Books, Education, and Leisure in the Late Middle Ages
The book of the late Middle Ages, between roughly 1300 and 1500, was the most expensive manufactured object most people would ever handle, and the most likely to survive in the archaeological record. This section traces that book through the three great changes of the period: the consolidation of the professional bookshop in university cities like Paris and Bologna; the rise of the lay stationer; and the printing of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible at Mainz in the 1450s. It then turns to the institution that produced and consumed most of these books, the medieval university — a self-governing corporation of masters and students that by 1400 had spread from Bologna (founded 1088) and Paris (recognised by the bull Parens scientiarum of 1233) to more than fifty foundations across Europe, including the studia generalia at Oxford, Cambridge, Padua, Salamanca, and Kraków. The third article surveys the leisure of the laity: the chivalric tournament as codified in the Ordonnance of Philip VI of France in 1314, the hunt and falconry, and the indoor pursuits — chess, tables, dice, and the moralised chess-problem of Jacobus de Cessolis — that filled the long winter evenings.
The book from scriptorium to printshop
For most of the period, the manuscript book was the product of a scriptorium, where monks or, increasingly, lay professionals worked on prepared parchment under a librarian’s eye. By the fourteenth century the centre of gravity had moved. The University of Paris had a recognised trade of libraires organised in a guild with statutes of 1314; the booksellers of the Rue Saint-Jacques ran the pecia system, in which a master text was broken into sections and copied in parallel by stationers who rented out exemplars to students. Bologna, Oxford, and Montpellier ran comparable systems. M. B. Parkes, in Scribes, Scripts and Readers (1991), showed how the layout of the university textbook — the running gloss, the marginal note, the alphabet index — was an answer to the needs of scholastic reading; the page itself was a teaching instrument.
The second half of the fifteenth century brought the printing press. Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible (c. 1455) was followed by a flood of editions: 150 to 200 incunable editions of the Latin grammarian Donatus appeared before 1500, and the presses of Mainz, Strasbourg, Venice, Paris, and London produced somewhere between eight and twenty million books before 1501, a figure that begins to be commensurate with the manuscript output of a single large monastery over a century. The census of incunables edited by the British Library and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke and the ISTC, is the working tool for the field. The Elizabeth Eisenstein–Roger Chartier debate over whether print was an agent of change or a reinforcer of older patterns remains the framing question for the period after 1450.
The university as a self-governing corporation
The medieval university was, in origin, a universitas magistrorum et scholarium — a sworn corporation of teachers and students that negotiated with bishop, pope, and city for the right to teach, to examine, and to grant the licentia docendi. Paris, the model for northern Europe, secured its first papal privileges in 1233 and served as the training ground for the arts masters whose cursus shaped the seven liberal arts. Bologna, the model for the south, was built around the faculty of law, with Irnerius’s recovery of the Digest in the late eleventh century and the work of Accursius’s Glossa Ordinaria (c. 1230–60). The curriculum of the arts faculty — grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music — was anchored in the older trivium and quadrivium, and shaped the literate Europe that Michael Clanchy traces in From Memory to Written Record (1979).
The high point of the late medieval university is the early fifteenth century, when the nominalist critique of William of Ockham, the physics of Jean Buridan at Paris, and the new astronomy of the Merton calculators (Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, Richard Kilvington) joined the humanist studia humanitatis of Florence and Padua. The new foundations — St Andrews (1413), Turin (1404), Heidelberg (1386), Cologne (1388), Erfurt (1392), and Rostock (1419) — show how a papal bull of foundation and a chancellor’s oath of allegiance translated into concrete teaching, and the foundation of the University of Glasgow in 1451 marks the northernmost point of the expansion.
Leisure: tournament, hunt, and board
The leisure of the lay aristocrat, like his dress, was a public performance. The tournament of the fourteenth century — the mêlée at the barriers, the joust with lance and shield, the prize of the heralds — was regulated by the ordonnances of Philip VI in 1314 and Edward III in 1342, and recorded in the armorials of the heralds, the jousts painted by the Limbourg brothers in the Très Riches Heures (c. 1412–16), and the prose chronicles of Froissart. The hunt was governed by the treatises of the Livre de chasse of Gaston Phébus, count of Foix (1387–89), with its eighty-six illustrated chapters on the pursuit of stag, boar, wolf, and hare. Inside the hall, the aristocratic game was chess — the moralised De ludo scaccorum of Jacobus de Cessolis (c. 1300) being the most widely circulated manual — and the popular dice-and-tables games that the church repeatedly tried to ban, and that the parchment and alabaster pieces of the Middleham and Westminster hoards preserve in the ground.
The best synthesis is in the Cambridge History of Everyday Life in Medieval Europe (C. M. Woolgar, ed., 2018), which treats the leisure of the laity as part of the wider history of consumption. The economic framing comes from Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (1989), who shows that the mise-en-scène of the tournament, the painted panel, the leather-bound romance, and the silver-gilt cup were all items of conspicuous consumption that the post-plague labour market made newly affordable for the gentry.
Articles in this section
- The medieval book and the late medieval scriptorium
- Education in the medieval university
- Games, sports, and tournaments in the late Middle Ages