The defining feature of the medieval manuscript, the book that was used across Europe before the introduction of printing, is that its contents have been written by hand. A compelling feature of written text from the medieval period is that it produces two kinds of meaning: the meaning of the words themselves, the primary reason for consulting a manuscript, then and now; and more concealed meaning hidden within the shape of the letters. As medieval scribes copied a text, they included information about themselves and their surroundings in their handwriting. How the individual letters were formed depended, for example, on the location and moment of the book’s production, the institution in which the scribe was trained, and even with how much care a text was copied. This is the enigma of the medieval manuscript, that a wealth of historical information is embedded in the appearance of letters – if the code can be deciphered. What methods are available to untangle this enigma? What knowledge hidden in plain sight can be gleaned if we are successful? Why is looking at an old book as useful as reading it?

Bindings are a key feature of the manuscript. Without a bookbinding, the quires remained individual entities. Curiously, this was sometimes the very rationale for not binding a book: some users preferred to keep their quires separate, for example, teachers who needed to bring only part of the book to class. Another important function of the binding was to protect pages from moisture and dust, the dirt of hands and desks, and even the teeth of hungry insects and rodents. From their very early days, books were, therefore, usually given some kind of cover. Medieval bindings generally consist of two components: boards made of wood (but in the late Middle Ages also from compressed paper), as well as a material with which to cover the boards. While the most common covering material was leather, there is great variation in the kinds that were used, as well as how they were decorated. Different readers and reading communities had their own preferences in this regard. Consequently, bindings invite us to “read” the outside of the book for cultural and historical clues.

Wearing Leather

Most medieval bindings are covered with animal skin: it was usually a pig, cow, or sheep that—involuntarily—ended up guarding the manuscript. Leather proved an ideal material for bookbindings. It is flexible enough to cover the stiff boards, but also durable. This means it does an excellent job of protecting the precious cargo it carries, while at the same time adding to the desired appearance of the book. It also repels moisture quite well. This benefit may seem odd from a modern perspective, but it is actually an important consideration: while medieval monks were unlikely to read books in the bathtub (as my spouse tends to do), they did consult them in the cloister, which was a damp environment filled with hallways in the open air. The purple manuscript in Figure 122 at p. 239 demonstrates what could happen to a book in such surroundings. An added bonus of leather was that it accommodated blind-tooled or stamped decoration, which was applied in mesmerizing shapes and patterns. It is hard to capture in photography, but the decoration is still visible in this binding made in 1525– 1535 by the Ghent artisan Joris de Gavere (Figure 41).

We will linger for a while longer in the world of the bookbinding. Wooden boards and leather covers are not the only components of a medieval binding. Sometimes readers asked the bookbinder to add additional elements, some of which were made of metal. Two of these are highlighted in this chapter: clasps and tiny feet. Why were these curious-looking pieces of metal added? And what do they tell us about the manner in which the manuscript was used?

Arm and Hand

While medieval manuscripts were made for reading, the makers of these books also carefully planned how to close them and put them away. In order to preserve the organic parchment pages, it was necessary to keep the volume tightly closed when it was not in use. Not only did this keep moisture out, but parchment also has a natural tendency to buckle, especially when handled at room temperature (see the image on the cover of this book). In fact, parchment pages curl up with so much force that they would push the wooden boards open were it not for this smart device designed to keep the lid on: the clasp (Figure 44).

The clasp is like an arm that extends from one cover to the other. Indeed, I find it hard not to think of clasps as hugging arms that embrace the leaves, safeguarding them from the harsh realities of medieval book use. Clasps protected the pages by generating the pressure needed to keep them fully flat. At the end of the arm a tiny “hand” locks into an extension—we could call it a “handle bar”—as clearly visible in Figure 44. At the same time, it ensured that the book was a firm object that could withstand daily use and abuse, such as being knocked off a desk or shelf in a medieval library.

Generally, two clasps were able to contain the force issued by the buckling parchment of a book. However, it was important to get it right as a bookbinder. When the distance between the one end of the arm (say, the “armpit”) and the handle bar was too much, there was insufficient pressure. By contrast, if the distance was too short, the book did not close.

