Written Word in Medieval Society 

Overview

The medieval age stretches across a millennium from 500 to 1500. During that period, the written word surpassed oral tradition as the primary means of transmitting knowledge. Although the Gutenberg revolution occurred in the mid-fifteenth century, the medieval age was essentially an age of manuscript production. Throughout the millennium, words were written on parchment, Latin was the privileged language (even as the use of vernacular languages increased), illumination was common in religious and secular texts, and the codex replaced the scroll for general use (Clanchy, 2013). The church exercised its power over literacy and book production throughout the period, although centers of power changed.

The papyrus scroll served as the means of transmitting the written word in antiquity, but as early as the fourth century, parchment (sheep or goatskin) and vellum (calfskin), a more enduring medium, increasingly began to replace papyrus (Brown, 2007). Wooden or wax tablets also continued to be used. The Springmount Bog Tablets, discovered in a bog in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1914, date from the early seventh century. The wax tablets with the Vulgate text of Psalms 30–32 inscribed, are thought to be the oldest examples of Latin writing from Ireland. Wax tablets were used for secular as well as religious texts. For example, accounting tablets from the period are extant. Girdle books, small sets of tablets bound in leather and attached to a belt, were worn by clerics and aristocrats, especially women, to have the books conveniently near and to protect them from theft and deterioration. Popular from the thirteenth century, girdle books were often religious, but legal, medical, and philosophical content was also common (Smith, 2017).

The fifth century also saw the use of illustrations to accompany the written word. Scripture was not only illustrated but also penned in gold and silver on purple pages to signify its worth. The Italian Codex Brixianus, a sixth-century Latin gospel book (containing one or more of the four New Testament gospels) was written in gold on 419 folios of vellum dyed purple, as were the sixth-century Canon Tables (a concordance). Secular works were also illustrated, including copies of Virgil, Terence, and Homer (Brown, 2007).

Although scrolls continued to be used for purposes such as financial and genealogical records, the codex (from the Latin meaning "trunk of a tree") became the dominant form for manuscripts. The codex, which allowed for writing on both sides of the page, made it possible to group several texts together, a change that made books more portable. The ease of turning leaves made books more easily searched, an important consideration for monastic scholars.

By the sixth century, the flexible quill had replaced the reed pen as the most popular writing implement. Quills were made from the feathers of a bird. According to some sources the feathers of geese and swans were used most commonly; other sources report the use of feathers from eagles, crows, and peacocks. The most commonly used ink was made from carbon or charcoal mixed with resin (Clemens & Graham, 2007).

By the twelfth century, book production and book ownership were moving beyond the monasteries. The first university in Europe (Bologna) was founded in 1088, and others soon followed, notably Oxford (1096–1167) and Paris (1160–1250). Teachers needed books and so did students. Manuscript miniatures from the period portray the university as a book-centered culture. These copies were likely simpler and less expensive than the illuminated manuscripts produced in monasteries. To monks copying books in scriptoria were added professional scribes working in commercial scriptoria in university towns where booksellers thrived. Literacy was increasing, and with it, the laity's desire to own their own books. At first, wealthy aristocrats were the book buyers, but as the bourgeoisie prospered, they too became book owners. Books of hours became the medieval equivalent of a modern bestseller. These prayer books made for the laity contained a set of prayers in eight sections intended to be said at set times throughout a twenty-four-hour period. In addition to the prayers, a book could include from five to twenty-five supplemental texts, including a calendar, penitential psalms, and prayers to saints. Each book of hours was unique. A patron could choose the number and nature of the supplements as well as specify decorative elements, which could range from simple initials to elaborately illuminated pages.

Religious texts were pervasive, and the power of the church is evident in the history of the written word in medieval society. However, secular documents played a significant role as well. Secular rulers solicited the help of the church in writing law codes, charters, and genealogies (Brown, 2007). Letter writing was so important that a genre developed around the rhetoric for letters. M. T. Clanchy points out in From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (2013) that during the thirteenth century England became more document-centered. Although literacy was far from universal, and fewer could write than could read, by 1300, even some serfs participated in document culture. Most prevalent were charters, documents that recorded sales, leases, gifts, and deeds of ownership as well as agreements and inventories. They were used at all levels of society, from the royal charters, called diplomas, that established alliances or settled disputes to deeds to land acquired by descendants of serfs. The most famous medieval charter is the Magna Carta signed by King John in 1215, limiting the authority of the king and establishing the power of the law.

