BBC - The Beauty of Books (2011) Part 2 Medieval Masterpieces

The British Library in London is home to 14 million books, on shelves that stretch over 600km. Extraordinary vessels of ideas and knowledge, they testify to the love affair we have with books. This series explores the enduring appeal and importance of books from a 4th-century bible to present-day paperbacks.

Part 2: Medieval Masterpieces

The medieval era was the heyday of illuminated manuscripts. In the 14th and 15th centuries, there was a flowering of religious texts set into beautifully-decorated pages. Among these devotional books were psalters, or books of psalms. Hundreds of these were produced, but the Luttrell Psalter is remarkable for its whimsical, humorous and vivid pictures of rural life and a demonic world that is terrifying and grotesque. This period also saw the development of literature in English. The great Geoffrey Chaucer, often called the Father of English Literature, took the bold decision to reject literary convention and write in English. His brilliant, bawdy satire, the Canterbury Tales, became a medieval bestseller and, as a result, when William Caxton set up his first printing press in London, he chose Chaucer's tales as his first major English publication. These wonderful books contain clever, often mysterious references for their readers and are crucial milestones in the story of the book, charting the last phase of the manuscript and the arrival of the printed book.

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