The Distinctive Characteristics and Purposes of Christian Art
LS9 – ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS
The Nature of Illuminated Manuscripts
T he aesthetic of medieval manuscripts links western culture to a past of castles
and knights, cathedrals and crusaders. The painted and illuminated manuscript is
amongst the greatest artistic triumphs of the Middle Ages, demonstrating social,
intellectual, religious and cultural attitudes of medieval life. To appreciate a
medieval manuscript is to understand its place in the medieval world. Most
surviving manuscripts are of a religious nature, and churches and many homes
kept books with various compilations of scripture.
Manuscript books were tediously but carefully written by hand – sometimes taking
two years to complete – each page adorned with unique initials and decoration. The
creation of an illuminated manuscript was complex and required the joint labours of
professional scribes to write the text in Gothic script, and artists to illuminate the
pages with decorated and foliated borders.
Here are some key features of Illuminated Manuscripts:
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Illuminated - Decorated with gold, either burnished from gold leaf or painted from finely ground gold
paint.
Manuscript - A book written and decorated by hand rather than printed.
Miniature - A picture or scene painted on the page.
Initial - A large capital letter usually painted in contrasting colour or illuminated in gold.
Rubrics - Capital letters or short notes in red ink to stand out from the text.
Calligraphy - the text was carefully copied with a quill in uniform calligraphy.
Foliated borders – Borders ornamented with the depiction of a covering in leaves.
Colours - Pigments used by the medieval painter were the rich, dark blue of lapis lazuli or azurite,
vermilion red, verdigris and malachite green
Vellum - (also known as parchment) – Calf, goat, or sheepskin scraped thin and used instead of paper
for writing.
Down at the Scriptorium…
The scriptorium was a writing/copying room in a monastery or workshop where books were produced for the
clergy, scholars and wealthy individuals.
Scribes (monks who would copy the texts) were paid to laboriously copy out by hand the ornate Gothic script
that was the staple of religious discourse. A room in the monastery reserved for this activity was called the
scriptorium and here they not only transcribed texts but provided "illumination"--elaborately conceived initial
letters, ornamental borders and gilded illustrations.
Production costs were quite high: an account roll in Westminster Abbey records that one 14th century Mass
book cost 35 pounds--the equivalent of several hundred pounds today--but of this the scribe received only 4
pounds for two years' work and 1 pound for clothing. Such books were, understandably, rarities and often
chained to the walls of the monastery.
The types of books that were made:
Until the late Middle Ages, the great majority of western books were written in monasteries by scribes, who
enjoyed the highest social status in their communities. Hence the great majority of early books in the Western
world are of religious content, as fitting the "Age of Faith". Consequently, most manuscript leaves and books
surviving today are the following types: Bible, Book of Hours (daily prayer book for the laity), Breviary, (prayer
book for the clergy), Gradual and Antiphonal (music book for the mass), Missal (book for the mass), Psalter
(psalm book) and others.
The end of manuscript production:
The introduction of printing from movable type in 1455 signalled the end of an era. Within a generation virtually
all book production was undertaken using the new and vastly more inexpensive technology of the printing
press. The explosion of knowledge brought about by this unprecedented dissemination (spread) of books
immensely benefitted mankind, helping to usher in the freedom of thought and material prosperity that define
the modern world.
Paris remained a centre of the production of handwritten religious books until about 1540, due in no small part
to the social status of the scribes' guilds. Catholic Spain was the final bastion of the old ways, where such
manuscripts would continue to be handwritten by cloistered monks well into the eighteenth century. Many of the
now jobless scribes of the 15th century found employment as rubricators of the earliest printed books, adding
the traditional hand painted Uncial initial letters and other embellishments to the printed texts.
Illuminated Manuscripts as providing a Didactic contribution to worship
and as a Visual Form of the Liturgy
Visual Form of the Liturgy:
While the ‘Book of Hours’, a very common personal devotional book of a wealthy layperson (non-church
affiliated worshipper), was often richly illuminated in the Gothic period, the illuminated manuscripts were often
commissioned by clergy. Archives suggest the most popular illuminated manuscripts in the first millennium were
most likely to be Gospel Books. The Romanesque period saw the creation of many huge illuminated complete
Bibles - one in Sweden requires three librarians to lift it. Many Psalters were also heavily illuminated in both this
and the Gothic period. This means such Bibles were used as part of the liturgical service.
The Didactic contribution to Worship:
The very fact that these illuminated manuscripts constitute scripture entails that they have a didactic function.
Some would argue that scripture is the ultimate source of authority in religion, the basis for belief. And as you
will see below, the point of the ‘illumination’ in this art object is not merely to illustrate the books but to draw out
the spiritual elements of the text.
The Devotional and Inspirational functions of Illuminated Manuscripts
Devotional (for the artist):
At the pre-Renaissance period, Bibles and other Sacred books were copied by monks in ‘carols’, small cubicles
set up in the cloisters of the monasteries and great cathedrals in response to the unprecedented need for copies
of books. It is of interest that the monkish copyists traditionally spoke the words aloud as they wrote
them. This oral "chewing" of the text was closely associated with the act of prayer, also helping to identify words
whose meaning might be otherwise obscure in the original manuscripts due to misspelling or excessive use of
contractions. The reading of the Holy text was also considered a form of meditation in which the scribe
savoured Divine wisdom directly from his books, which retained the mystical aura of miraculous objects at this
period.
In a surviving sermon of a twelfth century English Bishop to the monkish copyists of Durham Cathedral is found
this eloquent summation of both the reverent attitude toward illuminated manuscript books and of the materials
used in their production:
"You write with the pen of memory on the parchment of pure conscience, scraped by the
knife of Divine fear, smoothed by the pumice of heavenly desires, and whitened by the
chalk of holy thoughts. The ruler is the Will of God. The split nib is the joint love of God and
our neighbour. Coloured inks are heavenly grace. The exemplar is the life of Christ."
Inspirational (for the observer):
The technique of illumination sought to release the light, the truth, of a text from within. It was a light shone
through the text, not on it. The text thus appeared as the walls of a gothic church. These churches were often
made of porous stone which allowed light to filter through the walls, the light of God was thus all about the
parishioners, it did not shine down on them from above but was the very medium through which they moved. As
Marshall McLuhan writes:
Probably any medieval person would be puzzled at our idea of looking through something.
He would assume that the reality looked through at us, and that by contemplation we
bathed in the divine light, rather than looked at it. (106)
The glosses, learned commentary, border designs and other decorative materials did not "illustrate" the text so
much as reveal its inner qualities; text and decoration existed in a kind of continuum that was the truth of
The Word.