A Companion to the History of the Book (36 page)

Avrin, L. (1991)
Scribes, Script and Books.
London: British Library.

Badawry, A. (1978)
Coptic Art and Archaeology.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bately, J., Brown, M. P., and Roberts, J. (ed.) (1993)

A
Palaeographer’s View: Selected Papers of Julian Brown.
London: Harvey Miller.

Bischoff, B. (1979)
Paläographie des römischen Alter-tums und des abendlandischen Mittelalters.
Berlin: Schmidt (English edn.:
hatin Paleaography,
trans. D. Ganz and D. Ó. Cróinín. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Brown, M. P. (1990)
A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600.
London: British Library (rev. eds: 1994, 1999).

— (1991) “Continental Symptoms in Insular Codi-cology: Historical Perspectives.” In P. Rilck (ed.),
Pergament,
pp. 57–62. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke.

— (1994) “The Role of the Wax Tablet in Medieval Literacy: A Reconsideration in Light of a Recent Find from York.”
British Library Journal,
20 (1): 1–15.

— (1998)
The British Library Guide to Writing and Scripts.
London: British Library.

— (2001) “Female Book-ownership and Production in Anglo-Saxon England: The Evidence of the Ninth-century Prayerbooks.” In C. Kay and L. Sylvester (eds.),
Lexis and Texts in Early English: Papers in Honour of Jane Roberts,
pp. 45–68. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi.

— (2002) “Mercian Manuscripts? The ‘Tiberius’ Group and its Historical Context.” In M. P.

Brown and C. Farr (eds.),
Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe,
pp. 278–91. Leicester: Leicester University Press (rev. edn. 2005).

— (2003)
The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe.
London: British Library (facsimile and commentary volume, also published as a monograph).

— (2005) “The Tower of Babel: The Architecture of the Early Western Written Vernaculars.” In A. J. Duggan, J. Greatrex, and B. Bolton (eds.),
Omnia Disce: Medieval Studies in Memory of Leonard Boyle, O.P.,
pp. 109–28. Aldershot: Ashgate.

— (2006a)
How Christianity Came to Britain and Ireland.
Oxford: Lion Hudson.

— (ed.) (2006b)
In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000.
Washington: Smithsonian Institute.

— (2007a) “The Barberini Gospels: Context and Intertextuality.” In Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts (eds.),
Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragdin.
Turnhout: Brepols.

— (2007b)
Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age.
London: British Library.

Brown, T J. (ed.) (1969)
The Stonyhurst Gospel of St. John.
Oxford: Roxburghe Club. (For the collected papers of T. J. Brown, see Bately et al. 1993.)

Déroche, F. and Richard, F. (1997)
Scribes et manuscrits du Moyen-Orient.
Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Diebold, W. (2000)
Word and Image: A History of Early Medieval Art.
Boulder: Westview.

Gameson, R. (1999)
The Manuscripts of Early Norman England (c. 1066–1130).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

— (ed.) (forthcoming)
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ganz, D. (1990)
Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance.
Sigmaringen: Thorbecke.

— (2002) “Roman Manuscripts in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England.” In
Roma fra Oriente e Occidente,
vol. 49: Spoleto: Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo.

de Hamel, C. (1986) A
History of Illuminated Manuscripts.
London: Phaidon.

— (2001)
The Book: A History of the Bible.
London: Phaidon.

Henderson, G. (1987)
From Durrow to Kells: The Insular Gospel-books 650–800.
London: Thames and Hudson.

Herren, M. (ed.) (1988)
The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks: The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages.
London: University of London Press.

Kauffmann, C. M. (1975)
Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190.
London: Harvey Miller.

Kelly, S. (1990) ‘Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word.” In R. McKittenck (ed.),
The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe,
pp. 36–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kessler, H. (1977)
The Illustrated Bibles from Tours.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kiernan, K. S. (1996)
Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Lapidge, M. (2006)
The Anglo-Saxon Library.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lowden, J. (1997)
Early Christian and Byzantine Art.
London: Phaidon.

McKitterick, R. (1989)
The Carolingians and the Written Word.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (I99O)
The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (ed.) (1994)
Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mayr-Harting, H. (1991)
Ottanian Book Illumination: An Historical Study, 2
vols. London: Harvey Miller.

Muir, B. J. (ed.) (2004)
A Digital Facsimile of Oxford Bodleian Library MS Janius II
(CD-ROM). Oxford: Bodleian Library.

Miltherich, F. and Gaehde, J. (1976)
Carolingian Painting.
London: Chatto and Windus.

Needham, P. (1979)
Twelve Centuries of Bookbinding, 400–400.
New York: Pierpont Morgan Library.

Nersessian, V. (2001)
Treasures from the Ark: 1700 Years of Armenian Christian Art.
London: British Library.

