Tamara Kiewiet, Medieval Hand Hunter 👍
Since October 2025, Tamara Kiewiet has been working on her PhD project A Show of Hands within the Art and Knowledge Practices research group at the Huygens Institute. She’s studying how images of hands in medieval manuscripts, from large explanatory drawings to tiny marks in the margins, helped convey knowledge between 900 and 1550.
How did the idea come about?
Tamara Kiewiet: ‘During my Master’s in Book Studies, I came across this enormous, ridiculously heavy coffee-table book, Before They Pass Away by the photographer Jimmy Nelson. It weighs more than five kilos (5,437 grams, according to bol.com). Not exactly something you’d read in bed. Even on the sofa, you’re not quite sure how to hold something that big. It made me wonder what effect the size and weight of a book might have on the reading experience.’
And what did you discover?
‘It turns out that bigger and heavier books can actually improve learning and memory. In short, when you have to put in more physical effort to read, by using your muscles or stamina, your brain becomes more receptive to what you’re reading. Because several senses are engaged at once, the experience is richer and the content stays with you longer. I found that a really intriguing discovery.’
How did that lead to researching hand images?
‘I realised that books aren’t just carriers of information; they also play a role in knowledge transfer as physical, material objects. That made me start looking at them quite literally in a new light. And then I began noticing how full medieval manuscripts are of little hands, pointing hands, warning hands. I started collecting them for fun, and then studying them more seriously.’
So medieval scribes were using hand emojis?
‘You could say that! But there are also much larger depictions of hands, like diagrams used to explain things like musical notation or palmistry, for example. And I often come across the Hand of God, even in very early manuscripts from before the year 900. In this first phase of my research, I’m mainly looking for new hands. It’s like a treasure hunt. Just today, while scrolling through a digitised manuscript, I came across 90 small hand drawings and two large, full-page ones. A great find.’
The A Show of Hands project runs until 2031. Alongside her PhD, Tamara works at the National Library of the Netherlands on the Metamorfoze project, which focuses on digitising medieval manuscripts, where she continues to discover new hands.
Tamara Kiewiet places a medieval book under the camera as part of the Royal Library’s Metamorfoze project.
