By Jenneka Janzen

This week, while playing with the iPhone app for e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, I paid an online visit to one of my favourite manuscripts, the Cantatorium of St Gall (Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek Cod. Sang. 359):

Pages 24 and 25 of Cod. Sang. 359. (N.B. St Gall’s manuscripts are paginated, not foliated.)
Photo © 2013 e-codices.

A ‘cantatorium’ is a book that contains the gradual and alleluia chants that a soloist would perform during the Mass. Amalarius of Metz (writing before 850 AD) comments in his Liber officialis that the cantor (or ‘soloist’) holds the cantatorium in his hands at the ambo (or ‘lectern’) although he does not need it to perform his duties, and that the book is bound in ivory plaques.

But what is so special about Cod. Sang. 359? Besides the fact that very few ‘independent’ cantatoria survive today (over time these books were gradually combined with other chant and liturgical books), Cod. Sang. 359 is the earliest complete neumed manuscript.

It is possible to see some of these early ‘neumes’ (or ‘notes’) above the words below:

“Alleluia . Adorabo ad templum”. Cod. Sang. 359, page 53. Photo © 2013 e-codices.

Once believed to be the autograph of Gregory the Great (it isn’t), in 1851 this manuscript became the first published facsimile of any musical manuscript.

Despite its rare survival, Cod. Sang. 359 is not especially physically unique (which is not to say it is uninteresting). It is written in a single column, in a Caroline minuscule characteristic of St Gallen, by several hands of varying skill. The text varies in size and provides enough space between the lines to add musical notation, and the words are dispersed broadly across the line to make sure the neumes will line up properly. Given the regularity of the layout and relationship between neumes and script, it is likely that the scribe also played the role of musical notator.

Pages 56 and 57 of Cod. Sang. 359. Photo © 2013 e-codices.

Consistent with Amalarius’ description, the St Gall Cantatorium is bound between sturdy wooden boards mounted with carved ivory plaques. Dating of the oak boards has confirmed that this is the original binding. The ivory panels on the front are taken from an early sixth-century Byzantine diptych, and depict the war of Dionysus against the Indians, and were apparently once in the possession of Charlemagne. Although heavy, its narrow dimensions are designed to make it easy for one person to hold in his hands, emphasizing its use by the solo cantor.

Cod. Sang. 359′s ivory front cover, c. 500, Byzantine.
Photo © 2013 e-codices.

The cantatorium’s early neumes themselves have been the core of legend and controversy: where did they come from? And for what purpose? These questions will be explored in an upcoming blog post on the history of musical neumes.

To be continued…

By Julie Somers

In September, the three day ‘Digital Humanities Summer School’ at KU Leuven, Belgium, offered presentations on a variety of approaches to this field.  From ‘digital scholarly editing’ to ‘digital open scholarship’, the lectures provided insight into the simple and complex aspects of digital research.

Day one began with a very clear overview of the what and how of digital scholarly editing presented by Elena Pierazzo (King’s College London, UK). She began with a seemingly simple question; What is digital scholarly editing? Is it a change of medium? A new methodology? A new discipline? Her answer, ‘It depends.’ In the developing field of digital editions of manuscripts (classical, medieval or modern), the answer to this simple question quite often eludes simple definitions.

Against this backdrop, the first day of the program presented papers and projects that addressed the complications of digital scholarly editing. Caroline Mace (KU Leuven, Belgium) spoke to the need for digital tools that support an historical approach to manuscript traditions, providing ‘more than just images on the web’. She gave as an example Stemmaweb, an analysis and visualization tool developed with the Interedition project. Herman Brinkman (Huygens ING, The Netherlands) discussed the continuing problem of conflicted priorities of both user and editor when creating a digital edition. He presented a digital tool that offers a ‘compromise’ by creating a collaborative working environment on-line, eLaborate.  Franz Fischer (University of Cologne, Germany) discussed the changes from traditional to digital philology, where the digital edition can offer more than the print edition, as evidenced in the project, St. Patrick’s Confessio. At the end of the day another seemingly simple question was posed. Edward Vanhoutte (KANTL, Belgium) and Ron Van den Branden (KANTL, Belgium) asked ‘what is a letter?’ They presented the obstacles of defining elements of correspondence, including the envelope.

The second day presented a different aspect to Digital Humanities; open access, open learning, open content, open, open, open. Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK) presented the keynote to begin the days discussions with another question. His topic, ‘What are the Digital Post-Humanities?’ Hall suggests that it is a ‘mutation of those features that are already part of the humanities’ with a focus on making content openly available for new ways of research. Erik Duval (KU Leuven, Belgium) discussed the power of open data for building new and interesting projects, such as Live!Singapore and the rapidly developing open learning platform of MOOC’s. The focus on open access was reiterated by Cristobal Cobo (Oxford University, UK) who talked about projects that utilize open source (process or product), and open access (research papers) which can generate new ways of knowledge distribution, for example Hastac and figshare. The afternoon’s presentations turned again to the opportunity for open learning that MOOC’s provide, including information on the Leiden Coursera provided by Marja Verstelle (Leiden University, NL). This ‘re-imagined classroom’ was also discussed by Shaun Hides and Jonathan Shaw (Coventry University, UK) who envision open, hybrid and mobile ways of teaching and engaging students.

In all, the presentations showed the opportunities and obstacles that face digital scholarship, including the attempt to define this field. What is Digital Humanities? Or Digital Post Humanities? What is digital scholarly editing? What is a letter? Going back to Elena Pierazzo’s initial answer, ‘it depends.’ Yet, however you define it, it involves open collaboration between user and data.

By Ramona Venema

Ramona is a research master in ‘Classical, Medieval Renaissance Studies’ at the University of Groningen. She is currently working as an intern for the ‘Turning Over a New Leaf Project’. 

After completing a course in the fundamentals of codicology I was hooked: I had to do an internship that involved the study of medieval books. The smelliness of parchment couldn’t keep me away from the manuscripts. When I attended a lecture given by Dr. Erik Kwakkel, I decided to send an e-mail asking whether there was a place for an intern in his Turning Over a New Leaf project at the University of Leiden. I received a swift reply and a couple of months (and a pile of paperwork) later here I am.

Some of you might remember Erik Kwakkel’s earlier blogpost about how medieval letters can ‘kiss’ and ‘bite’ — in the twelfth century it became increasingly common for scribes to fuse certain letterforms together, giving the impression that they were ‘kissing’ (just touching slightly) and then ‘biting’ (almost fully joined together). Essentially, my internship project analyzes and records this ‘courtship’ of letterforms that took place during the eleventh century, while also keeping my eye out for developments and changes in other script features.

You might be wondering how my current project relates to the Turning Over a New Leaf project as a whole. Well, the data that Erik Kwakkel has collected thus far, has focused primarily on manuscripts produced between the years 1075 and 1225. He has shown that some early examples of ‘Gothic’ script features (including letter fusion) occur in approximately 30% of the manuscripts produced around the year 1075. This suggests that certain features that we now call ‘pre-Gothic’ or ‘Gothic’ may have been introduced even earlier than 1075. The question is where and when they were introduced for the first time. My task is to document examples of these script features in manuscripts of the eleventh century.

Two examples of a ct-ligature, the c and t are connected overhead (Fragment from Bibl. Nat. de France Lat. 3786 fol. 259; image from Catalogue des Manuscrits Datés)

My internship is (at the time of writing this) still in its infancy. Yes folks, that means that I spend most days staring at my computer screen, scanning 11th-century manuscript images, and entering their script features into a database. Admittedly at times it can be a monotonous task, but it also has its fun moments. I have now immersed myself so heavily in 11th-century script, that I sometimes find myself looking into the mirror early in the morning and thinking “Hey, that could be a ct-ligature!” and then quickly realizing that it’s just a curl in my fringe that I’m really looking at.