Noel, W. G. (I996)
The Harley Psalter.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nordenfalk, C. (1988)
Early Medieval Book Illumination.
New York: Rizzoli.

Parkes, M. B. (1992)
Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West.
Alder-shot: Ashgate.

Safran, L. (ed.) (1998)
Heaven on Earth: Art and the Church in Byzantium.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Temple, E. (1976)
Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 900— 1066.
London: Harvey Miller.

Turner, D. H., Backhouse, J. M., and Webster, L. (eds.) (1984)
The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, 966–1066.
London: British Museum.

van der Horst, K., Noel, W. G., and Wüstefeld, W. C. M. (eds.) (1996)
The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art.
‘t Goy-Houten: HES & De Graaf

van Regemorter, B. (1992)
Binding Structures in the Middle Ages,
trans. J. Greenfield. London: Maggs.

Walker, R. (1998)
Views of Transition: Liturgy and Illumination in Medieval Spain.
London: British Library.

Webber, T. (1992)
Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral c. 1075-c. 1125.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

— and Smith, C. Delano (2006)
The Cambridge History of Libraries in England,
vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Webster, L. and Backhouse, J. M. (ed.) (1991)
The

Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture
AD
600–900.
London: British Museum.

— and Brown, M. P. (ed.) (1997)
The Transformation of the Roman World
AD
400–400.
London: British Museum.

Weitzmann, K. (1977)
Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination.
London: Chatto and Windus.

Wright, D. H. (1993)
The Vatican Virgil
Berkeley: University of California Press.

14

Parchment and Paper: Manuscript Culture 1100–1500

M. T. Clanchy

Manuscript culture persisted in its essentials across the whole medieval millennium from 500 to 1500: the use of parchment, the privileging of the clergy, the use of the Latin language and of Latin alphabetical script (even for writing vernacular languages), the practice of illumination, the form of the codex itself – all these features persisted, though in varied forms. The period after 1100 witnessed thinner parchment (together with the increasing use of paper), new orders of clergy, the Twelfth-century Renaissance in scholasticism and then Humanist Latin, Gothic and cursive scripts, illuminated books for lay people, and even some challenges to the codex form itself from the use of rolls: one thirteenth-century manuscript of the English lawbook
Glanvill
is in the form of a roll more than eight feet long.

The most obvious difference from the preceding period is that many more writings survive from the years after 1100 and there is no doubt that more writing was being done, both for purposes of secular government and commerce and for religious reasons. By 1200, most scribes were professionals instead of being monks. But the clerical orders reinforced their ideological control over literacy through the new institution of the university, instead of the monastery, and through the Dominican and Franciscan Friars who took the lead from monks in the thirteenth century. Their Bibles and other devotional texts, equipped with finding aids like numbered chapters and indexes, and their summaries of doctrine (notably the
Summa theologiae
of Thomas Aquinas) ensured that Christian teaching in Latin remained at the heart of literacy and book production. The first books to be produced by Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1450s were the Latin Bible and the Psalter (book of Psalms) complete with all their Latin abbreviations.

Beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, increasing numbers of lay people, particularly among the aristocracy, became owners of books and patrons of writers. Most significantly, women, or more accurately “ladies” in social terms, came to possess personal prayer-books in the form of Books of Hours, which imitated the liturgical books used by the clergy. These books had the potential to familiarize their owners with reading and to enable them to educate their children in the elements of literacy. Women patrons were also responsible in part for the development of books in vernacular languages, notably French and German, in the twelfth century. By the fourteenth century, the volume of writing in vernaculars was beginning to rival the Latin learning of the clergy. The growing number of literates and the increasing volume and variety of book production by 1400 motivated inventors to experiment with ways of reproducing texts through printing. The essential point is, however, that a vigorous book-using culture was the precursor to the invention of printing rather than its consequence. The Middle Ages had invented the book in its latinate Western form and created its readership, clerical and lay, and male and female. By 1300, “everyone knew someone who could read” (Orme 2001: 240) and there were books in every church and every village.

In 1492 Johannes Trithemius, the abbot of Sponheim, published his polemic
In Praise of Scribes
in reaction to the success of the printing press, which was then some forty years old. “How long will printing something on paper last?,” he demanded. “At the most a paper book could last for two hundred years,” was his answer (Clanchy 1983: 10). The abbot contrasted the apparent superficiality of the paper printed book with the permanence of “writing on parchment which can last for a thousand years.” Parchment, in its choicest form as calfskin (vellum), had indeed been the ideal material for making the greatest illuminated manuscripts over the centuries. Notable examples in the period 1100–1500 are the giant Bible of San Vito in Pisa in the twelfth century, the Moralized Bibles of St. Louis in the thirteenth, the Luttrell Psalter in the fourteenth, and the dozen or so luxurious Books of Hours made for John, duke of Berry (at the time of his death in 1416 he had three hundred illuminated manuscripts in his library).

