What effect might these different approaches have on the finished product? In what ways does this make manuscripts different to modern books?
Medieval manuscripts are often thought of as encompassing two defining eras, the monastic and the secular. The making of these manuscripts were very different, culturally, socially and economically to modern books, requiring a rigorous, highly skilled and collaborative process.
In monastic scriptoriums, monks and scribes would spend a significant part of their day producing copies of classical Latin texts. This was a laborious process; the parchment itself took days in order to be primed and receptive to inks and colours. Monks stitched together handwritten parchments and bound them in wooden frames often covered in leather and sometimes embellished with gold leaf. The entire process involved multiple scribes, craftspeople and artists including lubricators, illuminators and correctors.
The demand for new types of book such as recreational or technical texts came from an increasingly literate middle class. Trade outside of monasteries mostly involved made to order copies, often included dividing types of labour on a single book between different shops (such as scribes, rubricators and illuminators each working on a part of the same book from different places). A corrector would check the writing when a scribe was finished and redress errors by scraping off ink with a knife or applying acidic solutions to loosen the ink.
Medieval approaches to copying manuscripts are rigorous compared to modern book production. A single copied manuscript would require careful collaboration and communication across a range of skilled workers/artists. This would have been a lengthy and extremely delicate and precision based procedure. The quality of a copy would depend on illuminators and scribes consistently producing a high degree of accuracy in their reproductions which would have required a lot of focus and concentration. The finished product would have been one which is much more highly valued because of the labour, skill, artistry and effort invested in its making. In contemporary society we showcase and preserve manuscripts in libraries and museums, assigning great cultural, historical and aesthetic value to them. I worked at the State library of NSW as a library assistant and had the pleasure of coming across a range of manuscripts within the collection. Here is a link to their collection of illuminated manuscripts.
Today’s book production is highly mechanised and industrialised, substituting the need for skilled craftsmanship with machines. This means that books are mass produced on a grand scale, we perhaps assign less value to them as they are commonplace and mundane to us and we no longer associate book-making with craftsmanship.
Question: How does this compare with contemporary approaches to art and design? How might these craftspeople have thought about the work they did?
It is interesting that we consider medieval manuscripts as works of art, it shows how concepts of ‘what is art’ has changed over time. There is a classical idea of art needing to be carried out by a trained craftspersons with strong technical ability and assumed they have received academic instruction on painting or writing, I think these manuscripts are in line with that view, we recognize the artistry inherent in the skill, precision and craft of these manuscripts. Our ideas of art have changed to encompass freedom of expression, or expressing individuality or simply defying artistic conventions and traditions, art doesn’t necessarily involve ‘skill’ in our contemporary culture, I think we look for ‘authenticity’, and I think its a reflection on our values as a society. We live in a society that strongly values individualism and free expression, where as religious manuscripts of medieval Europe romanticize and glorify devotion to god, to find beauty in liturgical scripture and imagery, there was more of an elitism and power of the church being celebrated for it’s beauty and cultural importance.