Writers and copiers ; buyers and lenders

This image is a familiar image from the medieval world. It seems such a peaceful, intricate occupation, setting out words and colourful images in miniature. The title of 'illuminator' was applied in the twelfth century to those who did this, 'illuminating' pages with colours and gold. Reading a book called 'Life in a Medieval City' which concentrates on the year 1250 in Troyes, the capital of Champagne, I found some details as a starting point for my research on book owners, and along the way, book creators.

Writers used wax tablets for their first drafts and then a scribe would copy it out neatly onto parchment which is prepared from sheepskin as opposed to vellum which is from calfskin. 'Virgin parchment is made from stillborn lambs, the skin of stillborn calves being 'uterine vellum' and considered the thinnest and finest and so worthy of the best bibles. The scribe would scrape the parchment with a razor or sharp knife, smooth it with pumice, polish it with a boar's tooth and then mark out lines out with a ruler and awl before writing, dipping the quill dipped in the ink held in an ox horn, with a fire or hot coals handy for drying. The Bible took about fifteen months to copy.

Books available in the thirteenth century included scientific works such as medicine, theology, philosophy, law as well as poetry and dictionaries and encyclopaedias. And soon saints' lives and adventures such as those by Chretien de Troyes - one of my favourite writers of Arthurian tales - and books of everyday life were starting to appear and the wealthy were starting to buy them as well as universities. Studying at schools and universities created a market for textbooks, students renting a book of 16 columns of 62 lines each with 32 letters, for a halfpenny or a penny. This also led to the creation of a black market for books. Students would borrow books and copy them.

John of Salisbury complained that a borrower had copied his book. Saint Bernard said the same, adding before the next borrowing "although you may read it, I do not allow you to copy it" showing copyright to be an issue just as hard to manage in the medieval world. Those copying would use the wax tablets and get a copier to work on the actual parchment. Of course mistakes were made and some books finished with the plea to at least copy correctly. When mistakes occurred, the copier might turn it into a little joke such as picture of a character carrying the missing word up the margin.  

References:

Bradley, JW 2006, Illuminated manuscripts, EBook #19870, e-book, Project Gutenberg, viewed 5 April 2011, <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19870>.

Gies, J & Gies, F 1981,  Life in a Medieval city, Harper Perennial, New York.

Medieval monk bookwriter, image, Flickr, viewed 15 April 2011,
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/socialist-bakelite-dayaya/2480460544/in/photostream/>.

Search for the Medieval book collector

I am researching into private collections of books from the Middle Ages. I love the idea that some people identified books as something they’d like to own and have in their homes and I'd like to find out about some of the individuals who thought that way and how they went about it. I imagine there will be some overlap with those actually creating the books – writing and illustrating them - as I also love the idea of someone sitting in their scriptorium, illuminating their tale.

As to how I shall be setting about my quest, I am unsure. Some of the collections may have developed into libraries or as bequests to libraries, so that might be a way in to the subject. Currently, although I have found what looks like an excellent article about a woman collector in France, I want to find out the background first - the early history of books, who created them, and how people went about organising to collect any.