Medieval
Manuscripts
Everything You Wanted to
Know But Were Afraid to Ask
English 328 (Fall 2005)
Before the Book...
• There was no paper.
• There was no pencil.
• There was no printing press.
• Word-processors? Ha!
Mesopotamian scribes used
clay tablets and pressed
designs into the wet clay using
a reed stylus.
The script the Sumerians invented and handed down to later
Semitic peoples is called cuneiform, which is derived from two
Latin words: cuneus , which means "wedge," and forma , which
means "shape.” Below, we see a series of cuneiform words for
animals. The scribe would rapidly press the end of the reed into
clay to “stamp” various combinations of shapes.
Advantages?
• Once dried or baked, cuneiforms tablets
were difficult to alter. They were excellent
for records and legal documents.
• Potential to make rubbings of tablets as
copies.
• Cheap and plentiful mud is the building
material.
• Using reed stylus to imprint clay is
speedy--up to 40 ideographs a minute.
Disadvantages?
• Very heavy--up to 2.3 pounds per “page.”
Difficult to transport!
• Melts or weathers away in all climates but
arid ones without firing.
• Breaks if dropped.
To the right, we see broken
remains of a treatise on
divination from lizard
movement (circa 650 BCE)
located in the British Museum
Papyrus scrolls were an
Egyptian alternative. . . .
• Easy to make by pounding or weaving reed
fibers into a mat.
• Lasts centuries in dry climates.
• Absorbs ink readily
But. . . .
Papyrus reeds only grow in hot, dry
climate with seasonal flooding.
Later civilizations used scrolls, which one read by
unrolling them along a horizontal frame. Scrolls
were compact, but unwieldy for rapid transition
from one passage to another. Any damage to a
scroll would affect large swathes of the text,
rather than one page alone.
Image of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Paper would not be
invented until the 12th
century in the Middle
East. It would not be
widely used in Europe
until the early
Renaissance. . . .
Classical and ancient
scribes needed an
alternative way to store
writing. But what?
The answer came in a
new structure and
alternative materials….
The new structure was
the codex. By putting
sheets of papyrus on
top of each other, with
a protective cover on
the top and bottom,
readers had two major
advantages.
A: The hard outer covering
protected the internal pages.
This covering--usually two
pieces of wood or metal with a
narrow spine connecting them-was easier to make than carving
out a hollow scroll tube from
bone, ivory, or wood. It also
remained attached to the book
while in use, providing further
protection. Ancient codices have
a much higher rate of survival
than ancient scrolls do.
As this poor copy of a
biblical scroll of Isaiah
illustrates….
Above: Q Isaiah-b X: Isaiah 57.17-59.8
As an added artistic bonus, this hard
surface gives the book-builder a
chance to decorate…
Left: a jeweled book
cover for a medieval
psalter, made of
hammered gold.
Turning the
literary
object into
even more
valuable art…
Right: Cover of the
Codex Aureus,
which uses over 120
precious and semiprecious stones.
B: As an additional benefit, it was
possible to browse through a codex
or book. One could mark pages,
compare passages, and flip back and
forth.
Scrolls required laborious rolling
and unrolling. In the case of the
Hebrew Torah, it might take a rabbi
twenty or thirty minutes to roll back
to the opening section of Genesis
from the end of Leviticus. It’s hard
to cross-reference scrolls!
The codex was a fantastic
innovation in late Roman and early
Patristic times. But where would
European book-makers find an
equivalent for Egyptian papyrus?
The answer lies with . . .
Our good friend, the
cow….
Cow skin, goat skin, and
sheep skin provide a fairly
flat but somewhat flexible
surface. The skin holds inks,
paints, or even gold foil.
Properly preserved, such
skins could last for long
centuries.
Mind you. This was no
cheap material. Step #1:
You must kill
poor Bessie…
#2: Cut away the skin in a
rectangular pattern
(It’s trickier
than you’d
think, given the
gruesome
geometry
involved in
irregular animal
bodies.)
#3: De-hair the skin by
rubbing off the hair with a
stone or knife.
#4: Treating the pages with
lime and water will help
dissolve any hairs you missed
on the “hair side” of the sheet.
The lime additionally helps
keep bookworms from eating
the sheets. Sprinkling chalk on
the surface and rubbing in the
powder will fill in the pores
and irregularities on the “skin
side” of the sheet.
#5: Measure out a number of
lines for text, and then mark the
lines by using chalk.
Alternatively, “prick” the line by
using a needle to punch a dotted
line across the page.
Left: Natural chalk
deposit from a
seaside cliff.
#6: Fold the skin as
appropriate for the size of
final book.
One fold = folio
Two folds = quarto
Three folds = octavo
Four folds = duodecimo
#7: Sew the “leaves” (pages)
together in bundles or leaflets
called “quires.” Each quire might
contain 8-16 sheets or so. Then
sew the quires together to make a
larger collection of leaves. Each
page requires twenty to forty
stitches.
Scholars commonly refer to medieval
manuscripts not by page numbers, but
by the side of the individual “leaf” or
page.