Manuscripts shed light to another contextual aspect of medieval book ownership: movement of manuscripts. In their owner's backpack, on wagons, and in boats: medieval books were keen travellers. With them they carried texts and ideas across Europe, disseminating the sciences, spreading romances, and passing on historical narratives. Short texts may have moved from A to B because they were committed to memory, by troubadours, for example, but longer texts more likely travelled in the guise of ink on a parchment or paper page. Texts that were made for travel were often fitted in special bindings, as Figure 116 shows (more about this manuscript in a moment). If a book was not going very far, its reader may even carry it on his or her body, like the girdle book in Figure 107 at p. 207, which belonged to Queen Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII. The tiny manuscript contains the Psalms in English in the translation of John Croke and features a stern-looking Henry. But what if a movable book is not secured in a typical portable binding? What other clues are there to indicate that a medieval text had been on the move? This chapter takes a closer look at the transportation of books in the Middle Ages.

Moving Books

Occasionally we get glimpses into the transportation of books and the rationale behind it. Court records show, for example, that when in 1423 a boat with commercial goods was seized in Nice, a batch of paper prayer books was among the confiscated items. When in 1334 war broke out near the city of Affligem, the Benedictine monks had to flee and their books became travellers, as reported by the fourteenth-century Middle Dutch author Jan van Boendale: “Then the monks took their belongings, their books and relics, and left their beautiful abbey, to go and live in Brussels” (“Die moencke haer goet [eigendommen] doe namen, / Haer boeke ende haer reliquien tsamen, / Ende lieten den cloester scoene / Ende maecten te Brusele hare wone”).

Remarkably, while it must have been quite normal for books to physically move between monastic communities, cities, and even countries, the phenomenon is almost completely hidden from our sight. The only pronounced evidence we have are book formats and bindings that were specially designed for portability

Having discussed a variety of decoration styles in medieval manuscripts, the present chapter adds contextual information to the culture of decorating manuscripts. While decorators were creative individuals, they had some help in how to depict certain scenes or decorated letters. They could look these up in model-books, which appear to have been quite popular in the later Middle Ages. A true feast for the eye, these books are filled with drawings and paintings that were meant to show scribes and illuminators how to embellish letters, paint initials, or add large segments of decoration to the page. Within this tradition, two types of model-books can be distinguished. Some functioned as instruction manuals, providing detailed step-by-step instructions for artisans. Other modelbooks appear to have merely functioned as a source of inspiration: they present a wide array of shapes and drawings from which the artisan could take his or her pick.

The level of sophistication among surviving model-books varies considerably. On the lower end of the spectrum there are pattern books that merely show how to make enlarged letters with some minor flourishing. On the higher end, by contrast, there are copies with rich stand-alone designs and sophisticated historiated initials inhabited by figures and scenes. Evidently the requirements of artisans varied, and, by proxy, so did the taste of medieval readers, for whom these drawings were ultimately meant. It is this variation that makes model-books so fascinating, both as physical objects and as cultural artifacts. The following examples illuminate the breadth of the genre and the appeal of these medieval “supermodels.”

Plainly Decorated Letters

To start at the lower end of the spectrum, some model-books merely showed book artisans how to draw plain enlarged capitals, the most basic kind of decoration. The book opening seen in Figure 59 is from Gregorius Bock's Scribal Pattern Book, which provides instruction on both fronts. Produced in 1510– 1517, the first part of the small parchment book contains a series of alphabets in different scripts, some of which are clearly influenced by print typefaces (New Haven, Beinecke Library, Yale University, MS 439).

Having introduced script, the defining feature of the manuscript, this chapter addresses a ubiquitous feature of medieval handwriting: abbreviating words with specific, recognizable symbols. To a literate person, reading a book is fairly straightforward: just pick it up, flip to the first page, and start reading. However, if you want to read medieval script as a modern reader, there are some challenges to overcome. It turns out you need to decode quite a bit of text first. The first round of decoding happens when your eyes meet the page. As the previous chapter showed, medieval letters are shaped very differently from those today, and some are actually quite difficult to read.

