Late Middle Ages

The medieval book and the late medieval scriptorium

The late medieval book was, for most of its readers, a manuscript. Until the late fifteenth century, every book — every Bible, every missal, every chronicle, every romance, every postilla of theology — was copied by hand, and the copying itself was a slow, collaborative, and expensive business. The scriptorium of the monastery, the chancery of the cathedral, the university stationer’s shop, and the lay workshop of the great cities each contributed to the output, and each left its traces on the page. The wider setting is sketched in the overview of books, education, and leisure; the learned reader is treated in Education in the medieval university; the vernacular literature that filled the late medieval library is in Chaucer and the birth of English literature and Mystery plays and medieval theatre.

Parchment, paper, and the materials of the book

The substrate of the late medieval book in northwestern Europe was, by a wide margin, parchment — animal skin, usually of sheep, calf, or goat, scraped, dehaired, and stretched. The term vellum is properly reserved for calfskin, but the two are often used interchangeably, and a well-prepared parchment of a single deacon-skin folio might take the skins of two or three young animals. The making of parchment was its own craft, centred in a handful of cities (Toulouse, Lincoln, and the Rhineland were notable), and the parcheminier of the étape is documented in the Parisian craft records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Christopher de Hamel’s A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (1986) and Erik Kwakkel’s work on late medieval book production both devote close attention to the skin, the hair side and the flesh side, the difference between the older uterine vellum and the cheaper uterine skin of the post-Black Death period.

Paper was a complementary material. It came to Europe through Arab Sicily and Spain, and the first paper mills north of the Alps were in the 1390s — at Nuremberg in 1390, at Ravenna in 1393. The first generation of paper in northern Europe was used for ordinary business records: the registres of the châtellenies, the notarial protocolli of the Italian communes. By the late fifteenth century paper was used for printed books and for the cheaper chirographa and libelli of the studium, but the high-grade manuscript book — the great choir book, the gift Bible, the de luxe Psalter — was still on parchment. The historian Peter Stallybrass has shown how the choice of substrate was closely tied to the status of the book in question.

The other materials were the ink, the pen, and the rule. The ink was iron-gall, made by mixing oak-gall extract (or apples of ink) with iron sulphate and a binding agent such as gum arabic. The pen was the quill, usually goose, prepared and cut by the scribe. The page was ruled in lead or in drypoint, and the lines determined the layout. M. B. Parkes’s Scribes, Scripts and Readers (1991) is the standard study of the technical practice; the older E. A. Lowe’s Codices Latini Antiquiores (1934–1971) is the indispensable catalogue of script types before 800, and Albert Derolez’s The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books (2003) carries the work into the late Middle Ages.

The craft of the scriptorium

A scriptorium in the strict sense was the writing room of a monastery, set apart from the rest of the buildings and lit, ideally, by north-facing windows. The scriptorium of Cluny in the eleventh century, of Canterbury’s Christ Church under Eadwine in the twelfth, of St Albans under the abbot Paul of Caen in the late eleventh, of the great Cistercian houses of the late twelfth, and of the Benedictine houses of the southern Rhineland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are the great examples. The scriptorium of a small monastery of a dozen monks might be modest — a single room, a handful of desks, a few scribes — and the scriptorium of a great house such as Cluny or St Denis could employ dozens of scribes, a librarius in charge of the chest, an armarius in charge of the lending library, and a corrector who checked the copy against the exemplar.

The process was slow. The scribe read the exemplar, took his quire, and began to write. He would punctuate lightly (a punctus, a virgula, later a punctus elevatus); he would mark the rubric, the heading, in red; he would leave space for the litterae notabiliores, the large opening letters, and the decoration. He would produce a quaternion (four folded sheets giving eight leaves) and pass it to the rubricator for the chapter headings, the running titles, and the initialia. The illuminator would then add the large initials and the miniatures. The whole process, for a folio Bible, might take a year for a single scribe, longer for the illuminator’s work. The two-speed production of the late medieval book — the text written quickly, the decoration added later — is well documented in Laura Light’s catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s manuscripts and in the older F. Wormald and T. S. R. Boase work on English illumination.

The scriptorium of the late Middle Ages was increasingly an urban workshop rather than a monastic one. The Parisian book trade of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the best-documented: the Rue du Fouarre and the Rue Saint-Jacques were lined with the shops of the stationarii, the libraires, and the enlumineurs, and the university controlled the pecia system, in which a single exemplar of a set book was broken into quires that were rented out seriatim to the students. The Bolognese notaries, the Florentine botteghe, and the English household offices of the bishops of Durham and Winchester all developed similar arrangements. Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse’s “The Book Trade at the University of Paris, c. 1250–c. 1350” (2010) is the standard study.

The illumination of the page

The illuminated manuscript is the late medieval book at its most distinctive. The illuminator — the enlumineur, the miniator — used gold leaf, ground pigments, and very fine brushes; the workshops of Paris, Bruges, Ghent, Bologna, Florence, and the Westminster and Ely scriptoria of the early fourteenth century were the great centres. The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (begun c. 1411–1412, completed c. 1485 by Jean Colombe), the Belles Heures of the same patron, the Limbourg brothers’ other works for the duke of Berry, the Luttrell Psalter of c. 1320–1340, the Bohun Psalters of the late fourteenth century, and the great Books of Hours of the late fifteenth century are the touchstones of the genre. The imagery is sometimes secular — the Très Riches Heures is famous for its labours of the months — and it is sometimes biblical, but the social world of the late medieval lord is on every page: the huntsman, the ploughman, the courtiers in the garden, the duke himself at the feast.