Or that merry moment when I found what I thought was a really obscure and unusual script with crazy ‘capless’ ‘a’s and huge ‘e’s. (I immediately got all geeky and excited—something strange was happening in this script). But then moments later Erik Kwakkel stopped by and said (after about 2 seconds of looking at it): ‘Oh, that’s visigothic script!’ (Read: You can’t include the manuscript in the database). Bummer! 

Visigothic: a fun transcribing exercise. Can you spot the capless a’s and the enormous e’s?
(Fragment from Bibl. Nat. de France – Nouv. Acq. Lat. 2169, fol. 26; image from Catalogue des Manuscrits Datés)

What I find satisfying about this type of (quantitative) research is that the numbers tell the tale. Even though I am not exactly a mathematical genius (far from it) I can appreciate that statistics (when applied to script) are able to give us the tools to date a manuscript more specifically, rather than going on gut-feeling (or the ‘Zap’ moment). It makes the research that is conducted more of an exact process, which is very satisfying. Needless to say, I am very content with my internship, and I am curious to see whether all my ‘staring at computer screens’ will yield some exciting results in the weeks to come.

By Irene O’Daly

Scribal portraits in medieval books were fairly common, and can be an important resource for scholars attempting to reconstruct the atmosphere of a medieval scriptorium, as they provide insights into the materials used in the production of the medieval book. In scribal portraits, however, there is often a substantial dose of iconographical convention mixed with attempts to make an accurate, realistic portrait. Scribal portraits may, therefore, tell us just as much about what the scribal process was thought to be like as what it actually was like.

The Four Evangelists (Plaque): Victoria and Albert Museum (Germany, mid-11th century)

Gospels often illustrate the four Evangelists at work, and these depictions commonly show the principal elements of the scribal process. In fact, such depictions were not limited to the pages of the book, but could be found in other media – as in the case of these ivory plaques. Here the Evangelists (identified in each case by their associated animal shown in the upper corner of each image) are depicted mid-process: on the top left, Matthew sharpens his quill; the next image to the right shows Luke hard at work in the process of composition; the image on the bottom left shows the Mark reaching away with his quill from the book, perhaps to refresh the ink; the fourth presents John deep in contemplation, looking beyond the boundaries of the image. Mental composition, preparation of materials, and writing are recognised as distinct stages of the scribal process.

Image of Eadwine, the Scribe. Cambridge, Trinity College, R. 17. 1
Christ Church Canterbury, c. 1160

A common inaccuracy in scribal portraits, as seen in the ivory book cover, is the convention of showing the scribe writing directly into a bound volume. We know that medieval books were, instead, written page-by-page, then assembled into a book after completion; drafts were usually made on wax tablets or parchment scraps. The presentation of the scribe writing into a book, therefore, was misleading. However, it clearly shows the value that was placed on the ‘finished product’ and, indeed, on the scribe’s role in designing and executing the volume. The famous portrait of Eadwine, scribe, found in the Eadwine Psalter (depicted above) is an example of this convention, and can be contrasted with the more accurate image below of Laurence of Durham, who is shown writing into a quire of parchment.

Image of Lawrence of Durham, Durham, University Library. Ms. Cosin V.III. 1. f. 22v.

Common tools shown in all these images include the quill and the knife. The quill was made from a hardened, dried-out feather cut at an angle. The scribe held the quill in one hand, and a knife in the other. The knife was used to sharpen the quill, to hold the parchment flat while writing, and to correct small errors by scraping the parchment. As depicted, the scribe usually sat at a sloped desk, which facilitated the flow of ink on to the page. If the scribe sat, it was at a chair with no arms, which allowed him to move physically across the page. The scribal task was often shared with that of illuminating the manuscript. Hugh, a late eleventh-century Norman monk, who describes as ‘pictor’ and ‘illuminator’ depicts himself ambidextrously engaged in both roles – quill on parchment, feather for painting in an inkwell.

Self-portrait of Hugo ‘pictor’ and ‘illuminator’, Oxford, MS Bodley, 717, f. 287v (Jerome on Isaiah) – late 11th-century Jumieges (Normandy)

The value of scribal images is that they allow us to imagine the scribe at work. Shown hunched at his desk, quill in hand, they represent the labour that went into the production of a medieval volume. A previous post touched on literary depictions of the medieval scribe. To echo that theme, and to reflect on the efforts of the medieval scribe, I conclude this post with a translation of an eleventh-century Irish poem by the late Seamus Heaney:

‘Colmcille the Scribe’:

My hand is cramped from penwork.
My quill has a tapered point.
Its bird-mouth issues a blue-dark
Beetle-spark of ink.

Wisdom keeps welling in streams
From my fine-drawn, sallow hand:
Riverrun on the vellum
of ink from green-skinned holly.

My small runny pen keeps going
Through books, through thick and thin
To enrich the scholars’ holdings:
penwork that cramps my hand.

By Jenny Weston

For the most part, medieval books do not look like this:

Front cover of the Lindau Gospel with raised gem stones (© Morgan Library, New York)

But just as some people today add chrome to their cars or gems to their watches or phone cases, some medieval people chose to add ‘bling’ to their books.

Take for example the following Gospel book known as the Codex Aureus or ‘Golden Book’. Made in the 9th century for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles II, the cover of the book is covered with gold, gems, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls.

Codex Aureus of St Emmeram (‘Golden Book’)

These extremely luxurious book covers are often referred to as ‘treasure bindings’ (for  obvious reasons)!

Because these books were extremely valuable, they were naturally a target for thieves. As a result, only a handful of ‘intact’ examples survive today. It’s possible to see a few ‘missing gems’ in the following book, where someone has carefully plucked out the precious stones (providing a little window to the wooden binding below).

Codex Aureus of Freckenhorst (11th century Gospel Book)

It is interesting that many of the most lavishly decorated books from the Middle Ages were Gospel books. Not only were the Gospels revered as sacred and significant holy texts, but these books were also often put on display on the altar of the church (for use in church services or ceremonies), as well as being read privately. They presented an opportunity to show off the wealth and prestige of a church, lord, or local community.

In some cases, the decoration did not stop at the binding but continued inside with grand illuminations and impressive detail. One of the most famous examples is the 9th-century Gospel book known as the Book of Kells, which contains many full-page illustrations like this:

The ‘Chi Rho’ Monogram of the Book of Kells

The attention to artistic detail is really stunning. If you take a closer look at the figure of Christ in the image below (centre), you can see how the illuminator has carefully intertwined the locks of hair, echoing the celtic motifs seen in the border of the image.

Christ on the throne (Book of Kells)

But why did some wish to decorate their books so opulently? I have compiled a (not so) comprehensive list of the most likely reasons for adding the ‘bling’ to the book:

1. To show off. 

Even ‘normal’ books were expensive to produce in the Middle Ages. By adding jewels and rubies to the cover of a book, you could send a pretty clear message that you were wealthy enough to afford such an expenditure.

2. To show how much you loved the text. 

Books, especially religious books, were seen as important carriers of spiritual texts—essentially vehicles of the Word of God. Some chose to honour the significance of the texts by adorning them with beautiful artwork.

3. To give a really nice gift to someone really important. 

Many of these books were made as gifts to honour important people or important events. The Golden Gospels of Henry III, for example, were made under the patronage of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III in the 11th century to be donated to Speyer Cathedral to mark the dedication of a new altar.

Golden Gospels of Henry III

For more images of treasure bindings and medieval manuscript ‘bling’, be sure to check out the website of our friends at Sexycodicology.net—especially their pinterest page where you can see lots more examples!

