Secular and Classical Manuscripts

Manuscripts whose texts are not religious, such as a late antique copy of the poems of Virgil, a medieval book of animals and an early copy of the Canterbury Tales. A work belongs here when the cited article names a classical, literary or natural history text. It excludes Gospel books, Bibles and books of hours. The group follows the text the cited article names. Such books show that scribes and painters of the Middle Ages and late antiquity also illustrated poetry, stories, natural history and plans, and not only scripture, and some of them are among the earliest surviving examples of their kind.