Scribes and their Status

As a monk, the abbot of Sponheim could look back over a millennium to the writing of the Benedictine Rule, with its provisions for “divine reading”
(lectio divina)
which had linked monks so closely with books and book production. The greatest Benedictine abbot of the twelfth century, Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, had likened the act of writing to work in the fields: “The pages are ploughed by the divine letters and the seed of God’s word is planted in the parchment, which ripens into crops of completed books” (Clanchy 1983: 10). The word which Peter used for “completed” here
is perfectus :
the monastic scribe produced “perfect books.” In Peter’s metaphor of plowing, the scribe is understood to incise the words of Scripture into the parchment with the point of his quill pen, whereas the abbot of Sponheim criticizes printing as an essentially superficial process which stamps text onto perishable paper.

In reality, however, most scribes never had been monks sowing the seed of God’s word, but scriveners and clerks doing paid work. “I neither meddle with plow nor harrow,” Thomas Hoccleve declared. He insisted that scribal work was not some sort of game; it was arduous labor, as “we stoop and stare upon the sheep’s skin” (Hoccleve 1981: 35). A good depiction of a scribe stooping over his work occurs in one of the Moralized Bibles made for St. Louis (Alexander 1992: 56). Working in the king’s Chancery in the 1400s, Hoccleve wrote on parchment, whereas paper was making inroads into the book trade by 1400. In England, the Red Book of King’s Lynn (a legal register) and the court book of Lyme Regis are exceptional in using paper before 1310; both are ports where paper could be obtained. Of the eighty-three manuscripts of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales,
all written in the fifteenth century, 61 percent are on parchment, 34 percent are on paper, and 5 percent are mixed. In the long term, paper became much cheaper than parchment, but this was not the case until the industry had developed.

By elaborating the sacred page of Scripture, monks had sanctified writers as much as books. This ideal is exemplified in the twelfth century in the thinking of Peter the Venerable and the full-page portrait of Eadwine in the Canterbury Psalter. He is praised as
princeps scriptorum,
“the prince of writers” (or scribes) (Gibson 1992: 180). In the twelfth century there were likewise distinguished nun scribes. Guda who “wrote and painted this book” has her portrait, presumably a self-portrait though much smaller than Eadwine’s, in a collection of Latin homilies (Alexander 1992: 20). An anonymous
scriptrix
(a female scribe) is known from St. Mary’s Abbey in Winchester in the twelfth century. Nuns as makers of books are best documented in the twelfth century in Bavaria: at Wessobrunn, the recluse Diemut was specially commemorated as the maker “with her own hands” of the abbey’s library (Beach 2004: 32); more than a dozen of her books still exist. A copy of Isidore (a work of secular learning) from Munsterbilsen in Westphalia declares: “these are the names of those who have written this book”; eight names of nuns follow (Robinson 1997: 88). The German tradition of nuns as writers continues. A liturgical book made for the convent of Rulle in Westphalia is inscribed in Latin: “The venerable and devout virgin Gisela de Kerzenbroeck wrote, illuminated, notated, paginated and decorated with golden letters and beautiful images this excellent book in her own memory in the year of the Lord 1300” (Oliver 1996: 109). This seems admirably specific, but it has been questioned whether Gisela did do all this, as the book contains a variety of scripts and artwork.

The use of Latin as the standard language of literacy was another element in the unbroken continuity of medieval manuscript culture that linked the ancient world with the present. Latin continued to be taught, as it had always been taught, through the Augustan classical authors, especially Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid, and Latin school texts are among the commonest books to survive from the Middle Ages. Some of the most original Latin prose and verse was composed in the Twelfth-century Renaissance, in the letters of Bernard of Clairvaux for example and the anthology of poems and music in the
Carmina Burana
codex. From the fourteenth century, in Florence in particular, schoolboys’ books have survived. “This book is finished, now let’s break the master’s bones! This book is Galeazzo’s, a good boy. I have written this in 1335” (Gehl 1993: 48). This is part of the colophon of an anthology of Latin verses copied out by Galeazzo. The process of copying meant boys compiled their own textbooks, while committing the texts to memory and perfecting their handwriting. (This sort of formal education in Latin was only for boys and not girls.) At the same time, Latin proved the perfect tool for the scholastic philosophers and lawyers. An important element in writing Latin, which, though developed earlier, had generally been firmly established by 1100 and was passed on to the vernacular languages, was the practice of separating the words by consistently sized spaces. This enabled the reader to scan the text silently instead of identifying each word by pronouncing it out loud.