By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel)

This blog connects to two earlier entries in medievalfragments: Irene O’Daly’s recent blog on how scribes are depicted in medieval art (here); and Jenneka Janzen’s assessment of how we are to understand the “physical scriptorium” (here). Something struck me when I read both pieces, in particular when I looked at the images accompanying Irene’s blog. The scribes in her story, as well as those in images I had on file myself, are depicted as individual copyists instead of scribes working in groups. Even when multiple scribes are presented in each other’s vicinity, such as the four evangelists in the Aachen Gospels of c. 820 (Fig. 1), we are still looking at multiple individual scribes – after all, they have their backs turned to each other and are separated by rock formations. My point, you ask? Where are the scriptoria, I reply!

Fig. 1. Aachen Gospels (Aachen, Cathedral, s.n. c. 820).

While the monastic scriptorium is the location where manuscripts were made – at least until c. 1200, when commercial scribes took over the monks’ role as primary book producers – it turns out that medieval images of scriptoria are rare. Very rare. Check this out: while a Google search consisting of the words “medieval” “scribe ” and “manuscript” returns dozens of writing monks, not a single one is shown in a spacey room working side by side with fellow monks – with the exception of images from the nineteenth or twentieth century. Even an intense search through various databases left me nearly empty handed. Here is what I did find.

Fig. 2. Lay person and monk jointly making books in a Echternach Abbey (Bremen, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 217, c. 1020).

This first image of multiple book producers at work in a monastic environment is from a richly-decorated Gospel Book produced in Echternach, Luxemburg (Fig. 2). It was made as a mighty gift for Emperor Henry II. The image shows a peculiar blend of two worlds: the individual on the right, a monk, is copying the text; while the person on the left, whose clothes show he is not a monk, produced the decoration. For important books such as this one professionals from the outside world were sometimes hired to decorate the pages. Is the place we see them working in a scriptorium? Perhaps. However, what the image really shows is how this particular book – the object sent to Henry II – came to be, namely with the help of a hired hand. Perhaps this image was added to show the receiver that a professional had decorated the object? (‘Spare no expense!’) In any case, it is unlikely that this illustration was included to show the inside of a scriptorium. This may be underscored by the observation that when lay scribes were asked to enter an abbey for the duration of a book project, they were usually separated from the local monks by order of the abbot.

Fig. 3. Scriptorium in tenth-century Spain (Madrid, Nat. Hist. Archaeological Museum, Cod., 1097 B, c. 970).

The second image I found presents a similar scenario (Fig. 3). Shown is the scriptorium of Tábara de León, a monastery in Spain, in what is usually regarded as the oldest known depiction of a scriptorium (c. 970). The image is part of a copy of Beatus’ Commentary on the Apocalypse. The accompanying colophon identifies the monk on the left as “Senior”, while the individual across the table is “Emeterius”, who is dressed as a lay person. Both are working on a book (is Emeterius perhaps drawing images?), while a third, in a room to the right, is cutting sheets (more information on this image here). While you are looking at a band of individuals producing a manuscript, the image likely shows how that very book was produced, as in Fig. 2.

Both images presented so far raise questions rather than answer them. Are we looking at a realistic representation of a scriptorium? Or do they show how a particular book was produced; stressing, in particular, that the monks had help from an outsider? If these two images do show us the real deal, then the scriptorium is a tiny space, not a vast room with rows of desks. Or did the illustrator choose to sacrifice a realistic view of a spacious room in order to show multiple individuals in the small space of a miniature?

Fig. 4. Paris, BnF, Lat. MS 818 (11th century).

The third image I found, which is part of an eleventh century missal (Fig. 4), underscores the issues encountered so far. The two figures appear to be involved in the production of a book. The individual on the left is writing on a wax tablet with a stylus, while the other is perhaps ruling a parchment sheet with a sharp object. (Or is he cutting sheets?) What may appear to be the inside of a scriptorium, could, in fact, also be showing us something else. If we zoom out and observe the full page, we see that the two figures are placed in a cramped space underneath the main character, a saint, who is writing text on a wax tablet with a stylus. It reminds me of the famous tenth-century ivory cutting showing Gregory the Great towering over some ‘dwarf’ scribes copying his works (Fig. 5). Three scribes producing manuscripts in a confined space do not constitute a scriptorium. Or do they?

Fig. 5. Gregory and his scribes (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 10th century).

Having searched the web far and wide, I came up with one last image. This scene is hard to trace back to a specific manuscript, but it appears to be kept in Madrid’s Bibliotheca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial - this is where I found it (Fig. 6). At long last, I hear you say, a real scriptorium, fitted with benches that are filled with scribes copying books, while a scriptorium master is looking on.

Fig. 6. Spanish scriptorium? (Madrid, Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 14th century).

Perhaps this is so, but there are issues here, too. For one thing, the scribe in the back is not a monk but a lay person. A rich one by the looks of his clothes and hair. The figure in the middle appears to be a monk, but the person on the right is likely not. The image comes close to what we would imagine a scriptorium to look like, judging from such descriptions as “[in the cloister] you might have seen a dozen young monks sitting on chairs in perfect silence, writing at tables carefully and skillfully constructed” (quote taken from Jenneka’s blog, mentioned earlier). However, the lay person in the back would seem out of place, as does perhaps the individual on the right.

In spite of all the obscurity in this blog, my main point stands: where are the scriptoria? After all, a search on the web and in my bookcase did not produce more than a handful of scenes where we see multiple individuals working on books in the same physical space. That none of them convincingly show us the inside of a monastic scriptorium does not matter. The biggest mystery, in my opinion, is why there are so few depictions of multiple scribes working together.

By Jenneka Janzen

In my last blog post I briefly discussed one of my favourite manuscripts, the Cantatorium of St Gall (Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek Cod. Sang. 359). It survives as the oldest complete neumed manuscript.

Pages 24 and 25 of Cod. Sang. 359. Photo © 2013 e-codices.

I also mentioned that early neumes, much like those found in this manuscript, are surrounded by legend and controversy. Indeed, their stories are both illuminating and quite funny.

The history of Frankish neumes begins with the rise of the Carolingian dynasty. When Pepin the Short became King of Francia in 752, significant problems in the Frankish Church were further exacerbated by a dysfunctional relationship with Rome. Having taken the crown after a long and violent struggle, Pepin needed the legitimacy of papal support. The new pope, Stephen II, likewise needed Pepin: when Pepin vowed to protect the papal estates from the Lombards, Stephen agreed to demonstrate his support of Pepin by performing his coronation.

Pope Stephen’s visit to crown Pepin was just the beginning; he trained the community at St-Denis to practice the Roman liturgy. While suppressing local Gallican rites, Pepin then requested a collection of ‘correct’ liturgical books from Stephen’s successor Paul I, and established a Roman-style schola cantorum (song school) at Rouen. Although students of the school were trained in the Roman style, it must have been nigh impossible to ensure the new tradition remained uncorrupted by the old. There was, after all, no static notational system; melody had to be passed by voice alone, and ‘correctness’ could only be verified against visiting Roman singers. The eventual consistency of the new Frankish-Roman chant was achieved through development of a successful notational system.

Close-up of the notation on “Alleluia . Adorabo ad templum”. Cod. Sang. 359, page 53. Photo © 2013 e-codices.

The earliest examples of notation are from between 825 and 850. Musicologist Willi Apel explains “we cannot assume that the earliest musical manuscript that has come down to us from these remote times was actually the earliest ever written. On the contrary, the highly complex and intricate notation of a manuscript such as St Gall 359 […] marks it beyond any doubt as one that was preceded by others, now lost.” Another example, generally attributed to the late 9^th or early 10th century (with some disagreement) is the incomplete Laon Gradual.

Much of what we know about the spread of Roman chant and development of neumes comes from 9th- and 10th-century writers who describe a sort of ‘chant war,’ if you will. According to Notker Balbulus in his Gesta Karoli Magni, written c. 884 at St Gall, Charlemagne asked the pope for a dozen Roman cantors to teach the monks in his kingdom. However, “being, like all Greeks and Romans, greatly envious of the glory of the Franks” they decided to sabotage Charlemagne’s goal of uniformity by each teaching a different vocal style to the Franks. Charlemagne found out that he and his kingdom’s singers had been deceived, and alerted Pope Leo. Leo recalled the offending cantors to Rome and punished them with exile or life imprisonment. Sure that any other singers he sent would be equally devious, Leo took in two of Charlemagne’s singers to be trained, and when their skill was perfected, sent them home to spread Roman chant.