See what happens, for example, when you start reading the famous Leiden Glossary (Figure 23). The paleographer E. A. Lowe defined this script as a pre-Caroline Alemannic minuscule, which means it dates from before the establishment of Caroline minuscule, which developed shortly before the year 800. It is relatively easy to decode Caroline minuscule with our modern brains. This is because early printers in Italy used the script as a model for Roman typefaces, which ultimately became our Times New Roman. Because most people read a version of Caroline minuscule in books or on their computer screens every day, they can identify the letters on a ninth-century page even if they don't know what the Latin words mean. The script in Figure 23, however, is far more difficult to consume, as you may have noticed, because our brains are not used to these letter shapes. Carolingian readers of around 800 would not have found this script illegible because they were trained to read it.

However, even when you are able to read a challenging script like this (and one can learn to do so in paleography classes), there is a second coding problem to overcome, which is much trickier: letters and words are frequently abbreviated with symbols. In fact, sometimes a full page or even an entire book is written in this “code.” Like any cipher, you can only read it if you know the key. It is this kind of decoding of abbreviated words, some made up of special signs, that stands centre stage here as a defining feature of medieval script.

While the medieval examples of ephemeral artifacts discussed in Chapter 22 involved paper, other examples, explored here, were made from parchment. In the Middle Ages, such slips were called schedulae (singular schedula). The ones discussed here were in essence the by-product of parchment production. While the waste material became used for the production of small books, which can be recognized by their uneven pages (Figure 94) and translucent patches (see Figure 4 at p. 9), the scraps were particularly popular for note-taking. Before exploring a rare surviving scholarly note that I happened upon by chance in the collections of Leiden University Library, let's first explore how the material itself came to be.

From Skin to Parchment

In order to make an animal skin into parchment, it needed (among other steps) to be stretched taut on a frame. This stretching, combined with the natural shape of the animal's body, resulted in very uneven edges. The longer sides were slightly narrower in the middle where the animal's stomach had been, which gave them an elongated dent, while the shorter sides had various smaller dents around the locations where the head, tail, and legs had been. The edges needed to be removed to make a tidy sheet to write on. What was left over when this job was done were small pieces of parchment, called offcuts (see Figure 94 and the General Introduction, p. 8).

The strips were not only deemed unsuitable for book-making because of their odd size (long and skinny), but they were also riddled with deficiencies, such as stains, discolouration, and translucent patches, either by virtue of their location on the animal's body, or because of the stretching process. Unwieldy as they were, such “offcuts” were primarily acceptable for texts of limited length that did not need to look spiffy, such as notes, short draft texts, letters, horoscopes, wills, or addenda attached to charters.2 When used as a writing support, offcuts have an informal air about them, which is also reflected by the grade of script with which they are filled.

This final section moves away from the production of written artifacts and the culture of reading, which have been the main ingredients of the narrative so far. Various contexts of medieval written culture are briefly highlighted. Our first stop is the monastic scriptorium: Chapter 27 deals with the intriguing observation that this environment, the kitchen in which medieval books were made, is not depicted in surviving manuscripts. While there is plenty of medieval art showing individual scribes producing a manuscript, there is none—at least not convincingly so—that shows several artisans at work in the same room. This observation is all the more striking because decorators presumably had only to look around for inspiration and a model of how to depict a scriptorium. While it does not solve this mystery, the chapter does highlight the limited way in which scribes at work are presented in medieval iconography.

Chapter 28 stays in the vicinity of scribes at work and inquires about the appearance of their working spaces. What can we learn from depictions of their desks? How did they handle having several books open at the same time (at least their exemplar and the parchment they copied it onto) with limited desktop space? Examining scribes at work in medieval images—one of the few sources available to us—teaches us a variety of things. For example, different types of desks appear to have been used by people making books (scribes) and those composing texts (translators). Likewise, decoration also provides a close-up look at readers in the process of reading. Both scribes and readers had to negotiate the restricted space provided by the medieval desk, but both had solutions at their disposal to increase the value of the real estate in front of them.

The next two chapters again return to readers, but focus not on the consumption of books, which is the focus of the section Reading in Context, but on different aspects of book ownership. Chapter 29 sheds light on the second-hand book market, a difficult task given the limited tangible evidence left behind by this thriving business.

