Colour notes in English Romanesque manuscripts

Abstract

COLOUR notes, indicating the colour to be used, have been recorded by Patricia Stirnemann in a group of late twelfth and early thirteenth-century French manuscripts. L. Gilissen has noted two other methods for indicating colour used in a group of thirteenth-century Cistercian manuscripts. One of these consists of writing the guide letter (that is the instruction left by the scribe to indicate which illuminated letter should be inserted in the empty space) in the same colour as that required for the initial and the other of placing a coloured mark adjacent to the guide-letter, again in the same color as that required for the initial. The purpose of this article is to describe colour notes similar to those observed by Stirnemann, but found in manuscripts produced in England in the late eleventh century and throughout the twelfth, and to consider their significance primarily in relation to Stirnemann's findings.