The Labor of Medieval Scribes from the Ninth Century onwards

       The literature which was to afford material for the exercise of the penman's skill was restricted within Christian boundaries. It was rarely that a scribe condescended to make copies of any of the literary work produced in pagan Rome or Greece. Occasional instances are found which offer exception to the rule, but as in the ninth century all the men who knew how to write were, in one form or another, servants of the Church, it was not to be expected that many among them would help to perpetuate the pernicious books of the dead heathens. Consequently many of the treasures of ancient literature perished. The Bible was the substitute ; and innumerable copies were made in the East and the West of the book which has influenced the world more powerfully than any other production of the wit of man. In the East, there was a more logical tendency to neglect the Old Testament and to copy only the New; in the West, it was the custom to multiply transcripts of the complete Latin Scripture as left by St. Jerome. Besides the Bible, there were the liturgical monuments. The Sacramentary which contained the order of sacrifice and adoration in the most solemn office of the Church, with all the prayers that preceded and followed the acts of offering and worship, required careful and frequent copying, so that it should not deviate in the smallest degree from the established model. The slight changes which constituted differences of use in this part of the liturgy, and which have distinguished the so-called Gallican, Mozarabic, Milanese, and Celtic churches as at least co-geval with (and possibly older than) the Latin church of Rome, began to lose their historic distinctness in the ninth century and soon faded away. The survival of belated and rare examples (by the grace of papal sanction) at Toledo and at Milan, is but an antiquarian curiosity without any significance. Rome triumphed in the ninth century, and the diversities in certain respects which have been dignified in England and elsewhere with the name of "use" since then, are simply local varieties in unimportant particulars.

Scribe reading a text

       Beyond the establishment of the supreme rite of sacrifice on certain holy days, the Church began, at an early period of its existence, to treat every day as consisting of so many hours of which some were necessarily to be yielded up to religious service. The use of the Psalms, and of set prayers, for that purpose, and the fact that the anniversaries of saints' and martyrs' deaths had to be borne in remembrance, led to the creation of the Breviary. Besides this, the office of the Mass itself became requisite for celebration on every day as well as on the more solemn days, and thus a variable portion (according to the character of the day) had to be added to the invariable. Thus enlarged, the volume of the Sacramentary, with all its lessons from the Bible, and its accumulations of antiphonal phrases grew into the Missal as we know it. The Breviary underwent similar increase, and the result was to make the Liturgy so extensive and so complex that it gave continual employment in the scriptorium of every church and monastery all over Europe. There were Psalters, Sacramentaries, Missals, Breviaries, Lectionaries of several kinds, Hymnals, Graduals (Books of the chanted antiphonal portions of the Mass), Antiphonaries (Books of the chanted antiphonal portions of the Hours- offices), Martyrologies, Homilies, and (at a later time) Kituals, Processionals, and Pontificals (offices to be performed by Bishops). St. Gregory had been the latest official arranger of the Sacramentary or Missal, in the seventh century ; but its text was hardly settled till the twelfth century, and the same may be said of the Breviary. In the ninth century, however, the texts had grown to something not very different from their ultimate state. Here was plenty of work for the priestly and monkish scribes.

       Besides the Bible and the Liturgy, there were the works of the fathers, and by-and-by the treatises of the school men and the chronicles of monkish historians ; quite enough, in all conscience, to render useless the heavy lucubrations of Livy and Trogus Pompeius, and the absurd conceits of the heathen poets.

       Things were not dissimilar in Byzantium. The Liturgy there was even more complex and extensive than in the West, and the foolish literature of old Hellas was generally ignored by the men who were engaged in daily study of the Euchologium, the Horologium, the Menologium, the Archieraticon, the Synaxarium, the Octoechos, &c. The Bibliotheca of Photius shows, however, that the race of students who cultivated the old literature was not wholly extinct.

       At all times, both in the East and the West, the letters and charters of Kings, and diplomatic documents of every kind, needed the service of trained penmen. This department of graphic labor was not completely in the hands of churchmen; and it led to the creation of a caste of writers in every country who were not under the influence of the monkish schools. They could not afford to spend so much time as the book writers over their work, and thus a hand of cursive character was established in every chancellery in Europe, devoted only to the service of the State and never employed for any other purpose. It was nearly always ugly, sometimes fantastic, sometimes difficult to be read except by the officials engaged in such work. From the earliest days of diplomatic writing, in the sixth century in Italy, down to the seventeenth century in England, it preserved a strange and fanciful style, first long, thin and narrow letters looking like a congeries of wandering parallel lines indistinguishable without a glass, and finally letters of proper size, but so disguised in shape as to be indecipherable without a special training. At only one period, that is, in the late eleventh and in the twelfth century, was diplomatic writing fair and readable. That was in England and Northern France; but even here, the upright strokes of letters like 1, and d, and b, were elongated to an enormous extent, and in their sweep offered to the scribe his few opportunities of ornamentation. As our business, however, is with books we leave the charters and the rescripts on one side, and proceed to the consideration of the main character of the calligrapher's work.

