Chapter 4
We owe much of our knowledge of Greek and Roman thought to the early Christians, who copied their texts, over and over, in gorgeous, regimented handwriting.1 These intricate manuscripts may indeed represent the apogee of handwriting in the West. Those who wrote them were primarily monks tasked with working for hours on end. They were not laboring under our modern notions of writing as expression; writing for them was neither creative nor original. The scribal monk’s goal was, in fact, to eradicate any sign of personality and produce multiple copies of the same books. Human copying machines of sorts, medieval scribes proved that handwriting does not, in and of itself, reveal personality or the self.
Being a monastic scribe was not a particularly high-ranking position, although the work was important enough that one Irish law punished the murder of a scribal monk as harshly as the murder of a bishop or even a king. Scribal monks were usually from poor families or men who held strong religious convictions. Scribes were valued, as their products were important to the prestige of the monastery: Their workplace was usually set up in a place that was difficult to attack, should an enemy appear, such as an upper floor. But they were not exalted as scribes were in Egypt; nobles and high-ranking church members, as in Rome, dictated their words to these lesser others. Orality was still far more appreciated than writing in the early medieval era, both as rhetorical skill and as the primary form of communication.
Scribes took dictation for church business, but that was not as laborious as the more important job of making copies of key religious, philosophical, and historical works, which they would do in a scriptorium, the suitably factory-sounding term for the room inside a monastery where monks sat to do their copying. Many classical texts were not deemed worthy of copying in the first centuries after the fall of Rome and were thus lost, but some were preserved by Byzantines and Muslims, as well as individual Christians who valued classical learning, such as Boethius, and a few monasteries, such as those in Ireland, that copied Roman texts. By copying and recopying, the scribes helped Christianity spread across Europe; over centuries, books were brought to monasteries and then copied again by another set of monks.
The labor involved in handwriting a book was intensive. A medieval scribe made his own pens from goose or swan feathers, preferably ones from the bird’s outer left side, as outer feathers were the longest, and the left-side feathers tilted to the right, an angle preferred by monks, who were right-handed by nature or training. Removing the barbs, he would scrape the center spine clean, fashioning a tip by cutting one end of the point at an angle and cutting a slit through it so the shaft could pick up ink. The slit would often open up, and he would use his knife to cut off, re-angle, and re-slit his pen several times an hour. Quill pens did not last long, so he would have to do this process over and over. A typical monk might go through sixty pens in a day.2 Scribes in the medieval era used two hands, one holding the pen, the other the knife they needed to continually sharpen and re-angle their instrument. Monks held their pens with three fingers “extended or slightly curved” (tres digiti scribunt) and two tucked in. The hand rested completely on the little finger; the pen was held almost perpendicular to the paper.
The inks the scribes used were usually made from lampblack mixed with water and either lye or gum. Red ink was used for headings and the first letter of a word. Making red ink was no easy task, as in this description from Theophilus Presbyter, an eleventh-century author of a text on the medieval arts, makes clear:
To prepare white-flake, get some sheets of lead beaten out thin, place them dry in a hollow piece of wood and pour in some warm vinegar or urine to cover them. Then, after a month, take off the cover and remove whatever white there is, and again replace it as at first. When you have a sufficient amount and you wish to make red lead from it, grind this flake-white on a stone without water, then put it in two or three new pots and place it over a burning fire. You have a slender curved iron rod, fitted at one end in a wooden handle and broad at the top, and with this you can stir and mix this flake-white from time to time. You do this for a long time until the red lead becomes visible.3
After the feather plucking and slit making and ink preparing, a scribe still needed to create a writing surface. Throughout the medieval era, that was usually made from parchment, and took weeks to prepare. Parchment, or vellum, is made from animal skin. After an animal—a sheep or a goat, usually—was killed, the skin would be removed and the hair and fur washed off. Then the skin was treated with lime to clean it. After that, it was washed repeatedly to remove the lime, scraped clean with an iron, and stretched on a frame to dry. After this process the two sides would be quite different. The inner side, which had been next to the animal’s flesh, was called the “recto” The “verso,” or back, which used to be next to the fur, was used for the backs of pages. Because animal skin has several layers, an error could be scraped off, another use for that handy left-handed knife. Usually a monk also had a stone on his desk to smooth out the parchment.
Having crafted a page, the monk would rule it, creating horizontal guidelines to keep his letters straight as he wrote across the page, and vertical ones, margins, to make sure the lines didn’t drift too far to the top, the bottom, or the edge. He sat at a sloping desk to accommodate the angle of the pen.