Books Before Print

It is easy to forget, but there were books long before Johannes Gutenberg started printing them in the middle of the fifteenth century. Books before print—commonly called “manuscripts” or, fancier, “codices”—were first made in the Latin West during the fourth century CE, when they started to replace the revered roll, a process that took until well into the fifth century. This transition was prompted by the growing length of texts, resulting from the increasing popularity of Christianity, a religion built on long stories and lengthy discussions. So when in ca. 1455 Gutenberg's Bible rolled off Europe's first printing press (a craftily converted wine press) the “new” object he produced had actually been around, in handwritten form, for over a thousand years.

In fact, if we look closely at Gutenberg's printed bible (Figure 1), we have to conclude that it looks almost exactly like the handwritten bibles produced by scribes in his vicinity, especially the large lectern bibles. As a businessman, Gutenberg knew not to change the look of books and potentially upset his clientele of readers. And so he adopted the manuscript's relative dimensions (the width of the page being 70 per cent of its height), layout (two columns), materials (like scribes, Gutenberg used both parchment and paper), reading aids (chapter titles, running titles at the tops of pages), and even the shape of handwritten letters: his printed textura was a direct copy of the written version used by scribes. In this early period of print the similarity to the handwritten book was so profound that one wonders if readers could actually see the difference, or if they even cared. The only real novelty, using moving type instead of a quill to produce letters, is difficult to observe unless you have an expert eye.

This book is devoted to the millennium of the quill, the era of the ancestor of the printed book, and, specifically, the manuscript (from the Latin manu scripta, “written by hand”). Most chapters tap into what is arguably the most notable feature of manuscripts: their individuality. While printers, producing several hundred copies at the same time, targeted a generic audience rather than a specific person, medieval scribes usually knew who would ultimately read the books they were making.

What can reveal more about the culture of a milieu or of an epoch than the style of its books? It is this exciting rhetorical question, posed by Leon Delaissé in his landmark article published posthumously in 1976, which captures the spirit of the explorations undertaken in Books Before Print. Its chapters show that medieval books are not merely objects that played a given role in society, for example, as tools or resources in religious practices and in education, but also that they themselves, through their material design, act as vehicles for the preferences and habits of the people who made up medieval society. As the case studies on the previous pages have shown, captured in the materiality of manuscripts are the data enabling us to make sense of their medieval users and settings of use. This is an important and advantageous legacy of the manuscript: that its observable features act as built-in historical evidence of a culture that has long vanished.

That this is even possible is because each medieval manuscript represents a single, custom-tailored production process, resulting in a one-of-a-kind—truly unique—book, as explained in the General Introduction. The motivations of scribes to opt for certain features were in large part sparked by the culturally and financially inspired preferences of the reader or the community that was to own the manuscript. Their needs were communicated, often verbally, and translated into specific material features. This system is unique to handwritten books. Printed volumes can also contain features that are unique to a specific copy, but to a much lesser extent. Readers in the age of print could write annotations in the margin and perhaps add a custom-tailored binding, but they could not mould the individual printed book to their own tastes and preferences. It was the printer who decided what physical features to include (dimensions, design, typeface) and he or she did so, obviously, for the entire print-run at the same time, probably without direct input from individual readers. In other words, printers designed a book with an ideal, not a real, reader in mind: true personalization arguably stopped when the quill was replaced by the press.

Whereas the previous sections of this book were devoted to producers of manuscripts, highlighting the accomplishments and products of scribes, decorators, and binders, the focus will now shift to readers and reading practices. It is much harder to shed light on this dynamic of medieval written culture. Books before print contain relatively few ownership inscriptions of specific medieval owners; moreover, rarely do ex libris inscriptions affiliate the manuscript to its first owner, the person or community that had the book made. The latter type is most interesting, as the General Introduction explained, because the first owner is the one who influenced (or, in case of a commercial book, even negotiated) the material features of the manuscript. While the next five chapters explore various aspects of reading culture in detail, we rarely encounter “real” readers, people we know by name and can place on the map of Europe.

