As Dr. C. W.
Dutschke guided us through the wonderful array of archaic manuscripts spread open
on the tables of Columbia University’s Rare Books Library, I could not help but
feel transported. Yellowing books from as early as the 9th century lay before
me and I was able to touch their pages and put my nose impossibly near to scrutinize
their fine details. While scanning the lines of script closely, often squinting
to try and decode the minute, otherworldly letters, I began to imagine what it would
have been like to live as a scribe in Medieval Europe. Who were these
mysterious men? And what were their feelings about the anonymity of their position?
It struck me, while admiring the red, black, green and blue flourishes of ink that
the writers of these works were marvelous artists. Yet, sadly we will never
know their names.
As a reader in
this citing and copyright obsessed age of print media, it is disturbing to me
that so many of these skilled writers never enjoyed recognition for their
arduous work. Their work is at the heart of our modern print standards.
However, unlike Gutenberg, whose name will forever be synonymous with printing
press technology, Anglo-European readers have never and will never casually
refer to masterful scribes by name. This is particularly surprising because,
“the purpose of the first printers was to compete w/ calligraphers. The
letterforms cut and cast by Gutenberg .
. . were modeled on popular
manuscript hands of the day (Bringhurst,40). Thusly, their work was admired and
regarded as fine enough to appropriate and cast as type. Yet early printers were
far from concerned about ingratiating those whose dexterous hands had established
the style standards of their emerging craft.
I imagine these
unnamed scribes gathered in small armies, cloaked and hunkered in rows, sitting
at rustic benches and working from first light until nightfall. As their quills
quivered with the determination of men devoted to their work, the only sounds
one may have heard is the quill tip scratching upon soft parchment, and far
away, a cold and constant drip. These bands of men – usually monks, were the gifted
ones, the ones with the power of marks: they could read and write. During their
time, literacy was a unique and valuable talent in and of itself. However,
“crafting a book, whether the elephantine volumes chained to the lecterns or
the dainty booklets made for a child’s hand, was a long, laborious process”
(Manuel, 133). And yet, the manuscripts that have survived until today, reveal
such delicate, almost tenderly applied detail work that these early books do
not seem as much the result of a burdensome task but as that of a labor of love.
Based on the manuscripts that Dr. Dutschke shared with us, it is clear that a
number of these men were so much more than menial scribes. They were astonishingly
creative and technically skilled artists.
For example, Columbia
University’s manuscript of Ad Quirinum by Cyprian (searchmark: Plimpton
MS 051), is thought by scholars to have been transcribed around the middle of
the 12th century by scribes of the Cistercian monastery at the great
Pontigny Abby of Burgundy, France and is a gorgeously lettered piece. Each
chapter heading in the medieval version of the contents page of this book,
begins with a large colored initial – the colors alternate between red, green,
red, blue and continue in this pattern. Yet more impressive are the larger
green initials that rise 5-lines in height and leaf-out a wealth of decorative
foliage at the start of each chapter. Concurrently, the early gothic script
used to write the bulk of the prose in black on each page is remarkably
uniform. This work, although simplistic in appearance is tremendously
significant. As author Warren Chappell explains, “the history of letterforms .
. . is the history of calligraphy – and the history of calligraphy is the
history of highly abstract, cumulative forms written quickly but precisely with
reeds and quill . . .” (27). Despite the scribe’s crude tools, the lines of
text in Ad Quirinum never fall out of alignment and there are no
apparent erroneous marks. The masterful calligraphy demonstrated by the unnamed
man who labored over these long-living pages is so precise, that today’s
writers would no doubt regard the work as impossible to duplicate. However, we
forget that the texts we use most frequently are simply electronic
reproductions of the scribal legacy.
Although no match
to the Ad Quirinum piece in calligraphic precision, the early
encyclopedia entitled Li Livres dou Tresor and authored by Italian
polymath, Brunetto Latini (searchmark: Plimpton MS 281) is a wildly exciting example
of scribal creativity. However, this 15th century manuscript is
unique other ways as well. The most intriguing to note is that remarkably, we
know this scribe’s name, or at least part of his name. The individual who
artfully penned the copy now housed in Columbia’s Rare Books & Manuscripts
library is recorded as “Iehan__?__net”. That is all we know of him. Yet, we
can glean inferences about Iehan from his pen work . His illustrations
certainly reveal a whimsical quality to his character. Wild beasts and mythic
creatures stomp and slither across the parchment of this early encyclopedia almost
as if they are materializing from the text itself, or as if they are the
reader’s imaginings coming to life on the page. A dragon with a dog-like face
set atop a long, hairy neck stretches up past nine lines of text in the wide
left margin. From where its two claws are planted at the bottom of the page, a
reptilian tail curls around and up into the negative space of the right margin.
In this way, the marvelous creature is interwoven with the textual paragraph, framing
the words devoted to its own identification and description. Scribe Iehan seems
to have been an innovator in his work, as no other texts that we viewed at
Columbia quite utilized illustration in this way. By integrating text and image
in an informal, instructive and highly interactive way, his work moves beyond
that of the decorative and towards that of the scientific, making Iehan’s
encyclopedia a benchmark artifact. His creative illustrations signal a change from Medieval aesthetics
and foreshadow Europe’s progression towards its golden age of art and science: the
Renaissance.
Each of these
early books is in someway significant. Each is the product of one man or
perhaps a small group of men, and gives us unique insight into the history of
literacy and print media. They are handmade by individuals with their own aesthetic
style and technical skill. Consequently, they are not flawless. And the limited
availability of bookmaking materials during these middle ages made it
imperative that scribes repair their work employing the same ingenuity with
which they created it. In one very early example, a scribe underscored his
error with three small red dots, signifying to the reader that they should skip
their eyes over the duplicate word and disregard. Dr. Dutschke also drew our
focus to a page within a 15th century devotional that had an almost
invisible seam which ran lengthwise down the inside margin. It was extremely
slight and close to the binding, however with a keen eye we were able to see
that the existing page was not the original. It was added later, after the church
had altered its doctrine. So the old page was cut away and a new page was
skillfully adhered. Editing was regarded as important and worth doing subtly
even then.
With such
scrutinizing attention to detail, it is easy to see why these volumes were
studied and admired diligently by the next generation of bookmakers. As
Chappell explicates, “the bound manuscripts of the fifteenth century were more
than mere prefigurements of the first European printed books. They were
regarded as actual models to be imitated as closely as possible” (40). Initially,
upon viewing the manuscripts, they all appeared very similar to me. All were
written in various forms of gothic script and arranged into tightly boxed
segments upon the aged parchment pages. Add a few hints of jewel-colored detail
and you have the principal elements of a medieval manuscript. However, after having
the opportunity to closely examining the texts at Columbia and to hear Dr. Dutschke’s
insightful descriptions, I now realize that each one is significant and unique.
Scribes’ works are important reminders of where we’ve come from as literate beings
and our innate potential to grow beyond our wildest imaginings. It is
imperative to view the changing directions of our print media and art through
the lens of our past accomplishments (Chappell, 10). Thanks to the scribes who
were instrumental in getting us to where we are today, who were rarely
recognized for their artistry, and who remain nameless.
Works Cited
Chappell, Warren and Robert Bringhurst. A Short History of The Printed Word.
Vancouver, BC: Hartley & Marks
Publisher, 1999. Print.
Manguel, Alberto. A
History of Reading. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Print
New York, Columbia University, Rare
Books and Manuscript Library, Plimpton 051, Digital
Scriptorium,
December 1, 2012.
New York, Columbia University, Rare
Books and Manuscript Library, Plimpton 281, Digital
Scriptorium,
December 1, 2012.
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