The eldest (in green) is attired with costly cloth-of-gold silks, then fashionable at European courts. The illuminator of this miniature followed a tradition of symbolically depicting each magus as hailing from one of the then-known continents.

Medieval writers interpreted these star-men as earthly kings based on the number and value of objects they brought to the infant Jesus: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, each a precious material associated with a distant land. The New Testament recounts that after Jesus’s birth the Holy Family was visited by gift-bearing Easterners called magi who followed a great star that appeared over Bethlehem. The Adoration of the Magi, Georges Trubert, in a Book of Hours, Provence, France, about 1480–90. In this illumination from Rudolf von Ems’ World Chronicle we see the wise Jonicus (the supposed fourth son of Noah), who was dubbed the first astronomer for his systematic approach to studying celestial phenomena. For example, a 12th-century Miscellany at the Getty contains numerous depictions of constellations, and the writer included captions indicating the names of these star-clusters in both Latin and Arabic. To grasp the mysteries of the cosmos, medieval scholars drew heavily upon diverse written, visual, and oral traditions, including Greco-Roman, Islamic, Jewish, and Zoroastrian. In particular, they looked to Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and the texts of many ancient and classical writers that flourished in pockets of Afro-Eurasia, from Ireland to the Middle East. Humankind has always looked to the sky in wonder, with a desire to understand the universe and ourselves. Jonicus, the First Astronomer in Weltchronik, Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, about 1400–10. In order to better understand the sun, moon, and stars described in the Bible-together with angels and other astral phenomena-Christian and humanist writers and thinkers often turned to earlier philosophical and scientific traditions, as well as to other world religions. The creator was often depicted in medieval art inscribing the circumference of the world with a compass or holding the round Earth in his hands (yes, they knew the world was round!).

Medieval Christians believed that the formless void of the universe was the workmanship of God, often known as the Divine Architect or the Prime Mover. The Creation of the World in the Stammheim Missal, Hildesheim, Germany, probably 1170s. To see how the people in the Middle Ages related to the stars and skies, I’ll offer examples in seven episodes (no Gungans, promise). In medieval Europe there was a close link between the celestial and the spiritual, and many images of the cosmos in our collection depict heavenly or religious scenes. Size: Codex: 27.1 x 19.5 cm (10 11/16 x 7 11/16 in.As a certified Star Wars fan (thanks to my amazing father) *and* a curator of medieval manuscripts, I couldn’t resist putting together a guide of the out-of-this-world imagery and ideas about the universe from the Middle Ages. The blind-tooled leather binding dates to the fifteenth century. Bondol was active at the court of Charles V from 1368 until 1381 where he headed the court workshop and also served as the king’s valet de chambre. The style and high quality of the decoration points to its inclusion withing a select group of manuscripts accepted today as from the hand of Jean Bondol. The main decorative body of the missal consists of two full-page miniatures comprising the Canon of the Mass and twenty-three small miniatures. The present volume was therefore meant to be used by the king’s private chaplain and was probably housed in Charles’s private chapel, possibly in his principle residence, the Palace of the Louvre (demolished in the sixteenth century). Manuscript missals were not intended for the lay user, but rather for the use of the celebrant at Mass.

The volume was originally copied and illuminated in Paris around 1375 – a commission of the Valois king, Charles V “the Wise” (1364-1380), one of the great bibliophiles of the fifteenth century and brother of Dukes Philip the Bold of Burgundy and Jean de Berry. This elegant Latin manuscript is known today as The Gotha Missal after its eighteenth-century owners, the German Dukes of Gotha.

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