilder Marginal notes: a study of the production of illuminated manuscripts in XIVth century Italy, based on the analysis of the instructions for the illuminator

The aim of this project is to study the instructions for the illuminators in medieval illuminated manuscripts, investigating a large corpus of Latin and romance codex in order to set up an upgradable and shareable database. As a matter of fact, it has been discovered that several illuminated, or planned-to-be-illuminated, manuscripts contained this kind of instructions that were written by the artist himself, or by any other person involved in the production of the codex (such as the patron, or the stationer), to guide the translation of the text into images. Nonetheless, after having been followed, the instructions were generally removed or hidden, so it is often difficult to find them in the manuscripts. Disregarding some late XIX and early XX centuries works, it is perhaps for this reason that only a handful of studies exist, which focus on this subject, mostly examining individual case study, without employing a comparative approach. Starting from this kind of approach, a corpus of about 280 manuscripts has been already redacted. The instructions present in these codex will be studied with regard to their content and relation with the manuscript’s illuminations and text, and to their linguistic and palaeographical aspects. Moving from the information obtained from the manuscripts and from the connections that will possibly arise among them, further manuscripts containing written instruction will be searched. At the last stage of the research, general considerations will be drawn by a comparative analysis of the final established corpus. These elements will make up an upgradable and shareable database. A multidisciplinary approach will guide the research, using methods and tools borrowed from art history, codicology, palaeography, philology and history of text reception, and history of language. Many scholars hope to establish a closer collaboration between illumination history and other topics.