We remain in the realm of flat objects, albeit those under scrutiny now are quite a bit larger than the tiny pieces of parchment and paper explored in previous chapters. In the Middle Ages words were not just written in books and on small paper or parchment slips, but also on full—plano—parchment skins: the full animal skin was the largest writing surface available in medieval written culture. Many of these “posters” were produced to be mounted on walls. While very few survive, and even fewer in one piece, they show how (and what) information was put on public display, both indoors and outside.

Advertisements

Commercial scribes and Early Modern printers marketed their goods and services in order to draw a crowd to their shops. In Chapter 6 we encountered the commercial scribe Herneis, who tried to lure clients into his bookshop by adding spam to the books he produced. He identified the street where he was situated: Rue Neuve Notre Dame. Parisians would go to this street for their French books, whether to buy them or to have them decorated or bound. For Latin manuscripts they went to the Rue St. Jacques, in the Latin Quarter, where students and teachers lived.

Because medieval tradespeople kept their shops in the same neighbourhood as other artisans of the same craft, customers knew precisely where to go when they needed a book, a candle, a good chair—or all three, the perfect combination.

In Brussels the commercial booksellers, scribes, and decorators were situated in the Bergstraat (or Rue Montagne). The street is strategically situated across from the city's cathedral, which is a location preferred by book artisans in other cities as well. The canons of the cathedral chapter, as well as many of its visitors, could read and were, therefore, potential clients. This location-sharing by people selling the same goods also presented a problem: how to convince the reader to step into your shop and not your neighbour’s. This is where the first poster comes in: the advertisement sheet (Figure 102).

This fragment was once part of a much larger sheet, which displayed many different types of scripts (The Hague, KB, 76 D 45 Nr. 4A). Another fragment from the same sheet also survives (Nr. 4B).