Our first stop is a visit to the centre of medieval book production: the scriptorium. This chapter's primary tool for looking through the keyhole into this room are miniatures. Decoration on the medieval page shows us human figures handling or making books. While being careful not to take the iconography too literally, such images help us paint a picture of what the medieval world of the book looked like, practically speaking. The well-known depiction of Eadwine, for example, shows this “Prince of Scribes” (according to the description that accompanies his portrait) holding both pen and knife (Figure 108). What such bookish scenes surviving in manuscripts do not show, and this is remarkable, are groups of scribes at work.

While the monastic scriptorium is the location where manuscripts were made—at least until ca. 1200, when commercial scribes began to take over the monks’ role as book producers—it turns out that medieval images of scriptoria are rare, or perhaps even non-existent. While an intense search across various online and offline platforms reveals images with several book-makers at work, none of the surviving images I encountered unquestionably presents a scriptorium. This observation prompts an intriguing question, which is explored in this chapter: where are the scriptoria?

Teaming Up

Bremen, Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek, b. 21 is a richly decorated devotional book produced at Echternach Abbey in Luxemburg. It was made as a monumental gift for Emperor Henry III (d. 1056), and at fol. 124v we encounter an extraordinary scene. The image shows a peculiar blend of two worlds: on the right, the miniature shows a monk, who is probably copying the text, while the person on the left, whose clothes show he is not a monk but a layperson, is producing the manuscript's decoration. 1 For important books like this, professionals from the outside world were sometimes hired to decorate the pages. Is the place where they are working a scriptorium? Not likely. What the image really shows is how this particular book came to be, namely with the help of a hired hand. Perhaps this image was added to show the Emperor, who is depicted receiving the book on the facing page, that a professional had decorated it. No expense was spared, it expresses. There is another reason to infer we are not shown the inside of a scriptorium.