The Magna Carta, that celebrated English document, was written in Latin. The official language of law, government, business, education, and religion in Western Europe throughout the medieval age was Latin. Vernacular languages rose in popularity later in the period. The rise can be seen clearly in the literature of the period. The Consolation of Philosophy by sixth-century philosopher Boethius, a standard text in medieval schools and a frequent choice for girdle books, was written in Latin; so was Bede's history in the eighth century.

Although a major switch to the vernacular came in twelfth-century France, local languages were used for literary works centuries earlier. The first work of English literature in history was the Old English epic Beowulf, which was likely written sometime in the seventh to tenth centuries. Beowulf was likely a written account of even older folktales that were passed down orally for generations. In the twelfth century, La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), the most famous of the French heroic poems labeled "chansons de geste" (songs of deeds) was written in Old French. A century later, the Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose), an immensely popular allegorical dream vision of 21,000 lines, was also written in Old French—the first 4,000 or so lines written by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 and the rest written by Jean de Meun in 1280. It was as influential as it was popular. Its influence can be traced in the works of Dante and Chaucer, who translated a portion of it into Middle English. Dante's own choice to write his La Divina Comedia (1308–1320) in the vernacular of his native Florence influenced the wide adoption of that vernacular as a literary language. Chaucer's decision to write The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) in Middle English rather than Anglo-Norman or Latin helped earn him the title father of English literature.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the written word was no longer the property of the church and an elite few. The time was ripe for a change in production. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, a former stonecutter and goldsmith, was the first to demonstrate that movable type could revolutionize the production of books and documents. He began working on his printing press in 1440. It took him three years to complete the Gutenberg Bible, which became available in 1455. Early that year Juan de Carvajel, a Spanish cardinal, saw some sheets from the bible on display in Frankfurt. In a letter to the future Pope Pius II, Carvajel wrote, "All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen in Frankfurt is true" (Hellinga, 2007). Although the Bible was incomplete at the time Carvajel saw the leaves, copies were already difficult to obtain, despite the price being the equivalent of three years' salary for the average clerk.

The printing press spread rapidly. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, about 2,500 European cities had printing presses and tens of thousands of books were being produced. Most of the materials being printed were documents, including millions of indulgences for the church (Johns, 2015). The manuscript book did not disappear in 1455, but it would become increasingly rare as printing made the written word more plentiful and less expensive. Gutenberg began a revolution that would lead to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. By the twenty-first century, the number of books printed would top ten billion (Man, 2009).

Further Insights

The range of Bede's works serve as a reminder that the monastic scribes were copying more than Scripture. Many manuscripts were hagiographical (biographies of saints) and liturgical (relating to public worship); others were administrative. Bede also acknowledged that he wrote his commentary on the third chapter of Habakkuk at the request of a nun. Benedict (2004) sees such connections as collaboration between women, who were prohibited by the church from teaching and preaching and thus from many forms of writing as well. At the end of the eighth century, Alcuin collaborated in this manner with several of Charlemagne's female relatives, including Gisla, Charlemagne's sister, and Gundrada, the emperor's granddaughter.

Women also worked as scribes. The mid-eighth-century yields evidence of correspondence between St. Boniface and Eadburga, abbess of Minister-in-Thanet, that includes a request that she copy a book. In the twelfth century, female scribes at St. Mary's Abbey in Winchester produced copies ranging from prayer books to a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Benedict, 2004). There were likely many other women engaged in various writing tasks for whom there are no records.

Many people are familiar with illustrations of a monk or a group of monks industriously copying texts, but the image conveys little of how difficult their task was. The spread of monasticism began in the fourth century, but it was Cassiodorus who founded Vivarium in South Italy sometime after 540 who made copying manuscripts a compulsory task for the monks. Typically, a monastic scribe worked for six hours a day. Cassiodorus excused the most proficient from daily prayers so that they could spend more time copying. Some monasteries limited work to daylight hours; others provided candlelight so that work could continue. A monk could go through as many as sixty quills in one session. Marginalia in surviving texts gives some indication of how taxing the work could be.