(Listen to one of Notker’s own chant compositions.)

John the Deacon, a monk of Monte Cassino with ties to the papal court, recounts another colourful introduction of Roman chant to Francia. In his Vita sancti Gregorii (872-882) he describes a meeting of Charlemagne’s cantors, who accompanied him on a trip to Rome, with members of the Roman schola cantorum during Holy Week of 787. Following mass one day, a bitter conflict arose about who best performed the liturgical chants; the Franks maintained their chant was superior, while the Romans claimed their perfect style descended directly from Gregory the Great himself.

Gregory the Great dictates chant to a scribe in the Hartker Antiphonary, c. 1000, St Gall (Cod. Sang. 390, page 13).

Perhaps following a sing-off, Charlemagne deemed his own cantors inferior and insisted his kingdom adopt the ‘purer’ Roman chant style. John however maintains that the Franks were unable to accomplish this goal “because the savage barbarity of their drunken throats, while endeavouring with inflections and repercussions and diphthongs of diaphonies to utter a gentle strain, through its natural noisiness proffers only unmodulated sounds like unto farm carts clumsily creaking up a rutted hill.”

“Oh! Sweet melody!”

While these 9th-century sources express the impetus for the introduction of Roman liturgical customs, neumes are unmentioned. The first direct discussion of neumes appears in Adémar of Chabannes’ Chronicon (1025-1028), and details the same confrontation between Roman and Frankish cantors as is told by John the Deacon. Adémar attributes the creation of neumes to the Romans: “all the cantors of the Frankish kingdom learned the Roman notation, which they now call Frankish notation”. Despite Adémar’s usually reliable accounts, no other evidence corroborates this Roman origin. Rather, Roman cantors likely taught the Franks orally, and the Franks later developed notation.

So, what were these early neumes and where did they come from? Among regional varieties, there are two general types of neumes. The earliest, called “paleo-Frankish” first appear between about 825 and 850, and are marginal or squeezed between lines of text. Unlike neumes later applied to chant books, these accompany classical poetry or illustrate small sections of musical treatises. They are likely private, localized memory aids for a single cantor or his associates, as opposed to the formal, transmittable “gestural” neumes.

Gestural neumes (so-called to reflect their imitation of the hand gestures used by the cantor-master to guide a choir) appear around the year 900; the oldest complete neumed text, as mentioned above, is the St Gall Cantatorium, attributed to 922-925. Early gestural neumes were not “literate”, that is, one could not simply read and interpret the melodies from the page without already knowing them. According to Leo Treitler, “the essentials of early notation lay not in representing individual pitches but in aiding recognition of crucial points in the text and indicating appropriate melodic gestures. This implies a sort of musical punctuation.”  Pitch notation (with the development of the staff) did not exist until the eleventh, or in some places the twelfth century.

What do you mean you can’t sing along?
The Laon Gradual, f. 1.

If notation was not a requisite step in the transmission of a new chant style, how was it used? Chant continued to be transmitted and performed largely from memory throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages, and unneumed chant books were produced long after standardization of notation systems. While the cantor relied on memory, he could now refer to neumes if he needed a reminder of how to sing the day’s chants consistently. It is likely that the very development of neumes produced their necessity; as the role of memory diminished with the popularization of neumes, neumes then likely became increasingly important to cantors.

Although the timeline, proponents, and exact use of early neumes are still somewhat unknown (and in some ways unknowable), they will most certainly continue to spark debate among researchers who approach the evidence with different questions, experiences, and the considerable body of existing scholarship laid out by passionate scholars. While manuscripts like the St Gall Cantatorium are not new to study, increasing digitization of international manuscript collections, coupled with ongoing interest in medieval chant and notation, will continue to provide ample opportunity for further discussion.

Some notes: Read Jenny’s blog on musical manuscripts here. There is actually a great album of Frankish and Roman chant curated to tell the tale of their legendary face off in Rome, called Chant Wars. Read about it here. Also, if you’d like to try singing along with the early neumes of Laon 239, a lovely tiny hand will guide you through a chant here.

Do you like neumes, chant, or Frankish liturgy? Here are some starting sources:

Apel, Willi. “The Central Problem of Gregorian Chant” Music in Medieval Europe: Chant and its Origins. Thomas Forrest Kelly, ed. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2009): 325-332.

Grier, James. The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabbannes in Eleventh-century Aquitaine. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hiley, David. Cambridge Introductions to Music: Gregorian Chant. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Huglo, Michel. “The Cantatorium: From Charlemagne to the Fourteenth Century” The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and Bridges, East and West. Peter Jeffery, ed. (Cambridge: Boydell Press, 2001): 89-103.

Levy, Kenneth. Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians. Princeton University Press, 1998.

McKitterick, Rosamond. The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms, 789-895. London: Royal Historical Society, 1977.

Page, Chirstopher. “Pippin and his Singers, II: Music for a Frankish-Roman Imperium,” The Christian West and its Singers: the First Thousand Years (Yale University Press, 2010): 305-326.

Treitler, Leo. Several chapters in With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it was Made. (Oxford University Press, 2003): 131-185.

By Ramona Venema

Ramona is a research masters student from the University of Groningen, and currently working as an intern in the Turning Over a New Leaf project. Her interests include baking and she maintains her own cookery blog.

We have already seen what a medieval cook could whip up in a previous post. Being the fanatic foodie that I am, I recently acquired a cookbook filled to the brim with historical baking recipes from the seventeenth century onward. I wasn’t exactly surprised at first, knowing some medieval recipes are perhaps a bit too adventurous for the modern mind. In any case, it prompted my curiosity and I set out to find out more about medieval cooking.

First of all: medieval chefs really knew their stuff. Whereas some modern cuisine is concerned with food on a molecular level, medieval chefs were probably not that bothered with exact amounts. It soon became clear why the writer of the historical cookbook left out medieval recipes. They do not contain any indication as to how much of a certain ingredient was needed, and so left a lot of creativity up to the chef. Perhaps medieval cookbooks were then not so much a cookbook as we would recognize it today, but rather a reference work. Or perhaps it shows that medieval cooks were used to cooking with whatever was at hand – it’s not like they could walk into a supermarket. Also, precise timings would be fiff-faff as medieval chefs were using an open fire.

Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, MS 5070

Take eelys & sawmoun & smyte hem

on pecys & stewe hyt in almaunde

mylke & verjous. drawe up an al-

maunde mylke with the stewe. [..]

Fragment from a recipe for Tartes of fysche – no indication of how many eels the cook should use.
Found in Fourme of Curye, transcr. by Daniel Myers

Even though this  eel and salmon pie filling doesn’t sound particularly yummy to most of us, the ingredients weren’t that unusual. Not as decadent as your average fast-food restaurant burger, probably! The same Fourme of Curye reveals an abundance of recipes for meat and fish dishes as well as some vegetable concoctions and sweet treats (“Rysshews of fruyt” anyone?). Even though we might expect, or hope for a recipe for unicorn, as this recent British Library April Fool’s post tantalized us with, this is certainly not the norm. I did find a recipe for “dragonee” which looks like it could be some sort of sweet capon stew, for which the color should turn out “red of dragon’s blood”.  No dragon meat involved however! Hearty and sweet were frequently combined, undoubtedly much to the horror of modern taste buds – who would combine meat with strawberries nowadays?

The oldest European medieval recipes were discovered in Cambridge in April by prof. Faith Wallis of McGill University (Montreal). The twelfth-century Durham manuscript they were featured in also contained medicinal recipes. Some of the recipes, such as “hen in winter”, confirm yet again that medieval cooks worked with the products at hand, and kept seasons in mind. Perhaps something we should take note of today.

Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, MS 5070

Want to try your hand at a medieval recipe yourself, recreate a medieval banquet or have a really original recipe for Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving? A good starting point is the Medieval Cookery website. A recipe which looked particularly good is the one for pear custard. If you’re interested in “historical” cooking on a more academic level, then you might be interested in attending “The Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food in the Low Countries” which will be held for the first time on January 17^th 2014.  An interesting article on medieval cookbooks can be found here, starting at page 71.

By Irene O’Daly

While most of my research involves eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts, occasionally I have an excuse to dig deeper into the collections at Leiden University. Sometimes these searches unearth manuscripts that, while they may be run-of-the-mill examples of their kind, are new and exciting to me as a medievalist. I recently found one like this when I was preparing a demonstration for some students working on texts written by humanist scholars in the Renaissance.

Although only 16 folia long, this manuscript (PER Q 18) was full of interesting features. The manuscript contained Leonardo Bruni’s (c. 1370-1444) translation and commentary on the first book of pseudo-Aristotle’s Economics, written c. 1420. Bruni, of course, was one of the ‘superstars’ of the humanist revival of interest in classical philosophy – and his translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian text was destined to become a medieval bestseller, surviving in over two hundred manuscripts. The Leiden example is in three parts. It contains a dedictory letter to Cosimo de Medici, a translation of book I of the text, and a copy of Bruni’s commentary on that book.

Opening Dedication, Leiden UB PER Q 18, f. 1r

The opening dedication is presented in the style typical of Florentine book production in this period. The text is surrounded by a decorative border and opens with an initial containing a personification of Cosimo de Medici himself. As is typical of the period, the script references the rounded style of Carolingian miniscule, rather than the pointed characters of the Gothic. It is only lightly abbreviated, compared to the compressions of text common in the Gothic period. These archaising tendencies had a practical purpose – to increase legibility – but the aesthetic choice to make the volume emulate earlier (supposedly more accurate) exemplars was also reflected in other aspects. For example, the text is presented on pages that are ruled with a pointed stylus, rather than the dark lead lines favoured from the mid-twelfth on.

Bruni’s translation of Book I of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Economics
Leiden UB, PER Q 18, f. 1v

Bruni’s translation follows the opening dedication. Although accompanied by a decorative border, again the page gives a clean and uncluttered impression, emphasised by its finely produced parchment. Often humanist manuscripts were decorated sparsely, to allow the text stand for itself.

Opening of Bruni’s Commentary on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Economics,
Leiden UB PER Q 1, f. 4v

Bruni’s sentence-by-sentence commentary on the text follows. Interestingly, here the extracts taken from the Economics are presented in a different register of script – characterised by a different range of letter-forms (note particularly the a and the round-s) and in larger size for ease of consultation. Although a reference work, the manuscript was carefully copied by a professional scribe who was obviously at ease switching between scriptural registers and adept at making the text visually pleasing.

Vespasiano da Bisticci, a Florentine stationer, described how Bruni was able to walk around the city and see his works copied wherever he went. Bruni was a celebrity writer, and the Economics, with its advocacy of private wealth, seems to have held particular appeal in the mercantile economy of Florence in this period. Despite its diminutive size, therefore, Leiden UB PER Q 18 tells a story of changing fashions in book culture in the final heyday of manuscript production.

By Jenny Weston

While most of the manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages are roughly the same size as today’s books, some volumes feature outrageous dimensions—either super-large or teeny tiny! Today’s blogpost is devoted to the ‘small-end’ of this spectrum, examining some of the world’s tiniest medieval manuscripts.

Anne Boleyn’s golden psalm-book, Stowe MS 956, ff. 1v-2, British Library

During the later Middle Ages, prayerbooks (and in particular ‘Books of Hours’) were often produced with smaller dimensions. These books were often favoured by women, who relied on their collection of prayers, psalms, and painted miniatures for their daily devotion. With smaller dimensions the book would have been lighter and easier to carry, which would have appealed to the devoted lady who wished to have the book on-hand throughout the day. (Such books could easily fit into one’s pocket or be attached to a girdle, see below.)

Here we can see a fourteenth-century example of a miniature prayerbook known as the Hours of Jeanne D’Evereux. Made in Paris by the artist Jean Pucille, this little book measures just 9.2 x 6.2 cm and could still easily fit into the palm of your hand.

The Hours of Jeanne D’Evreux

The little book was originally produced under the patronage of King Charles IV as a gift to his third wife, Jeanne D’Evereux (1310-1371), who was only fifteen years old at the time of their marriage. It is a rather sweet idea to think that the book may have been designed with to fit the small hands of the young Queen.

It is likely that these tiny manuscripts also presented a tantalizing challenge to some ambitious scribes and artists, particularly those who wished to demonstrate their skill and precision on a tiny-scale. Despite the limited surface area, some books feature an impressive level of artistic detail, such as this fifteenth-century Book of Hours, which includes a number of illuminated portraits:

Miniature Book of Hours, Codex Manuscript 001054 © Rauner Special Collections Library (http://raunerlibrary.blogspot.nl/2013/05/a-beautiful-manuscript.html).

As noted above, the greatest advantage of a small book was its portability. By the thirteenth century, there was a growing interest in books that were easier to carry—friars and preachers, for example, often carried personal pocket-sized bibles with them as they wandered the streets (ready to teach and discuss the Word of God at any moment); students and scholars also benefited from these smaller, lighter books, as they were far easier to transport between the lecture-hall and home. Some of these books were attached to a piece of cloth, which could then be hung from a belt:

A portable copy of Boethius’s ‘De consolatione philosophiae’.

The tradition of ‘tiny-book-making’ has continued on since the Middle Ages, and it is still possible to find artisans making teeny-tiny volumes today.

On a final note, I could not resist adding this neat picture of an 18th-century leather bookcase from the Netherlands, designed to secretly house a collection of tiny books:

By David Ganz

Editorial note – David Ganz is Visiting Professor of Palaeography at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Associate of Darwin College, University of Cambridge. His guest blog summarises a much-overlooked publication by Bernhard Bischoff (d. 1991), the great expert on Caroline script and Carolingian book culture. In retrospect, Bischoff’s lecture and subsequent publication reads as a ‘report on the state of affairs’ of palaeography in the mid-1950s. (EK)

At the Tenth International Conference of Historical Sciences, which met in Rome in September 1955, papers on palaeography were delivered by Charles Perrat, Bernhard Bischoff and Gaines Post. Bischoff’s paper, which is titled ‘Paläographie der Abendländischen Buchschriften vom V. bis zum XII Jahrhundert’, falls between his article for Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, first published in 1950, and the revised version in 1957. As a public lecture to an international audience it is both more discursive and more personal than his textbook. He starts by suggesting that in the last two generations palaeographical work has focused on the period of 400-1200 because it offers favourable conditions for fruitful study, while after the thirteenth century the material becomes too vast to master. He noted the change for the philological and text-critical goals of Ludwig Traube and W.M. Lindsay to more historical and cultural historical interests.

Bernhard Bischoff (d. 1991)

The divide of c. 800
In the period 400-1200 there is a divide around 800. E.A. Lowe’s Codices Latini Antiquiores (CLA), the first volume of which appeared in 1934, marked the start of a new phase, and is a testimony to the advances in localizing and dating the material from the earlier period. Bischoff sketched the history of the photographical collection assembled by Traube, which was used as the basis for the lists of unical and half uncial manuscripts published by Lehmann and Lowe, for Lindsay’s work on minuscule manuscripts, and for Lowe’s attempts to establish objective bases for the dating of these scripts. When Bischoff gave his paper, six CLA volumes had been published (of the planned ten) and many items had received their first palaeographical descriptions. He noted other efforts to assemble large photographic corpora, such as the catalogues of dated and localised manuscripts (the Catalogues des manuscrits datés), as well as the work on Beneventan and Visigothic manuscripts dating from after 800, and the assembling of microfilms of Irish manuscripts in Dublin. He then drew attention to the work on Carolingian manuscripts by Albert Bruckner and himself, and stressed the importance of collaborative work between palaeographers and art historians.

