TAKE a moment, and, in your mind’s eye, conjure up an image of a medieval scriptorium. What do you see? The chances are, there will be cowled monks, hunched over rows of wooden desks, leaning forward in concentration. There may be hushed silence, or the muted sound of Gregorian chanting in the background. Possibly the sound of quills scratching laboriously over the parchment. Brilliant sunlight might stream down from the upper windows, or maybe a multitude of candles light the shadows of a cold stone room.
You may envisage rolls of fresh parchment, arranged on to shelves by size, lining the corners of the room. Perhaps a stern librarian sits at the head of the room overseeing the scribal activity, with a pot of feathered quills on his desk. You may imagine painters and illuminators working in a different part of the room from the scribes, perhaps in some orderly production line, with the freshly scribed parchment being passed on to the illuminator to decorate with gold.
In reality, the making of a medieval manuscript was dirty, smelly, often boring, and certainly back-breaking. It involved blood, urine, excrement, and earwax. From the visceral process of preparing animal skin, to the wrist-straining tedium of endless writing, to the foul-smelling ingredients of illumination and to the finger-numbing effort of sewing tough parchment together — making a manuscript was an act of hard labour.
Consider all the work hours that would have gone into the production of one single medieval book in Europe. First, you would need good-quality animal skin for the parchment. For a manuscript of reasonable length (say, 120 folios/240 pages), you would need about 20 animal skins that were not scarred or covered in holes from the flayer’s blade. Then you would need to prepare the parchment, which would take a good few weeks.
For the ink, you would need oak galls, either foraged from local oak trees or bought at the market, plus ferrous sulphate (which would have been relatively easy to source in Europe). The last ingredient, gum arabic, would require sophisticated trade links, to import the gum from Africa or Asia. Alternatively, you could use a local plant gum as substitute. The quills you would collect in the months of June and July, when the geese and swans shed their feathers, and store them to naturally harden over the year.
THEN consider the time it took to copy out the book by hand. As a scribe, you would first have to be trained to write a decent-looking script, in the style of the religious house you belonged to. Then, hour after hour bent over a desk, you would meticulously form words, with hands, back and eyes aching, and intestines constantly cramped. It’s no wonder that some scribes could not keep their misery from spilling onto the page, complaining bitterly of their lot in added notes in the margins.
But still the manuscript was far from done, even with the writing finished. The coloured initials would need to be added, and the images sketched out before adding the ingredient that would make it truly precious — gold. First, you would need to prepare a mixture of gesso, as a base for the gold. The gesso is full of unpleasant-smelling ingredients, such as egg glair, fish glue, and garlic juice, and you need to apply it quickly before it sets. If the gesso had too many bubbles in it, you would simply add some earwax to smooth it out.
Even though it sets quickly, you then need to wait at least 12 hours for the gesso to harden thoroughly before applying wafer-thin sheets of gold. This is a skilled and delicate operation that requires complete stillness and concentration, otherwise you end up losing most of it by the slightest air current.
AlamyA Spanish manuscript prepared for Alfonso X in 1283 shows monks at work in a scriptorium
Only when the gold has settled and been polished to a shine with a dog or boar tooth is it ready for the next stage. The medieval palette consisted partly of locally grown or easily made pigments, but also of incredibly dangerous substances and metamorphic rocks from far across the sea. The time, skill, and networks needed to source the variety of pigments were immense. For example, madder — a plant grown easily in Europe — needs at least three years in the soil to develop its roots, and another year to let the roots dry out. Only then can you extract a decent reddish pigment.
And lapis lazuli (otherwise known as ultramarine) needs to travel all the way from Afghanistan, traded from merchant to merchant, before finding its way into monasteries on the western side of the known world. Orpiment, otherwise known as auripigmentum (gold paint), was understood to be deadly, yet continued to be prized for its golden hue. So, once you have sourced all your pigments, you grind them into powder with a stone, then mix with a binder before pouring them into pots or shells. You would then select a paintbrush made from the hair of a squirrel or badger or cat, and now, finally, you are ready to paint.
EVEN though you now have your text, your shining gold, and your beautiful images, it is still not complete, for it needs to be bound together. The text block is first sewn on to alum-tawed leather supports with a thick needle piercing through the tough parchment. Once sewn together, you need wooden boards for the covers. The wood has to be a hard wood, such as oak or cherry, and shaped into the right thickness. Small channels then need to be carved in the boards for the alum-tawed leather supports to thread through, joining the text block to the wood.
But it’s pretty dull just having wooden boards as covers; so you might want to dress it up a bit in leather or cloth, or even jewels or embroidery. If you want leather, it might mean a trip to the smelliest part of town where the tanner worked. Buckets of dog excrement collected freely from the streets would be lying around there, ready to be used to soften the animal skins, and the stench would greet you long before you arrived. But — you’ve now got a nice red leather cover over your boards, and the manuscript is nearly finished.
The problem with parchment, though, is that it doesn’t want to lie flat; it wants to spring open (even between thick wooden boards); so it needs something to keep it shut. The last step in the process is a trip to the blacksmith to fashion an iron book clasp or two. Once they are attached to your boards and snapped into place — that’s it! You have a medieval manuscript.
AlamyInitial “S” from a Gradual (Salve sancta parens) showing a Madonna and Child (c.1370-74) by Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci (ink, tempera, and gold on vellum). The Gradual was produced in the scriptorium of the Monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence
Just consider that book in your hand and its utter uniqueness in a multitude of ways. No other manuscript will ever be made of the same parchment. It came from animals that were once grazing in a field, and the parchment will still contain traces of the living being, with skin imperfections, pores, and veins often still visible. No other manuscript will be written with the same quill, and very few will be written with the same batch of ink and by the same scribe.
No other manuscript will have the same pattern of mistakes, erasures, wax drips, and squashed insects. No other manuscript will be painted in exactly the same way, using exactly the same pigments. No other manuscript will be sewn together and attached to its covers in precisely the same way as yours.
No matter how sophisticated book production became in the medieval period, there would never be two identical manuscripts. Every medieval manuscript is a single unique object, largely sourced from natural products and produced completely by human hands, and it contains a wealth of physical information about the time in which it was produced. Think of all the other hands that have been involved in its creation — from the parchment maker to the scribe, to the illuminator, to the painter, to the bookbinder, to the woodcutter — before it is held in your hands.
The physical structure of any book means that all its secrets are hidden away between its covers, only to be revealed when you open it. This is even truer of a medieval manuscript, and the reason why the written words and images remain so vibrant today is because they are preserved in this ideal packaging.
This is an edited extract from The Medieval Scriptorium: Making books in the Middle Ages by Sara J. Charles, published on 19 August by Reaktion Books at £16.99, (Church Times £15.29); 978-1-78914-916-6. Read a review here.