The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

by Sara J. Charles

Overview

Illuminated with illustrations, an exploration of medieval manuscript production that offers insight into both the early history of the book and life in the Middle Ages.
 
This book takes the reader on an immersive journey through medieval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a medieval narrator—including a parchment maker, scribe, and illuminator—introducing various aspects of manuscript production. Sara J. Charles poses the question “What actually is a scriptorium?” and explores the development of the medieval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press.
 
With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labor, planning, and networks needed to produce each manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, The Medieval Scriptorium helps us to experience medieval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789149166
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	10/29/2024
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Sara J. Charles works and studies at Senate House, University of London. She has previously published on various aspects of the history of the book.

Editorial Reviews

"In this compellingly written, fascinating must-read, Charles leads us on sensory journey of the tactile, unexpectedly smelly, excruciatingly painful, and divinely jubilant reality of manuscript-making in medieval Europe. A joyous page-turner!"

Elizabeth Savage

"Not at all ironically, rather extremely intentionally, the first impression any reader will have when encountering The Medieval Scriptorium by Charles is a very old-fashioned one: it’s a lovely physical production. It’s got a strong, flexible binding and heavy pages filled with clear, beautiful illustrations. In these chapters, Charles tells the history of the medieval manuscript, its evolution, its various technologies and the skill of their use. . . . Lively."

Open Letters Review

In The Medieval Scriptorium—an engaging and beautifully illustrated volume—Charles traces the evolution of the book from the early Christian centuries to the development of printing, a story covering some 1,500 years. . . . The author’s love of these books shines through and her enthusiasm and appreciation of the skill involved in making these works of art are infectious. The reader will learn much about medieval books, their makers and their making.

Methodist Recorder

"This book is a successful attempt to take its readers into the scriptorium for a close look, introducing them to the ‘blood, urine, excrement and earwax’ needed in the writing of a medieval manuscript.

Church Times

"Charles is particularly good in describing the manufacture of parchment, inks and colours (including the deadly, arsenic-based yellow-orpiment). . . . Another of the author's virtues is care in briefly explaining terms such as uncial and minuscule."

The Oldie

From squirrel hair brushes to scripts, Charles offers a comprehensive and engagingly accessible introduction to medieval book production. At times strikingly imaginative in form, this book brings together creative vignettes, intermittent chronologies, illustrations, and lucid prose to trace the contours of manuscript making in this period.

Hannah Ryley

"The Medieval Scriptorium vividly recreates the techniques and processes that underlay the production of books over the thousand-year period of the Middle Ages. Charles’s intimate grasp of her subject gives us a volume that is filled with delightful detail while offering a richly insightful overview of its compelling topic."

Timothy Graham

"A highly readable account of developments in book production in western Europe during the Middle Ages, surveying and contextualizing many of its best-known and most significant treasures while casting interesting light on the circumstances of their production. Charles introduces us to various individuals behind the books and reminds us of the human cost: the sore backs, the eye strain and the freezing fingers. Each of the book’s chapters is prefaced with a brief vignette that brings the subject to life with telling details. Thus, we encounter the nun who drops a lump of her own earwax into the egg glair used to stick gold leaf to parchment, the librarian inspecting sheets of parchment for holes before copying begins, and the painter getting bits of lapis lazuli stuck in her teeth after inadvertently licking her paintbrush. The author takes a broad and ambitious historical sweep."

Times Literary Supplement

"Lay readers and undergraduates will enjoy this learned and passionate exploration of the beauty, importance, and technical skills associated with Western medieval manuscripts. Charles accomplishes the latter in chapters explaining the procurement and preparation of parchment, the formulation and application of inks, the development of scripts, and the binding of folios into codices. Over three-dozen color illustrations appear throughout the text, as do a multitude of two-tone maps and figures. A narrative outline of text production in the classical era segues into chapters on the Middle Ages. Clearly explained is the importance of books in spreading Christianity, which established and solidified ties between monastic communities and, from a scribe’s perspective, the copying of texts as a devotional act. Readers unfamiliar with the medieval period will learn about women as religious and lay scribes and the importance of Iberian/Sicilian Muslim and Jewish scholars in the revival of learning in the twelfth century. Some key points include the establishment of universities, the growth of lay literacy (and the consequent commercialization of scribal work), and the demise of handwritten text after the invention of movable type. Recommended."

Choice

The author describes how manuscripts were made, the colours and techniques used, including the roles of the parchment maker, scribe and illuminator and how they developed in medieval times. You can perceive the lives and the aura of the monasteries and monastic life—and it’s the amount of labour and detail put into every edition that also causes you to marvel. . . . A fascinating account of manuscript making and writing and the relevance today with our lives caught up in smart phones, computers, social media and AI.

Arts Centre Group

"Charles conjures the feel, sounds and smells of manuscript-making in this jaunty book, which is filled with imagined vignettes starring medieval figures, as well as extensive detail and analysis of tools, materials and religious contexts."

Apollo Magazine

"A lively and very readable illustrated survey . . . of all aspects of medieval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world, charting the decline and fall of the scriptorium and its makers over more than a millennium."

Fine Books

"Glimpses of medieval belief and culture, trade, relationships with nature, and - most of all - individual medieval lives: Sara J. Charles’s brilliant book reveals the world of the Middle Ages through the pages of its manuscripts."

Catherine Clarke

"A fascinating look at manuscript making in the Middle Ages. . . . In The Medieval Scriptorium, Charles, a book historian at the University of London, illuminates the old, even ancient origins of concepts that remain familiar today. . . . The book introduces us not just to the way that texts have been passed down through the centuries, but how that phenomenon happened."

Financial Times

"This fascinating book explores the medieval process of bookmaking and reproduction that was often arduous, back-breaking, eye-straining work for the scribes and copyists involved. We learn how colours were made and calfskin prepared to create parchment and how these beautiful and enduring objects developed. Illuminating."

Financial Times (Best books of 2024: Literary non-fiction)