Manuscript copied c. 800 (St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 229)

Ninth century
For the ninth century, script types were replaced by house styles with distinctive and localisable ‘earmarks’. Bischoff reminded his audience how much was lost, urged the need for inventories of library holdings, and noted his goal of a list with exact dating and localising. He pointed out that eliminating places where a manuscript could not have been written was also helpful and stressed that such a list would inevitably be a first attempt, in need of improvement and greater precision, but it was still a requirement for the understanding of the period in which most classical and patristic texts were transmitted to us.

Carolingian manuscript copied in 800-25 (St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 116)

Tenth to twelfth centuries
Moving to the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bischoff stressed the diversity found in some centres, and the remarkable conservatism of centres like Angers. Given the amount of material, the right strategy, as suggested by Bischoff, might be to look for common features and to record the differences between the script of luxury liturgical books and the less elaborate and fast scripts used in schools. He noted the importance of Tironian notes as essential for the study of Carolingian schools, and the significance of their revival in the circle of Thomas Becket in the twelfth century, and also the difficulties on the analysis of insular scripts. He pointed out that Lowe had spoken of the decisive role of ‘quarter-uncial’ in the development of insular scripts in the preface of CLA Volume II and gave his own account of the development of Irish script After noting developments in the study of early Visigothic script and in the study of the script of Luxeuil, he drew attention to the differences between Lowe’s views on the origin of Caroline minuscule via the influence of half uncial and his own sense of the convergence of different factors: the decline of half uncial, the calligraphic formalising of cursive, and the experiments at Charlemagne’s court to create a new bookscript based on the cursive used in the chancery.

Early gothic script in Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, BPL MS 196, written 1145-49)

In conclusion, Bischoff spoke of the ‘gothicizing’ of script and of his own contribution to discussions of nomenclature. Carolingian was not a chronological term, early gothic script had strokes at the bases of the shafts moving to the right, sometimes these were hairline strokes. When the bows were linked, then the script was fully gothic. Most of the scripts that stand between Caroline and Gothic can be described as ‘protogothic’ (frühgotisch in German) in this way. Although, as in every living development, there are transitional forms, they do not invalidate the use of this basic terminology. Two final paragraphs discuss De Bouard’s views of developments in England and on the role of the cut of the pen, and Lieftinck’s thoughts about the plainness of Cistercian books.

Bernhard Bischoff, ‘Paläographie der Abendländischen Buchschriften vom V. bis zum XII Jahrhundert’, in Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche I (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), pp. 385-406.

By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel)

1. Frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra, printed in China, 11 May 868.

2. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, VLQ MS 9 (Italy, 550-600).

3. Old Etruscan “book”, made c. 600 BC (Sofia, National History Museum).

4. Early Christian papyrus, Egypt, 2nd century AD (University of Michigan, P. Mich. inv. 6238)

By Jenneka Janzen

First, a very Happy New Year to all our readers from the Turning Over a New Leaf Project!

2013 was an exciting year for manuscripts! New technologies and growing digitization programmes enhanced avenues of access and exploration for researchers, while an interested non-expert public kept exhibitions, blogs, and the latest manuscript news in the limelight. Let’s take a quick look back at some of (what I think were) the best manuscript news items of 2013.

Escape of the Timbuktu Manuscripts

A pile of rescued manuscripts. Photo courtesy t160k.org.

In early 2013, violence erupted in Northern Mali, where rebel troops burned two institutes said to house thousands of Islamic manuscripts dating as far back as the twelfth century. Shortly after the calamity, it was revealed that most of the manuscripts had been earlier secreted away to protect them from the looming conflict. Reported widely by international media, this story highlighted the threat that military conflicts pose to precious artifacts, while also demonstrating the importance of both local and global communities in protecting our cultural heritage. For more, see this BBC story, or read about (and if possible, support) the ongoing preservation challenges faced by Timbuktu Libraries in Exile.

Medieval Cats

Photo taken in the Dubrovnik archives, courtesy Emir O. Filipović.

No, I’m not kidding; cats were a popular manuscript trend this past year. When Erik Kwakkel retweeted the above picture sent to him by Emir O. Filipović, a researcher at the University of Sarajevo, it went viral. The following week, guest blogger Thijs Porck wrote ‘Paws, Pee, and Mice’ for us, which remains today our top-viewed post. A few weeks later, the Smithsonian, National Geographic, and Discovery (just to name a few) ran with the image. Grumpy Cat even responded.

Uncovering Palimpsests

© Image copyright Palamedes Project.

On the scientific front, 2013’s Palamedes Project is using advancing technologies to decipher two palimpsest manuscripts. Facilitated by Georg-August University in Göttingen, Bologna University, and the National Bank of Greece, a team of scholars will use these manuscripts to create critical editions of a previously unknown work by Euripides, and an unidentified fifth-century commentary on Aristotle containing high-quality drawings. Read medievalist.net’s coverage and visit the Project’s website. (Interested in more palimpsests? The Archimedes Palimpsest Project, started in 1998 at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, was the forerunner of this project. In February 2013 we hosted a fascinating lecture by Dr. William Noel, the director of this project, about the process and discoveries made.)

Collaborative Digitizing

Image results for one of the Walters manuscripts in the Stanford digital collection.

Many universities, libraries and museums worked singly and together to increase the quantity and quality of their digital collections. In one great collaborative example, the Walters Art Museum and Stanford University teamed up to improve and augment the Walters’ digital manuscript collection (currently holding 100,000 manuscript images): not only will the images be protected from loss or corruption in Stanford’s Digital Repository, but a transcription tool, side-by-side viewing option, indices, and other high-tech reading aids will soon be available. As of now, 281 items are already in Stanford’s database (with limited features so far).

The Vatican and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library also agreed to a four-year project to digitize 1.5 million pages of medieval manuscripts, focusing on Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, and incunabula (hopefully inspiring further digitization after this initial goal is reached). They’re already well underway: check out the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project website.

The Lindisfarne Gospels Draw 100,000

The Lindisfarne Gospels, f.2v-3r.

When the Lindisfarne Gospels left London for a three month sojourn up north, it managed to draw nearly 100,000 interested visitors to Durham University. While only two openings of the 1300 year-old book were displayed (first the Canon Tables, and then the portrait of John the Evangelist), public interest was remarkable. The exhibition also featured the Gospels of St Cuthbert, called the “oldest European book to survive fully intact”, which was purchased by the British Library in partnership with Durham University and Durham Cathedral for £9 million (€10.8 million, $14.8 million US) in March 2012. Clearly, manuscripts are crowd-pleasers! If you didn’t number among the visitors, you can still visit the manuscripts online here and here.

Now, I wonder what’s in store for 2014?

By Ramona Venema

Ramona Venema works as a research assistant in the Turning Over a New Leaf project. Her previous post was devoted to medieval cooking. She maintains her own cookery blog.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 602 (Unicorn)

First of all, there is the unicorn. The unicorn is familiar to us because of its presence in popular culture, where it features on t-shirts and in a great deal of photoshopped images (see this Google search result). In medieval times the unicorn was seen as the enemy of the elephant: it would attack the elephant with its horn or hoof, piercing its skin. The unicorn was almost impossible to catch. The hunter used a virgin girl to lure the creature closer. When the unicorn put his head in the virgin’s lap, the hunter took his shot – or, as in this image, he used his club to strike him down.