The great manuscripts were expensive, and the prices have been reconstructed in the Rouse and Light catalogues. A single richly illuminated folio in a Parisian workshop of c. 1400 might cost the patron the equivalent of a skilled craftsman’s wages for a week; a full de luxe book of hours could cost as much as a small house. The library of Jean, duc de Berry (d. 1416) was one of the largest in Europe, and the inventaire drawn up after his death lists some 340 volumes, including the Très Riches Heures, the Belles Heures, the Très Belles Heures de Notre-Dame, and a great number of illuminated bibles, psalters, and lives of saints. The library of the Visconti of Milan and the Estense of Ferrara were comparable; the smaller libraries of the Paston family and the Stonor family are the everyday English counterparts. Jonathan James and Mary Erler have both written on the late medieval lay book owner.

The names of the illuminators are increasingly known. Jean Pucelle of Paris (active c. 1320–1334), Jehan Bondol of Bruges (c. 1368–1381), the Limbourg brothers (active c. 1385–1416), Jan van Eyck in his manuscript work of the 1420s, Jean Fouquet of Tours (c. 1450–1480), William Vrelant of Bruges (c. 1450–1481), Loyset Liédet (c. 1460–1484), and Jean Colombe of Bourges (d. 1493) are the most prominent; the work of Margaret Rickert and John Plummer on English illumination, and the great French series of M. Meiss and M. Thomas on fifteenth-century illumination, has recovered the workshops. Christopher de Hamel’s A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (1986), Jonathan Alexander’s Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (1992), and Myra Dickman Orth’s catalogue of the Huntington Library’s illuminated manuscripts are the standard references.

From manuscript to print

The printed book arrived in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and the spread was rapid. Johann Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, printed at Mainz between about 1452 and 1455, is the first substantial book printed in Europe; the Gutenberg and Fust Psalters of the 1450s are earlier still. The new technology spread within a generation: Cologne (1464), Rome (1467), Paris (1470), Milan (1469), London (1476, with Caxton’s press at Westminster). The first generation of printers was, technically, the heirs of the manuscript world: their typefaces imitated the littera textualis and the rotunda of the late medieval scribe, their layout imitated the manuscript, and they were sometimes the same men who had been copyists. Clemens Alexander’s Printing and the Book in Fifteenth-Century England (1992) and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) are the two essential points of entry.

The impact was uneven and not always immediate. The Parisian university, the Bolognese law schools, and the great ecclesiastical institutions continued to commission de luxe manuscripts well into the sixteenth century — the late fifteenth-century Heures of Jean Bourdichon for Anne of Brittany (c. 1500) is one of the last great illuminated manuscripts. The cheaper libri of the university and the law school, the schoolroom, the arte, the theology bachelor, were quickly replaced by the printed book. The Breviarium of Bamberg of 1481, the Catholicon of Johann Balbus printed at Mainz in 1460, the Grammatica of Alexander de Villa Dei printed at Cologne in 1473, the Decretum Gratiani printed at Strasbourg in 1471, are typical. The Stationers’ Company of London received its charter in 1557, and the Guild of Stationers of Paris had its first ordinances in 1276: the regulation of the trade in written and printed books had a long history that the printing press inherited, not invented. Lotte Hellinga’s work on the early printed book and Cathy Graham’s catalogue of the British Library’s fifteenth-century books are the standard modern reference.

Reading, ownership, and the spread of books

The late medieval reader is more visible than is often thought. Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record (1979, revised 2013) made the case that late medieval England was, in spite of its reputation for illiteracy, a society increasingly dependent on written record: the Domesday Book of 1086, the Close Rolls of the king, the Patent Rolls of the chancery, the Year Books of the common lawyers, the Taxatio Ecclesiastica of 1291, the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, the household accounts of the Luttrell family of Brotherswater. The same period saw the rise of the common school, the grammar school, and the chantry school; the wills of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century mention books with increasing frequency, and the late medieval wills of laymen often list a surprising number of books: a Book of Hours, a Psalter, a Trevisa translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, a Stacions of Rome, a St Albans Chronicle.

The reading habits of the late medieval layman are the subject of Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory (1990) and The Craft of Thought (1998), which set out the meditatio and the compositio loci of the monastic reading tradition and trace them into the lay world. The actual evidence is striking. The Paston letters of the 1470s and 1480s refer to bokes of Sir John and the book of Margery and the boke of the lyffe of the holy mayde; the Cely letters of the same period mention a boke as a present; the Stonor letters mention a booke of Lydgate that is being read aloud at the family hearth. Mary Erler’s Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (2002) and H. S. Bennett’s Books and Readers in Medieval England (1952, still useful) are the standard treatments. The shift from manuscript to print did not by itself create this audience, but it did enlarge it, and the late medieval inheritance is, in this respect, recognisably modern.

References

  • M. B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication of Late Medieval Texts (Hambledon, 1991).
  • Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (Phaidon, 1986, 2nd ed. 1994).
  • Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2nd ed. 2008).
  • Richard and Mary Rouse, “The Book Trade at the University of Paris, c. 1250–c. 1350,” in The Book in the Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
  • Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd ed. 2013).