Now ready to write, the monk had to sit and write for at least six hours a day. Monks were not allowed candles to keep them warm, for fear of fire. The monk who ran the scriptorium, the armarius, told the scribe what to copy each day. Accuracy was essential: Monasteries staked their reputations on how accurate their copies were. An armarius sometimes quizzed a scribe on the contents of the book he was copying—called the exemplar—to make sure he understood the text’s meaning. It was tedious, slow work. A typical monk spent some three months—all day, every day—copying one book. Since the world was still primarily oral, the convention, until around the ninth century, was to speak while reading. As a monk wrote on one of his manuscripts, “No one can know what efforts are demanded. Three fingers write, two eyes see. One tongue speaks, the entire body labors.”4
We are not sure exactly when silent reading developed, but in his Confessions, Saint Augustine described being shocked to find his friend, Ambrose, reading without saying the words out loud. The move from spoken to silent reading, like so much in this history, took a very long time, as the culture gradually moved from being primarily oral to being more text based. The expression Verba volent, scripta manent indicates that speech moves and continues but writing stays in place. Aristotle, updating Socrates to some degree, said that letters were “invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent.” 5 Writing conventions of the time show this continued assumption of orality from ancient times, as medieval scribes also did not use spaces between words, punctuation, or paragraphs. Those are elements that enhance the reading experience but are not required in talking, and were only invented once people became habituated to reading.
Once silent reading became the norm, the scriptoria went quiet. The Church started using silence as a form of devotion and discipline, and to this day many monasteries require absolute silence. Gone were the low mumbles of words being recited for memorization from exemplars. And if a monk needed something—more ink or parchment—he would use hand signals to indicate his needs to the armarius. If he needed a new book to work on, he would turn over a page in the air. Sometimes the signals were humorous. If he was copying a Roman book, then considered a pagan text, he would pretend to be a dog and scratch his body, because pagans were regarded as dogs.6
Although the work of the medieval scribe was routine drudgery, the books the monks produced are glorious: Looking at them provides a rare aesthetic experience. While their beauty was in part the result of an extremely hierarchical, rigid society, and although individual monks were never recognized, some did smuggle in bits of individuality. There are manuscripts in which a monk either broke a rule to insert himself into the book, or fixed a mistake and left his mark by so doing. In one manuscript, for example, a passage had been left out. The scribe caught the mistake, wrote the missing passage in the margin of the page, and then drew around it a scene showing it being lifted up to the correct spot in the text.
Other scribes left feisty and hilarious comments hidden in margins and back pages, such as this warning to anyone tempted to steal the manuscript: “If anyone take away [i.e. steal] this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen.” Others commented on their unending work:
“Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose, and very tedious for the scribe.”
“Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text.”
“Thank God, it will soon be dark.”
“Now I’ve written the whole thing. For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”7
Later in the medieval era, the dominance of the scriptoria weakened, literacy became less restricted, and opportunities for secular scribes and non-monastic bookmaking arose. By the thirteenth century, schools and universities had been founded, and they created new centers of manuscript production. Bookshops and stationers opened, and individuals who were neither nobles nor high-ranking Church members started buying books, just as they had in Roman times. The professional scribe, who had not been needed since Roman times, became a new career opportunity.
Professional scribes were paid by the job, so the faster they could write, the more they could make. One scribe in particular, Giovanni Marco Cinico of Parma, was said to be able to copy a book in fifty-two hours and was nicknamed “Velox,” or “Speedy.”8 Scribes could advertise their prowess: The first English advertisement for a scribe was a specimen page showing all the hands he could offer for your book. You could walk into his shop in London and choose your script from among the options. Scribes were also hired by students in the new schools and universities to copy their textbooks, and students lacking funds for an entire book would order their required reading one gathering, or pecia, at a time. A gathering refers to the number of pages held together by a fastener (in this case, rope); today, we use the term “signature”—one very correlated with handwriting—to denote this same gathering of pages for a printer. As the semesters progressed, students would return for more peciae.
By the fourteenth century, a good number of lay scribes were traveling through towns across Europe, selling their services, showing potential customers sample books, and being hired by students and the wealthy alike. Some began to set up workshops with other craftsmen, which led them to organize into guilds. What was once an act of anonymous religious devotion was slowly transformed into an individual craft as people moved from a feudal to an early capitalist society.
As in the monastery, the guilds required a phalanx of skilled workers to make one book. In the fourteenth century, people were ordering books customized to order, somewhat like ordering a high-end handbag or wedding invitation. The customer would decide on the shape of the book—how large the pages would be, how embellished the cover, how many illustrations—and what contents he wanted. The shop might stock some originals for the customer to peruse. Then the bookseller would hire a scribe, as well as an illustrator, to make the book. Eventually the number of skilled trades related to bookmaking increased to include limners, who drew the pictures; tornours, who drew the initial letters and the borders; rubricators, who colored the red letters; flourishers, who did the curlicues in the margins; parchmenters, who made the parchment; and bookbinders, who sewed the peciae together.9 After the book was done, more specialists, called correctors, would go over the book and point out errors. A seven-year apprenticeship was necessary to become a master in any of these trades.
But being able to leave the monastery and work for oneself did not improve the rank of scribes. Lay scribes were no more vaunted than were the scriptoria laborers who worked for God’s glory instead of wages. A professional scribe earned about what a farmhand did, and the work was almost as physical: “It makes the eyes misty, bows the back, crushes the ribs and belly, brings pain to the kidneys, and makes the body ache all over,” as one scribe lamented.10
Scribal monks sublimated their individuality to authority; the books they wrote were unoriginal copies. But the manuscripts do not all look the same, as the scripts monks used changed many times from late antiquity to the Renaissance. Each script, while very prescribed, was distinct from others, and each one carried a particular connotation. Looked at chronologically, these scripts tell a story of change in Europe from Rome to the Renaissance.