As some might recognize from reading the Harry Potter books, which deserve to be mentioned in a post devoted to such exotic creatures, one could use the horn of a unicorn to detect poison, and even counter its effects. The horn was dipped into the liquid, which became safe to drink. The story goes that in powdered form the unicorn’s horn could be used as an aphrodisiac – which is no surprise, really, given the whole horn-in-virgin’s-lap scenario. In sum, it was quite a nifty object to have at your disposal as a medieval king, who was traditionally the one to receive the horn of a captured unicorn in medieval stories.

London, British Library, Royal MS 12 C.xix (Caladrius)

Then there is the caladrius. This bird may not seem particularly unusual at first, but it has remarkable properties. Living in the king’s house (royals really liked their mythical creatures), the white bird could spot and cure a sick person. The bird is depicted sitting on a bedridden person, as in the picture above. When it looked away, the person would die. If it looked straight into the patient’s face, however, there was hope for a full recovery. The caladrius would “draw” the illness into itself and fly toward the sun, where it would burn up. The man in the miniature was lucky, given that the bird is looking straight at him.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1431 (Mandrake)

A third creature of interest seems ready to attend a Brazilian carnival, as seen in the image above. You may also recognize him from the Harry Potter books: the mandrake. It concerns a plant with a human-shaped root that would shriek when it was pulled out of the ground. The shriek would drive the person who pulled it out mad; it might even kill him. The medieval bestiary therefore suggests giving this job to a dog. The dog would be tied to the plant and it was persuaded to move away from its owner with a piece of meat, thus pulling out the mandrake – well out of reach of the owner’s ears.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1511 (Manticore)

The last creature in this exotic parade would make you run the other way when encountered in a dark alley. The manticore, a red and feisty beast, had the body of a lion, the tail of a scorpion and the face of a man. In addition to his appearance, another quality would make it wise to run the other way: the manticore’s favorite dish was human flesh!

Want to know more? A great website about the bestiary and its strange creatures is The Medieval Bestiary, which also proved useful for this blog. Other images may be found in the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. Also check out, lastly, Jenneka Janzen’s post on bestiaries, which features a comprehensive list of interesting bestiaries. Happy hunting!

By Irene O’Daly

On Christmas Day I was delighted to see that the prime-time offering from the BBC was a documentary on a giant of the field of manuscript scholars, M.R. James. The focus of the documentary was not James’ work as a manuscript cataloguer, however, but another aspect of his output for which is best remembered in the public imagination, that is, his ghost stories.

Stamp of M.R. James issued as part of the Royal Mail’s ‘Britons of Distinction’ series (2012)

Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 and in many respects typified the Victorian scholar; schooling at Eton was followed by a long period as a bachelor-academic in Cambridge, after which James returned to Eton as provost, dying in 1936. In the manuscript world, James’ principal contribution was his series of catalogues of the libraries of Cambridge colleges, such as Trinity, Corpus Christi, as well as of the collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, where he was director from 1893-1908. While I had always known that James was a prolific scholar, I had not realised that much of his work was conducted early in his career; by his early thirties, James had already published catalogues of five principal collections in Cambridge. The enterprise was aided by the fact that many of the colleges simply sent their manuscripts to James’ rooms to allow him to work more efficiently on the material, a convenience unimaginable to the modern scholar!

James’ method was captured in the title given to many of his volumes; they were ‘descriptive catalogues’. James not only recorded the contents and appearance of the volumes, but included invaluable histories of how the manuscripts had ended up in their collections, and lengthy transcriptions of interesting or unusual passages. His extensive knowledge of medieval library collections and extant booklists allowed him to assign provenance to many manuscripts, as demonstrated by the overlap between his cataloguing of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi, and his reconstruction of the holdings of The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover.

The BBC documentary, M.R. James: Ghost Writer, drew attention to James’ second career as a writer of spooky tales, a sideline seemingly developed from James’ natural talent as a raconteur. The documentary pointed out that many of James’ stories star characters who seem to be a shallow pastiche of James himself – single male academics who spend their holidays rooting around medieval ruins and among libraries. The stories often focus on books containing alchemical treatises, old maps, or ciphered inscriptions.

Cathedral of St Bertrand de Comminges. Watch the clip about James’ description of the cathedral here: http://bbc.in/19l9mhU

One such story, Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook takes as its setting a cathedral in France. The protagonist, Dennistoun, deserted by his two travelling companions (‘half an hour at the church would satisfy them‘), chooses to spend a day photographing and recording details of the cathedral architecture. Not only, as highlighted in the documentary, did James provide an accurate description of the church, but upon reading the tale myself, I found an evocative account of the book found by Dennistoun, which echoed some of the more vivid entries found in his manuscript catalogues:

‘Before him lay a large folio, bound, perhaps, late in the seventeenth century [....]. There may have been a hundred and fifty leaves of paper in the book, and on almost every one of them was fastened a leaf from an illuminated manuscript. [....] Here were ten leaves from a copy of Genesis, illustrated with pictures, which could not be later than A.D. 700. Further on was a complete set of pictures from a Psalter, of English execution, of the very finest kind that the thirteenth century could produce; and perhaps, best of all, there were twenty leaves of uncial writing in Latin, which, as a few words seen here and there told him at once, must belong to some very early unknown patristic treatise.’

In another tale, The Uncommon Prayer Book, the principal character comes across a deserted chapel where the prayer books are always found open to a particular page. He notes that the page ‘is a very odd and wholly unauthorised addition’ to the Book of Common Prayer, and ‘knowing the need for particular accuracy in these matters, he devoted some ten minutes to making a line-for-line transcript of it’. The character’s attention to rooting out bibliographical details that may provide clues to solve a mystery brings to mind James’ academic rigour, as well as his interest in apocryphal biblical texts.

Worship of the Seven-Headed Beast from the Trinity Apocalypse, one of the manuscripts described in detail by James (Trinity College, Cambridge, Ms. R.16.2, f. 14v). See catalogue entry here : http://sites.trin.cam.ac.uk/james/show.php?index=1199

James’ gripping accounts of hauntings were peppered with one-liners about academic study which still ring true. One story (Two Doctors) begins ‘It is a very common thing, in my experience, to find papers shut up in old books; but one of the rarest things to come across any such that are at all interesting.’ James’ self-deprecating sense of humour is one of the most appealing features of his stories and, perhaps, explains their enduring appeal (The Collected Ghost Stories have recently [2013] been reissued in the Oxford World’s Classics series). His valuable contributions to the fields of manuscript studies and literature alike remind us that the best research always requires a touch of imagination (and perhaps a healthy respect for ghosts…).

Extracts from: M.R. James, The Collected Ghost Stories (Oxford, 2013). For further information about James see R.W. Pfaff, ‘James, Montague Rhodes: College Head, Scholar, and Author’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

Today’s blog is a guest post from Thijs Porck, a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture, Universiteit Leiden.

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle 
Boece or Troilus to wryten newe,       
Under thy lokkes thou most have the scalle,     
But after my making thou wryte trewe.             
So ofte a daye I mot thy werk renewe,
Hit to correcte and eek to rubbe and scrape;    
And al is through thy negligence and rape.     

[Adam scribe, if it should ever happen to you that you write Boethius or Troilus anew, may you have scabs under your locks, unless you copy in true fashion in accord with my lines. So often in a day I must renew your work, and correct and rub and scrape it; and all is through your negligence and haste.]

In this famous little poem, Geoffrey Chaucer cursed the sloppiness of his scribe Adam. However, some evidence of the medieval punishments inflicted on other scribes in the Middle Ages suggests Adam got off lightly.  

A number of inscriptions, added in the margins of English manuscripts, suggests that negligent scribes could face physical repercussions. In London, British Library, Harley 55, a twelfth-century miscellany containing medical texts and Anglo-Saxon law codes, an added note reads “Writ þus oððe bet ride aweg Ælfmær pattafox þu wilt swingan Ælfric cild”. Depending on whether we interpret the word “bet” as a form of Old English betan ‘to make amends, pay’ or bett ‘better’, this note translates as either ‘Write like this or pay (and) ride away, Ælfmær Pattafox will hit you Ælfric, child’ or ‘Write like this or better ride way, Ælfmær Pattafox will hit you Ælfric, child’.

