After a mostly fruitless afternoon spent rummaging around in the gimmels of the Internet I stuck gold. Gold leaf more correctly.

I found one of those rather sad websites where function has flown out of the window in deference to clever coding.

Suffice to say that it doesn’t work in Mozilla Firefox but I can testify that it does work in IE version 6.0.2800 if you are so inclined.

The site is under the National Library of the Netherlands website. It is available in Dutch and some of it is available in English and some of it which is supposed to be in English is in Dutch.

After going round in circles for longer than I care to admit, I finally found this link to the Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts about six levels down.

Obviously they are not keen to have people visit these pages. Make no mistake though, they are worth visiting for there are some beautiful manuscripts to be found and reasonable quality reproductions to feast the eyes upon.

Once here though, you must ignore the browse feaure no matter how you itch to take up the quest - you will be thwarted by the guardian of the gateway. The expert search is marginally more helpful. But be warned there are missing pictures everywhere.

Patchy, clumsy and as frustrating as it gets - but the content is enough to make up for the other.

Book of Hours - 1460-1480

Logging off,
Jools