Abbess Hilde

Smiling Bats

Isopod

Man writing

Decorated initial D with interlace and a mermaid, from Psalm 14 (folio 13v) 8th century. The Psalter of Charlemagne (shelfmark BN lat. 13159) She pulls her hair, and has a very long body that ends in two tails.

I found her when I was looking for the book La sirène dans la pensée et dans l'art de l'Antiquité et du Moyen Âge by Jacqueline Leclercq-Marx, which I’m still looking for. She’s interesting, as she’s a very early mermaid in a religious manuscript. Another early example of a two-tailed mermaid in a religious manuscript is from the Book of Kells:

This is a page from a Medieval glossary, a list of words followed by a synonym or an explanation of their meaning. Glossaries are the ancestors of dictionaries, the difference is that dictionaries aim to include all the words in a language, while glossaries were/are made to help students understand a specific Latin text that they studied in school, listing the difficult or outdated words from that text.

The page in this photo is the last surviving page of a glossary that was copied around the year 900 probably to be used in the Barcelona Cathedral's school. It's kept in the Diocesan Archive of Barcelona (Catalonia).