A group of students was invited to choose a manuscript from the collections of the bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève connected to the idea of wonder studied in class. Working in small groups, they wrote the exhibition labels and created works in a variety of formats related to the manuscripts they had chosen.
At the initiative of Antoine Boustany, curator in the Reserve department, two display cases were designed by a group of third-year students in the “Licence Lettres” program at Université Paris Cité as part of the course “Littérature, art et cultures médiévales” taught by Amandine Mussou. The students were invited to choose a manuscript from the collections of the bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève connected to the idea of wonder studied in class. Working in small groups, they wrote the exhibition labels and created works in a variety of formats related to the manuscripts they had chosen. In medieval culture, the noun wonder is used in both religious and secular language: it refers to “the prodigy,” “the miracle,” “that which inspires astonishment,” in connection with its etymon mirabilia, derived from the verb miror, which contains two complementary semantic elements: looking and astonishment. The manuscripts on display, produced in different periods and copied in various languages, highlight certain aspects of how men and women of the Western Middle Ages related to wonder, and how it was recorded in books as an object of knowledge and transmission alongside well-attested realia. In these display cases, visitors will find a griffin facing a vulture in a Greek bestiary, strange peoples represented in a collection of scholarly texts, the recipient of a book of hours appearing alongside the Virgin in the same image, the biblical episode of the burning bush, and an exorcism manual used to free victims from demons.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève