Illuminated Manuscripts

picture credit

Hero is finding  the illuminated manuscripts pretty interesting, and wants to do an art project with them. Since we're home this week, I'm thinking that we'll do some kind of crayon resist project. He's thinking that making an illumination for his name, like the third example on this page, sounds like fun. Works for me. The project is designed for high schoolers, so we'll have to simplify it a bit, but that's OK. It's also OK with me that this is a project that's going to take some time. That's very historically accurate.

I also found this cool interactive thing taking a virtual tour of some actual illuminated manuscripts, complete with commentary. It may be somewhat over his head to take advantage of the whole thing, but it will still show him some actual examples of real manuscripts. We'll start with the one called "Glimpses of Medieval Life" and see what catches his attention from there. I love how the internet makes this stuff so accessible, so that even at elementary ages we can at least have a look at the actual primary documents!