Once upon a time in the Middle Ages… there was a humble monk, living in a monastery, who devoted his time to copying texts for his brothers to read. All his life he copied and copied the same texts over and over again, highly esteemed by his fellow monks for this strenuous task. When he was young he had been allowed to copy the texts from the original manuscript once, before it was locked in a wooden chest again. All the other copies he provided were based on that first copy he had made all those years ago. When he felt, at a respectable age, that the end was near, he asked the prior to be granted one last wish: to see the original once more. With trembling hands he turned the parchment leaves and read the text he knew by heart. For the first time in his life he felt proud of what he had achieved, but just before he closed the book his eye fell on one word he did not recognize… He then realized that he had made a mistake: he had always written ‘celibate’ instead of ‘celebrate’.

This is an old joke, but it clearly shows the general image most people nowadays have of medieval book production: monks copying religious texts (and making mistakes). But book production in the later Middle Ages was more dynamic than you would expect.

Certainly, until the twelfth century most writing was done in monasteries. Monks had the knowledge, the skills and the infrastructure. However, with the rise of towns and trade after 1200 more and more people needed to be able to read and write. At first these skills were only needed for administrative purposes, but once the number of readers started to increase, the demand for books to be read soon followed. The cities also harboured new centres of learning: universities.  Their demand for books surpassed the production in monasteries. As more and more people learned to write, so more people started making a living from it: teachers, notaries, parish priests and town clerks could earn a little extra money by copying texts. In some cities, like Paris, Oxford, London, Ghent, Bruges and Brussels, Nuremberg, Augsburg and Strasbourg, the mercantile, intellectual and governmental centres, large scale commercial book production flourished in the later Middle Ages. In late thirteenth century Paris, for instance, several streets were inhabited by parchmenters, scribes (?) and illuminators (?), all working together on the most beautiful manuscripts.  All of the case studies in this exhibition are written in towns.

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Private Collection (by courtesy of the owner): Initial A in gold leaf (2 lines high)

The medieval manuscripts that are admired the most are often those with lavish decorations. Their detailed paintings with gold leaf are one of the highlights in western art. But we should keep in mind that not everybody could buy these manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Many less richly decorated manuscripts must have circulated at the time. The decoration often tells us something about the social status of the patron of the codex.

Most manuscripts have at least some sort of decoration. These decorations range from simple rubrications (?) – such as highlighted capitals, underscored words, headings (?) and paragraph marks – to miniatures (?) with lush illustrations the size of a full page with gold leaf additions. These decorations are often not mere illustrations to the text, but are an aid to understand its structure.

Private Collection (by courtesy of the owner): Initial C in gold leaf (2 lines high)

Decorated initials, for instance, are nearly always used in hierarchical order. The most beautiful initial in the manuscript can usually be found at the beginning of the first text. Every new text may open with a similar beautiful initial, but the chapters of every text will have a more simple initial, while every new paragraph will have an initial that is more simple still.

Whereas plain red initials are at the bottom of the hierarchy, the painted initials (with or without gold leaf) are at the top. They can be found on the first page of a manuscript or, when the patron could afford to pay for it, at the beginning of every text in the codex. Often these initials contain animals and people that may be connected to the text.

For more pictures of beautiful manuscripts, you can visit the websites of many important national and university libraries. Most of them will have an online exhibit of their treasures (e.g. the Royal Library in The Hague). For a glimpse at some marvellous pictures of the most well known type of decorated manuscript, the fifteenth century bestseller, the book of hours, click here.

For information on manuscript pages and script, click here.

Or you can return to the entrance of this room.