       The Bible and the Liturgy for churchmen have been spoken of as the chief objects of reproduction among the scribes for many centuries. It was not till the twelfth century that their labors required to be augmented for the service of laymen. Men (and women) who could afford the expense, or whose position demanded that they should have prayer books for their own use, whether they could read ill or well or not at all, were furnished with Latin Psalters, to which were added, at the end, the Athanasian Creed, a Litany of Saints, some general prayers, and the office for the Dead. They were extracts from the Breviary for the use of persons who only prayed occasionally. The growth of something like education, and a religious desire to share to a somewhat greater extent the communion with Heaven which was monopolised by monks and priests, caused a farther extension of calligraphic labor towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Psalter with its scanty additions was no longer sufficient for pious laymen. A larger selection of prayers and lessons from the Breviary was concocted; the offices of the Virgin, of the Cross, of the Holy Ghost, and of some special saints were united to form the Book of Hours. It was nothing like the severe and frequent task of orisons with which the monks performed their duties at the canonical Hours of the day and night, but it was sufficient for the most zealous laymen and laywomen ; and it became the private Prayerbook of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. During that period it was produced in countless thousands of manuscripts in England, France, Flanders, Italy, and to a less extent in Germany and Spain. In England it was called Horse Beata3 Maria3 Virginis, or Book of Hours, or Primer; in France always Horge, or Livre d'Heures; in Italy it was Officium B.Y.M., and in Flanders and Holland Ghetijden. The Gebetbuch of Germany belongs chiefly to the fifteenth century, and was nearly always in German, while in France, Flanders, and England, prayers in the vernacular only crept in gradually here and there. (In Italy the book always continued to be written in Latin only.) In the English Hours or Primer the vernacular portions became at last so important that it was found advisable to issue many of the printed Primers in the sixteenth century in bilingual form, Latin and English ; and it was undoubtedly this tendency both in England and in Germany which produced the Reformation. It was not so much the desire for a Reformation of the Church even Boccaccio, himself a churchman, and many others of his kind had wished for that as an invincible demand for a vernacular liturgy, which widened through opposition into an eagerness to sweep away everything that opposed it. Hence the break with Home, which still imperiously demanded the uniformity that could only be maintained by the use of a single language throughout Europe. The few exceptions to the rule which ecclesiastical policy had ever allowed were in the concession to the affiliated Greek, Slavonic, and Oriental congregations of a right to use their own vernacular liturgies. The antiquity of the Greek and Syriac formulas, on the one hand, the utter impossibility of making Latin familiar even to the priests of the Slavic and Oriental churches, and the certainty that a denial of their needs would throw them into the Byzantine fold account for Papal acquiescence in that respect. But the Popes could not see that England and Germany, which had from so early a time been the seats of Roman colonies and the homes of Latin churches, likewise needed a liturgy that the people could understand; and that the Teutonic speech of the north had no such generic sympathy with the language of the Roman liturgy as the rustic Latin tongues of Italy, Spain, and France.

       The Canon Law, deriving from the remains of the apostolical constitutions and the acts of the Councils, the Penitentiaries which had been formulated by bishops for the government of Christianized barbarians, and the decrees of Popes, began to take shape as a Code in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The existence of forged documents among the decretals was a matter of no great importance. Everything was sufficiently old to be respectable ; and the schools of law, which had never given up the study and cultivation of the Civil Code (digested in Justinian's time from the various works of the old Roman jurists), set to work to arrange and gloss the Canon Law. The two Codes, especially the Ecclesiastical, provided the scribes of Western Europe with an enormous amount of work. Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford were renowned for their lawyers and their schools of law; with the accompanying armies of students and copyists.

       Christian poets, too, were not lacking. From the time of Lactantius onwards, the quantity of metrical Latin work done by churchmen was very large; and the lyrical yearning inherent in all societies had produced an immense hymnology, which comprised a great deal of real poetry most poetical and most charming when least Ciceronian. Here, again, was rich material for the copyists of the scriptorium; and both Hymnals and Lawbooks lent their aid towards the gradual tendency of students to go back and investigate the ancient sources of literature and philosophy and history. Pliny had never been wholly forgotten, even in the most anti-pagan times, and the treatises on natural science which had appeared among the schoolmen, all stimulated curiosity to learn what had been written before the days of Constantine. The result of these intellectual tendencies made the fourteenth century a dawn of the Renaissance, and with the beginning of the fifteenth a large body of heathen literature was annexed to the libraries of universities, scholars, and monasteries, giving increased employment to the transcribers who were at that time busy all over Europe. It was in the thirteenth century that the monks and the priests lost their monopoly of the practice of ornamental writing ; in the fourteenth century every great city had its ateliers of calligraphers unconnected with the Church; and when the fifteenth century arrived the trained citizen penmen, who formed crafts throughout Europe, were probably not inferior in number to the scribes who worked in ecclesiastical edifices.

Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, You Are Reading Chapter 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 chapters

Plates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22