The back side of a leaf, called the verso
side, appears as the left page of an open
book if you are sitting down to read.
The front side of a leaf, called the recto
side, is on the right.
Thus, the scholarly abbreviation MS
Hengwrt f. 32 v stands for “Hengwrt
Manuscript folio leaf 32 verso side.” If
you work with medieval manuscripts at
a museum or library, these are the sort
of references you will find in catalogs
of medieval manuscripts and citations
of specific manuscripts.
It took up to 100 sheep to
make an average book…. That’s
a significant percentage of a
population’s wealth, when that
leather is desperately needed for
other purposes.
Larger bibles might require
500 sheep. Books were rare and
expensive items in the medieval
period.
Animals hides from goats or
sheep are generically called
parchments. If the skin comes
from a calf, lamb, or kid, it is
technically called vellum. In
practice, the two terms are often
used interchangeably by
scholars--especially after DNA
testing proved in the 1980s that
it’s very hard to distinguish
between them by sight alone.
Now that we have pages and
are ready to write, what do we
use for ink? What for a pen?
Near the Mediterranean,
monks would use squid ink to
make black, blue, or purple
ink.
In Europe, the best black ink came
from oak gall, the seepage that comes
from oak trees infested with larval
parasites.
Right: grub larvae
within a gall in the
quercus rubras
species of red oak
Truly impoverished monasteries would
use ashes mixed with water to make a
thin, diluted ink.
Goose quills, cut with
a knife to a sharp
point, were the
preferred writing
instrument. Every few
pages, the scribe
would need to take a
knife and cut the quill
anew in case ink had
dried on the tip or the
tip had grown dull from
friction.
By now, this book is now becoming a
luxury item. The ink should be
supplemented with flashier materials
in the most valuable manuscripts.
Crushing semi-precious gems or
using rare dyes could result in brilliant
red or blue inks. Gold foil can be
attached with wax to the page, or
molten gold poured (very carefully!) to
create reflective artwork on the page.
Adding gold to a manuscript is
called illumination.
Adding colored ink,
especially red ink, is called
rubrication.
The term initial refers to any
enlarged letter at the beginning
of a section of a book. These
first letters are often elaborately
illuminated or rubricated. For
instance, let us take a look at the
opening of the Psalms, “Beatus
vir,” in Dagulf’s Psalter. . . .
All that stuff that
looks yellowish in
the photograph of
Dagulf’s Psalter is
gold leaf. The
entire manuscript
shimmers
incandescently.
Notice the
elaborate Celtic
knotwork in the
initial “B.”
If there is an animal, scene, or person
inside the letter’s artwork, we have
what is called an inhabited initial.
They range from the grandiose and
the pious to the absurd and the
obscene.
…To pictures of the author himself
Left: The Hoccleve
Portrait of Geoffrey
Chaucer
The borders of medieval manuscript are
also lavishly depicted. Scribes
intentionally left wide margins, partly to
allow the leaves to be trimmed if the
book needed rebinding in a century or
two, but also to leave room for
marginalia. Marginalia includes glosses
(marginal notes added by later readers)
and artwork provided by illuminators
and rubricators.
The Ellesmere manuscript of
Chaucer is particularly lush with
vinery or “vine-work.” The
illuminators probably spent
several days decorating each page.
Remember that much of the
vinery is gold. Here’s a closer look
on the next slide.
The beginning and ending of
each section would be marked
with Latin phrases. “Incipit…”
(“Here begins…”) and “Explicit”
(“Here ends…”).
Altogether, these disparate elements
created an elegant, pleasing organic
unity. But the most beautiful manuscripts
were huge endeavors. A scriptorium of
twenty monks took nearly ten years to
produce the beautiful Utrecht Psalter for
Duke Udolphus. Similar effort must have
gone into the Duc du Barry’s Les Trés
Riches Heures, a gorgeous book of
hours.
And it was all done by patient monks
sitting quietly in scriptoriums, copying
these texts by hand onto cow skin,
relying on faith and goose feathers.
Explicit Presentatio!
Works Consulted:
•
Brown, Michelle P. Understanding Medieval Manuscripts: A Guide to
Technical Terms. London: the British Library, 1994.
•
Cuneiform text containing omens taken from the behavior of lizards, pieced
together from several fragments, c. 650 BC (Photo courtesy of British
Museum) 12 March 2003 as found at
<http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/99/1004/tablet.shtml>. The University of
Pennsylvania hosted the site with the sample cuneiform words as found
September 2 at <http://www.upenn.edu/museum/Games/cuneiform.html>.
•
“Green Gregory.” Image of unknown scribe. 12 March 2003.
<http://www.plymouth.edu/psc/medieval/MedievalHistory.html>.
•
Images of scribe at desk. 12 March 2003.
<http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/subjects/mss/mss.html>.
•
Squid. Photograph by John W. Forsythe. Cephbase. 13 March 2003.
<http://www.cephbase.utmb.edu.>.
•2003 © Dr. L. K. Wheeler