Just when this medieval Latin seemed to be getting set in its ways, Petrarch and the Italian Humanists reinvigorated classical Latin and literally gave it a new look. A letter from Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence from 1375 to 1406, or Poggio Bracciolini actually looked different, as the Humanists created a new script and new punctuation in the Italic letter forms which are standard today on computer screens and in printed books. Petrarch in 1373 had criticized the division of labor for producing books in the commercial workshops, the greatest of which were in Paris. “There are those who prepare the parchment,” he described, “others who write the books, others again who correct them, others who illustrate them, and finally still others who bind them and decorate the outside surfaces” (Petrucci 1995: 193). He wanted Humanist scholars to restore the integrity of books, though not by reviving monastic illuminated manuscripts. Instead, scholars who had made themselves into exquisite scribes and designers, like Poggio Bracciolini, copied the books of the classical authors themselves (particularly Cicero in Poggio’s case). Poggio’s pages have a few colored initials but no other ornament. Their beauty depends on the whiteness of the parchment, the spacing of the lines and words, and the elegant simplicity of the roman capitals and lower-case script. The Humanists caused books in black-letter Gothic script (“bookhand” as it is often called) to look old-fashioned and barbarically obscure; Germany proved most resistant to the new style. With their ideal of a Renaissance reinvigorating the roots of classical culture, the Humanists were the most successful propagandists there have ever been in the book business.

Books in Vernacular Languages

Furthest in distance and in spirit from the Latin manuscripts of the Italian Humanists are the Icelandic books in Old Norse, which survive in relatively large numbers from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Icelanders, like all Scandinavians, had a dual literacy in runes and alphabetical script. Because they had two forms of vernacular writing and a relatively egalitarian society in which clerics had little power, non-Latin literacy was probably more widespread here than anywhere in Europe, with the possible exception of the great Italian cities like Milan, Florence, and Siena. The book that survives most frequently is the
Jónsbók
law code. Deluxe manuscripts of this, with miniatures in tones of red and green and lines of black script consistently ruled, are not unlike German or English vernacular manuscripts. Texts of Iceland’s great medieval literature of the sagas are less common; some of these books are very plain in appearance, like the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda dating from the late thirteenth century. Undecorated manuscripts intended for reading aloud are a common feature of early vernacular literature.

In defending writing in the vernacular in the 1300s, Dante had argued that anything could be as well expressed in Italian as in Latin; the sun was setting on Latin’s long day, now that the future of literature lay with the vernaculars. In the breadth of vision and diction of the
Divina commedia
he demonstrated what Italian could achieve. A generation later Boccaccio showed in the
Decameron
that the vernacular could be as effective for storytelling as for poetry. The writing of Italian had come late among the latinate languages; Spanish and French in various forms had begun developing literatures two centuries earlier. The most notable of these twelfth-century writings are the poems of the first troubadours (beginning with William IX, duke of Aquitaine), the Poem of the Cid, the Song of Roland, and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Like Dante, Chrétien had explicitly challenged the supremacy of Latin. No one now says anything much about the Greeks and Romans, he claimed in the 1170s, “there is no more word of them; their glowing embers are extinguished” (Clanchy 1993: 205).

Vernacular authors secured the fame of their books not primarily through arguments with Latinists but by the quality of their work. Often the earliest surviving manuscripts are modest in appearance, as has already been seen with Iceland’s books. The earliest manuscript of the Song of Roland, probably dating from before 1150, is a small book written on unbleached parchment without decoration and with inconsistent spacing and ruling. It has been compared with the books used by students in the schools and nascent universities (it may have been written in Oxford). A writer in the French vernacular before 1150 was doing something novel and it would be appropriate if he emanated from a university environment (this is the time when universities first develop at Paris, Oxford, and Bologna). The somewhat amateur appearance of the Oxford manuscript may be a consequence of the writer doing something unfamiliar.

Dante had argued that vernacular literature must be illustrious and courtly if it were to measure up to Latin. This was achieved by making superb illuminated manuscripts of the French romances in the thirteenth century, especially the stories of the Holy Grail, and of the writings of Dante and Boccaccio in the fourteenth. These books contain numerous and detailed illustrations of the narrative so that the lay aristocrat, whether male or female, who owned the book, could study them during the reading or recap on the story afterwards. Dante’s
Inferno
proved popular with illustrators because of the details of the punishments. The most magnificent patron and creator of vernacular writing was Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84). The principal manuscript (now in the Escorial in Madrid) of his
Cantigas
(songs) in praise of the Virgin Mary contains more than 1,250 miniatures arranged six to a page with explanatory captions. These are paintings of exceptional quality unified on the page by a strong decorative design. In their narrative clarity and coherence, they turn the genre of the illuminated manuscript into something like a technicolor film. Alfonso was also responsible for producing the multivolume lawbook, the
Libro de las leyes,
and an anthology of chronicles in Castilian comprising a history of Spain.