Even though medieval readers of surviving manuscripts are commonly anonymous, many of them left traces that enable us to gauge why they consulted the manuscript or how they valued the text it held. The first two chapters explore these marks left behind during the act of reading. As Chapter 14 shows, medieval readers frequently consumed their books with a pen in their hand. This instrument was used to make notes in the margin, verbally attack the author of the text, and correct and expand the text, if needed. Moreover, readers highlighted important passages with special signs. It was so common for readers to engage with the text in this manner that it is indeed quite unusual to encounter manuscripts with spotless margins. While the absence of marginalia does not necessarily mean that the book in question was not read (an incorrect inference found in some studies), a margin that remains empty does limit our ability to say something about the people who read the book in the Middle Ages.

Chapter 15 subsequently highlights a particularly charming marginal addition, one that was deemed so useful that it even made it into the era of print: a pointing hand, or manicula, as defined in this book's General Introduction.

This section opens with a manuscript with a peculiar shape and format. Like most objects, books are confined to the space they occupy, obedient as they are to the laws of nature. That is to say, unlike the Incredible Hulk, they do not expand beyond the limits of their own physicality. This chapter will challenge your beliefs if you agree with this. It draws attention to a manuscript type that does expand: with a flick of the finger or a gesture of the hand the dimensions of these special objects increase dramatically, up to ten times their original size—or more. As if defying the laws of nature, this miraculous expansion increased the available writing space in objects that were principally designed to be small and portable. What do these objects look like? And what was the drive behind their production?

Bat Books

Produced in England in ca. 1415– 1420, the small manuscript in Figure 82 contains a calendar as well as astrological tables and diagrams. The information was used by physicians to diagnose and prognosticate, while the calendar provided information about religious feasts. The Leiden codicologist Peter Gumbert (d. 2016) coined the term “bat book” for this type of manuscript, alluding to its expanding nature: the book stretched its wings, as it were, when used. Moreover, in an unused state the book would be hanging from the owner's belt in an upside down orientation, like a bat. Gumbert's inventory holds sixty-three items, and many of them look more scruffy than the handsome specimen in the Wellcome Library. Folding almanacs were especially popular in late-medieval England, if the surviving specimens form an accurate representation.

These bookish objects are especially interesting from a material point of view. During production, folding almanacs looked very much like a regular book: the scribe filled regular pages with text. However, in a completed state, when the binding was added, the pages were folded in a very clever way, giving them an “unbookish” look. The two different states (a small package when closed, irregular dimensions when unfolded) were chosen with care: closed, it was a portable book that could dangle from the owner's belt, while in its extended state the reader was provided with expansive information at a glance.

This chapter and the next again focus on the medieval reader; not to examine how the manuscript reflects reading practices, as is done in the section Reading in Context, but to deal with aspects of book ownership. Like modern readers, medieval people owned two types of books: some were bought new, others secondhand. The two are very different entities, as we all know. New copies are expensive, pristine, and probably present a current publication, while second-hand ones, by contrast, are damaged, may smell of cigars, and potentially present an older edition of the text. Apart from the cigar smell, not much has changed in this regard since the Middle Ages. In that era, too, books were bought both new and pre-owned. And like most books today, their value differed greatly. We know this in part thanks to a familiar piece of information that is sometimes encountered in a medieval book: price tags.

Valuing Books

Medieval booksellers carefully set a value on both the new and the second-hand books that they offered for sale. Mind you, while they had the second-hand copies in stock, ready to be browsed by potential clients, the new ones still needed to be made. For these, arrangements awaited, regarding both material features and price. While it is difficult to deduce precisely which factors were in play in the appraisal process of second-hand books, availability and looks were probably deemed important. Manuscripts with illustrations or with a decorative binding, for example, may have been more expensive than plain copies bound in a parchment wrapper. Unlike today, the text's edition was unimportant (there were no publishers, editions, or even title pages), nor was the pristine preservation of the copy in question: it was common for medieval readers to jot down notes in the margins anyway, so few copies were truly pristine for long.

Surviving price tags, while rare, add a real-world dimension to these inferences and assumptions. The tags are usually found on the first or last page of the book, commonly at the very top so that they could be easily found (Figure 113). These prices were sometimes added next to individual copies listed in book inventories, which were made if an owner planned to sell, or if he or she had died.