Manuscript books began to supplant papyrus scrolls in Antiquity. Rare surviving books of the Fourth Century are surprisingly similar in general appearance to works written a millennium later. 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. As civilization progressed and the demand for books became greater, later works were executed by pupils of the Renaissance "writing master", who taught the craft to apprentices. Some early students' copybooks survive as witnesses to the difficulties of mastering this exacting skill.
These early books were mostly written on vellum, a fine grade of goat, calf, or sheep skin. Fortunately for collectors, it is an extremely durable substance which generally survives the centuries well. It was an expensive material, however, and the production of a complete Bible, for example, might require years of a scribe's time, and the skins of several hundred animals, thus making books a rare and expensive commodity. The Medieval practice of autumn livestock butchering, to conserve fodder for the winter, is thought to have been the primary source of skins used in the production of books. How the skins were prepared has been recorded in a monastic account of the Twelfth century; they were alternately soaked in clear water, immersed in a strong lime solution, then scraped of hairs, and sun-dried. The process was repeated over the course of several weeks until the vellum became sufficiently clean and flexible for use. As natural animal products there are wide variations in texture, thickness, and tone, and almost all books exhibit a few small natural flaws in the leaves, around which the copyist skillfully worked his text.
The art of paper-making was first utilized by the Chinese, who appear to have discovered the craft as early as the 2nd century B.C. Paper first became available to the rest of the world in the mid- 8th century, as Arab contacts with the Chinese at Samarkand divulged the secrets of its manufacture, from fibrous vegetable matter. Initially flax and linen were the favored materials in the west; in later years the rarer cotton was also used. The first European center of paper-making was in Moorish Spain in the 12th century. From there Italy became the first great center of the paper-making industry, its factories beginning in 1276 and supplying much of Europe's needs as late as the 15th century. In Germany, France, and the Netherlands there also developed thriving paper-making concerns by 1400. Concurrent with the rise of printing in the last half of the 15th century was the supplanting of vellum by paper in the making of books, with the former all but abandoned within a century.
Pens used by the copyists were generally natural quills, plucked from geese, crows, or turkeys, or later, iron pens. Inks exist in two major kinds. One is black encaustic, an acidic iron gall mixture that etches into the vellum and thus fixes itself ineradicably. The other and more often employed ink is a mixture of common lampblack, a fixing agent and a medium such as oil or water. It is brown in color and, although it has a slight tendency to flake off the vellum under humid condition, MSS written in this common ink are still fully legible today. Colored inks were most often supplied in red and blue, though oils in all colors were available and used in the most sumptuous presentation volumes for royalty and the clergy. Gold accents were sometimes added to the MSS, in two forms, one of gold leaf, which still retains its flashing brilliance in extant manuscripts, and the other as gold ink, which adds a lovely highlight to the initial letter decorations.
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 Bibles, Psalters, Books of Hours, and Breviaries. Manuscript books stating the name of the copyist and exact year of their production exist, but they are the rare exception rather than the rule, as our modern notions of self and time were irrelevant to the Medieval world view. The works are, generally, attributed by the style of the script and rubrication (ornamentation), which are quite unique to their time and place of origin and can readily be recognized. Thus surviving works can be attributed with authority to the correct city or region, and to their period within a date range of a generation or so. Even after the advent of printing, traditional manuscript books, especially Hours, continued to be produced for several generations, and these are readily discernible from their ancestors of earlier times.
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 MSS 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 savored 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 neighbor. Coloured inks are heavenly grace. The exemplar is the life of Christ."
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 of books immensely benefitted mankind, helping to usher in the freedom of thought and material prosperity that define the modern world.
Paris remained a center of the production of handwritten religious books until about 1540, due in no small part to the clout of the scribes' guilds. Catholic Spain was the final bastion of the old ways, where Antiphonals 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 handpainted Uncial initial letters and other embellishments to the printed texts.
| ©:2009 Phil Barber philb@historicpages.com |