Exceprt from "
Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen," Peter K. Yu.
Michigan State Law Review, Vol.1 (2006 )
The Rule
of St. Benedict...“contained a specific instruction that a certain number of hours in each day were to be devoted to labour in the scriptorium. The monks who were not yet competent to work
as scribes were to be instructed by the others.”
Notwithstanding the Church’s active participation, the production of knowledge
remained parochial. The copying of books
was also slow, tedious, and very time-consuming; it took years for a scribe to
complete “a particularly fine manuscript with colored initials and miniature
art work.” When Bishop Leofric took over
the Exeter Cathedral in 1050, he found only five books in its library. Despite immediately establishing a
scriptorium of skilled workers, his crew managed to produce only sixty-six books
in the twenty-two years before the
bishop’s death in 1072. Likewise, although the Library of Cambridge
University had a remarkable collection of 122 books in 1424, it “labored for a
half-century to increase the number to 330.”
To make the copying task even more difficult, the working conditions in monasteries
were “far-from-productive.” For
instance, “[t]he weather might be uncomfortable, the light poor..., and the
text difficult to read or tedious to contemplate.” In addition, monks had to “concentrate on
material they [might] not have been
interested in—or even understood,” and they often feared that they would make
an error or would not be able to complete a given work within the specified
time. Under these conditions, it is,
therefore, no surprise that monks sometimes jotted remarks about their
frustration and relief in the margins, or the colophons, of their
manuscripts. Examples of these remarks
included “Thin ink, bad vellum, difficult text,” “Thank God, it will soon be
dark,” and “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a
drink.”
.....
Because the monks focused on the process, rather than the contents, it was not uncommon
to find them writing over materials on the same parchment or copying “useless
texts in illegible scripts.” After all,
the goal of such writing assignments was not to produce or preserve knowledge,
but rather to keep their hands and minds busy and away from sins or idle
thoughts. By the twelfth century, towns emerged, and communities grew in size and
wealth. As a result of the spread of
literacy, the demand for books increased dramatically, and a large number of new texts appeared. “[M]onastic libraries [soon] found it more and
more difficult to keep their collections up to date, and they began employing secular scribes and illuminators
to collaborate in book production.” Meanwhile, schools became independent from cathedrals, to which they
were originally attached, and guilds of
lecturers and students gathered to form universities. With the changing lifestyle and the emergence
of new educational institutions,
[i]t became more and more common for people to want to own books themselves, whether
students seeking textbooks or noble
women desiring to own beautifully illuminated Psalters. By 1200 there is quite good evidence of
secular workshops writing and decorating manuscripts for sale to the
laity. By 1250 there were certainly bookshops
in the big university and commercial towns, arranging the writing out of new
manuscripts and trading in second-hand copies. By 1300 it must have been exceptional for a monastery to make its own
manuscripts: usually, monks bought their books from shops like anyone else,
although this is not quite true of the Carthusians or of some religious
communities in the Netherlands.
As universities began to rely on scribes
to produce and reproduce texts, supervision by the university faculty became
necessary. Ordinances, therefore, were
developed “to regulate the work of the copyists, to lay down the minimum
requirements of formal presentation and substantial correctness, and to prescribe the selling price of duly certified copies.”....
“The English book trade...developed not around the universities, as on the Continent, but in London,
where the stationers formed a guild as early as 1403.” This guild was known famously as the
Stationers’ Company.... Despite the professional growth, medieval
scribes continued to be treated as mere laborers.... “The
average scribe in the later Middle Ages...had to work three
to seven days for the sum earned in one day by a common foot-soldier slogging
through Scotland in King Edward’s army.”
Nevertheless, the commercial book trade continued
to flourish in major European cities, and
the number of scribes and
illuminators increased substantially
as a result. “By the late thirteenth
century in Paris (a century later in England)...[t]he names
of scribes, illuminators, parchment-makers and binders...[can be found] in
tax records, though few names can be linked with surviving books.”
Hat-tip to Medievalists.net.
Image: The Monk Eadwine; c. 1150
Illumination on parchment, 457 x 330 mm; Trinity College, Cambridge.
The monk Eadwine, the prince of scribes (as the inscription calls him) is shown in this mid-twelfth-century portrait in a luxury glossed Psalter written at the cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. Eadwine is working with a pen and a knife together.
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