Books were created as well as copied in the monasteries. The Venerable Bede, who spent most of his life in monasteries, the larger part at Jarrow, is credited with having authored forty books. Monastic libraries throughout Western Europe held copies of his scriptural commentaries, and his most famous work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731), is the major source for information about early British history and the arrival of Christianity.

Discourse

The very word manuscript is a reminder that for most of the medieval period, books were made by hand, or, to be more accurate, most frequently made by many hands. Collaboration was common. Some books were the handiwork of entire workshops. Images of book production in medieval monasteries usually feature a single scribe, but copying even one book could require the work of many scribes. Others may have worked at related tasks, cutting pages to size and sewing them into eight-leave packets or mixing inks. The artist responsible for the illustrations and the elaborate initials was also part of the team, and larger books required multiple artists. The parchment and vellum pages, made from stretched, treated animal skins, was expensive. The use of vivid colors and gold embellishment that gave the manuscripts the descriptor "illuminated" were also expensive. Bindings, especially those that were set with jewels and enamels added significantly to the cost.

Collaboration may have been the rule, but there were exceptions. In the sixth and seventh centuries, Ireland was a center of monastic scribal activity. The monks who in 635 settled at Lindisfarne, a monastic community located off the coast of what is now Scotland, brought with them the illumination tradition of the Irish scribes. The early eighth century Lindisfarne Gospels reflects those traditions. Believed to be the work of one man, Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne from 698 to 721, the manuscript, a masterpiece of medieval art, uses about ninety colors in the interlacings and spiral patterns that make up the first letters that characterize illuminated manuscripts. The style is a blend of Irish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. About 970, an Anglo-Saxon translation was added in red ink, making the Lindisfarne Gospels the oldest surviving version of the gospel in English, albeit in a form of the language that seems foreign to modern speakers.

Even more famous but more representative of the collaboration that typically produced such manuscripts is The Book of Kells, which has been called the most famous of all medieval illuminated manuscripts. It consists of 340 folios, on the vellum pages of which are written the four Gospels in Latin, each with a preface and a summary, and other texts, which include canon tables—indices of passages that occur in two or more of the Gospels. Scholars have been unable to assign a precise date for the manuscript's creation. Most scholars believe it was created around 800, but no one knows if the site of creation was a monastery in Iona before the Viking raids of the late eighth century, the monastery in Kells a bit later, or partially created on both sites. Four major scribes did the copying, and three artists worked on the illustrations. No one knows if the two groups overlap to any degree. The illustrations, which include abstractions, symbols, images of animals and plants as well as humans, and narrative scenes. The most famous page in the book, and arguably the most famous from the period, is the Chi Rho page, so called because it illuminates the verse from the Gospel of St. Matthew that begins "Christi autem generatio sic erat." (1:18—This is how Christ came to be born.) The art has been called angelic.

Bibliography

Benedict, K. M. (2004). Empowering collaborations: Writing partnerships between religious women and scribes in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge

Brown, M. P. (2007). The triumph of the codex: The manuscript book before 1100. In S. Eliot & J. Rose (Eds.), A companion to the history of the book (pp. 179–193). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Clanchy, M. T. (2013). From memory to written record: England, 1066–1307 (3rd ed.). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Clemens, R., & Graham, T. (2007). Introduction to the medieval manuscript. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gearhart, H. C. (2016). From divine word to human hand: Negotiating sacred text in a medieval gospel book. Word & Image, 32(4), 430–458. doi:10.1080/02666286.2016.1222836

Hellinga, L. (2007). The Gutenberg revolution. In S. Eliot and J. Rose (Eds.), A companion to the history of the book (pp. 207–219). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Johns, A. (2015). The coming of print to Europe. In L. Howsam (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to the history of the book (pp. 107–124). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Man, J. (2009). The Gutenberg revolution: The story of a genius and an invention that changed the world. London, England: Bantam.

Mark, J. (2019, March 20). Medieval Literature. World History Encyclopedia. www.worldhistory.org/Medieval‗Literature/

Smith, M. (2017). The Medieval Girdle Book. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press.