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The digital world has transformed the way that ideas are communicated and spread. Central to this phenomenon is the incredible ease with which information can now be copied and shared — from files attached to emails, sent via WhatsApp or posted to social media. When we look at a familiar website, we are viewing a copy.
Yet, for all its apparent novelty, this feature actually has a long and fascinating history. This is explored in a new book by Sara J Charles that takes modern readers back to the origins — technical, social, economic and intellectual — of copying in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Reproduction is nothing new.
In The Medieval Scriptorium, Charles, a book historian at the University of London, illuminates the old, even ancient origins of concepts that remain familiar today. “Scrolling”, for example, is lifted straight from one of the earliest technologies of sharing ideas — the papyrus scroll. The term “codex” refers to leaves (of papyrus or parchment) that were bound together to create what we now think of as a “book” — much more convenient than the scroll for navigating through a lengthy text (as anyone wading through a PDF file will recognise).
The book introduces us not just to the way that texts have been passed down through the centuries, but how that phenomenon happened. “Who were the scribes and what was life like for a medieval copyist?” asks Charles.
These original script makers were of both sexes and, in late antiquity, often slaves. We encounter Pamphilus and Eusebius in the third century, whose writing was connected to the library at Caesarea in modern-day Israel. Alcuin of York, a major figure in the court at Aachen, introduced an entirely new script which helped to forge the intellectual credentials of the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne.
The author’s focus is on the Christian Middle Ages. So, unsurprisingly, many of the scribes we meet were also monks, nuns or priests such as Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, who made the famous 8th-century Gospels. The rise of the universities and a literate courtly class encouraged a secular book trade to be developed, with both male and female collaborators such as Jeanne and Richard de Montbaston in 14th-century Paris or Sara Bradfut and Peter the illuminator, who worked in Catte Street in Oxford in the 13th century.
This focus means that, sadly, Charles largely ignores the creation of legal, commercial and administrative documents, which survive in abundance in archives and could have added a further dimension to her study. So too could an exploration of Hebrew bookmaking in the Middle Ages — just as productive, beautiful and socially interesting as Christian bookmaking. The two traditions often crossed over, even to the point of using the same scriptoria. The publishers would also have done the author a greater service by including more illustrations keyed into her text.
Charles is a specialist in recovering medieval techniques of bookmaking, and her account is at its best when diving into the material culture of sharing ideas. The detail is incredibly visceral. It required 129 calfskins to produce the Lindisfarne Gospels; the process of parchment making — from butchering animals to preparing skins through scraping, stretching and even splitting to make the best writing surfaces (as the word of God would be placed upon them) — is enthusiastically explained. Earwax was valued as a basis for gold illumination. Colour — taken from red ochre, madder (a root), orpiment (an arsenic mineral) and lead white — was another prized feature. The results can still be seen in the breathtaking illuminated manuscripts we see exhibited in the world’s great libraries today.
Such beauty came at a cost. “In reality, the making of a medieval manuscript was dirty, smelly, often boring and certainly back-breaking,” writes Charles. Yet it was also a sustainable way of disseminating ideas. The materials were replaceable and the products — books — incredibly durable.
The same cannot be said of the digital age. Dependent on the extraction of rare minerals and consuming vast amounts of energy, digital information is difficult and costly to preserve. Our present modes of copying may be immeasurably faster than the work of the medieval scribe, but this book demonstrates that the present has much to learn from the past.
The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages by Sara J Charles Reaktion Books £16.99, 352 pages
Richard Ovenden is director of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and author of ‘Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack’
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