London, British Library, Harley 55, fol. 4v © British Library

 Similar threats of violence against a scribe failing to reproduce the script of his exemplar are found in two twelfth-century notes, added in the margins of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20 (a ninth-century copy of Alfred’s Old English translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care). These notes are directed at scribe Willimot and read “willimot writ þus oððe bet” [Willimot, write like this or pay/better] and “writ þus oððe bet oððe þine hyde forlet” [write like this or pay/better or lose your skin]. Similar admonitions to ‘write like this’, albeit without explicit threats of physical punishment, can be found in other Anglo-Saxon manuscripts (Whitbread 1983).

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20, fol. 53v (top) and fol. 55r (bottom) © Bodleian Library

The scribal notes in Harley 55 and Hatton 20 are painful reminders of the fact that a strict regime of physical discipline was an integral part of monastic education.  A twelfth-century manuscript now in Durham Cathedral Library shows a pupil being beaten by his teacher, next to the rubric “Afficitur plagis qui non vult discere gratis”  [He who does not want to learn freely must be taught with blows] (Cleaver 2009).

Durham, Cathedral Library, Hunter 100, fol.44r © Durham Cathedral

Monastic rules abound in corporal punishment for misbehaving monks and these sometimes included negligent scribes. The 9^th-century typikon of the monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople, for example, lists the following punishments:

A diet of bread and water was the penalty set for the scribe who became so much interested in the subject matter of what he was copying that he neglected his task of copying. Monks had to keep their parchment leaves neat and clean, on penalty of 130 penances. If anyone should take without permission another’s quaternion (that is, the ruled and folded sheets of parchment), 50 penances were prescribed. If anyone should make more glue than he could use at one time and it should harden, he would have to do 50 penances. If a scribe broke his pen in a fit of temper (perhaps after having made some accidental blunder near the close of an otherwise perfectly copied sheet), he would have to do 30 penances (Wegner 2004, p. 210).

One particularly painful corporal punishment of a scribe, though not for erroneous copying, is found in the 9^th-century Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna by Andreas Agnellus. After Ravenna rebelled against the Byzantine Empire at the end of the seventh century, one of its local rebels, the scribe Johannicis, is arrested and brought before Byzantine Emperor Justinian II, ‘the slit-nosed’ (669-711):

Justinian, having become enraged, ordered Johannicis to be brought into his presence; as if ignorant, he asked him ironically, “is this indeed Johannicis the scribe?” and when he answered that it was he, the imperial rage rose yet higher. He ordered a reed to be brought and he ordered that it be forced under all the nails of his fingers up to the second joint. He then ordered parchment and pen to be given, that [Johannicis] might write. When he received it, he forced the pen between two fingers. He did not write with ink, but with the blood which flowed from his fingers (Mauskopf Deliyannis 2004, pp. 265-6).

In true heroic fashion, Johannicis writes a prayer to God in his own blood on the parchment and throws this in the Emperor’s face. The enraged Justinian then orders Johannicis to die a ‘mouse’s death’; that is: he is crushed between two stones and dies.

In view of the above, Chaucer could have done a lot worse to Adam scriveyn than a mere conditional curse of scabs. So, the next time you are frustrated with barely legible scripts or missing pieces of text in medieval manuscripts and feel like wringing the scribe’s neck, rest assured that his contemporaries probably got there first…

References:

Cleaver, L., ‘Grammar and Her Children: Learning to Read in the Art of the Twelfth Century’, Marginalia 9 (2009), http://www.marginalia.co.uk/journal/09education/cleaver.php
Mauskopf Deliyannis, D. (Trans.), The Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna (The Catholic University of America Press 2004)
Wegner, P.D., The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI 2004).
Whitbread, L.G., ‘A Scribal Jotting from Medieval English’, Notes and Queries 228 (1983), pp. 198-199.  

By Jenny Weston

Today’s post is dedicated to lecterns and bookshelves — the essential furniture of the medieval book! Both of these items were regular companions of the book and they played an important role in supporting and protecting manuscripts while in use and in storage.

The lectern is one of the most recognizable features of the church, and like today, they were used by medieval readers to hold open their books during public readings. Many of them were beautifully carved or decorated to reflect the importance of the books they held.

Notice the two little wooden spindles at either side of this early 15th-century lectern, designed to hold long candles for reading in dark places:

Wooden lectern, c. 1490 (Image Source: Victoria & Albert Museum)

With the help of the lectern, the reader did not have to strain his arms holding up the book, which may have been quite heavy, and it also accommodated ‘hands-free’ reading. This was important for those conducting a church service or those delivering an important lecture in the classroom. Indeed, many medieval masters relied on hand-gestures to emphasize or articulate specific points of their argument.

University master gesturing from a lectern

One of the most common lecterns used in the Middle Ages (and still in use today) is known as the gospel-lectern. As the name suggests, these particular stands were designed to hold open a gospel-book during the mass.

This painted wooden lectern is from the German Abbey of Alpirsbach (c. 1150-1175) and depicts the four evangelists holding up the book-platform on their shoulders:

Image Source: Web Gallery of Art

Many of these gospel-lecterns take the form of an eagle — the symbolic animal form of the evangelist John. The eagle was believed to fly the highest (and thus the closest to heaven). In his preface to his commentary on Matthew, St Jerome explains that John is represented by the eagle because it is he who, ‘having taken up eagle’s wings and hastening toward higher matters, discusses the Word of God’.

The image below depicts such a lectern carved from marble by the Italian artist Giovanni Pisano (c. 1240-1319). If you look closely you can see that the eagle is clutching a small book in its talons:

Image source:  Metropolitan Museum of Art

Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gospel-books were not the only type of book placed on a lectern however. These stands were also used to hold large copies of the psalms or musical texts, such as missals, which would be performed by a choir. In manuscript illuminations, we often find images of singers crowding around a lectern while they sing:

Dominican and Franciscan friars singing from books (c. 1250-1262), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 107.224.

Despite the fact that the book was presented on a large stand, realistically the group of singers would have had a difficult time reading the words and notes on the page. It is quite likely that most individuals would have memorized the material beforehand and the books would have been displayed on the lectern as part of the ceremonial tradition rather than serving an immediate practical purpose.

When books were not being used, they were often stored in large book-chests known as armaria (singular: armarium). This style of book-chest looks almost like a modern trunk turned on its side with the doors facing outwards. Shelves were often added to organize the books inside.

The earliest image of an armarium can be found on a marble sarcophagus from Rome (200 CE), which attests to the longevity of this system of book-storage!

Earliest portrayal of an armarium, c. 200 CE (Image source: From Cave Paintings to the Internet)

The most famous portrait of a medieval armarium can be found in the famous eighth-century bible known as the Codex Amiatinus. On fol. 5r, there is a miniature of Ezra writing next to a large wooden book-chest; the books are laid flat on the shelves:

Armarium pictured in the Codex Amiatinus

Eventually the doors of the armarium would be removed and the modern-book shelf as we know it would be born.

In the post-medieval world, some rather creative early-modern engineers eventually designed an all-in-one system that featured a bookshelf (a miniature chained library included), a desk, a small lectern, and a cupboard. I could definitely use one of these in my office…

Image Source: Chetham’s Library

By Jenneka Janzen

This week’s blog is a show-and-tell of one of my new favourite finds in Leiden University’s Special Collections.

Two weeks ago, Turning Over a New Leaf hosted another successful colloquium and Lieftinck Lecture. I coordinated the manuscript display, which included selecting a number of manuscripts to show attendees, choosing which folios to display, and writing a short description to accompany each book. This is normally an easy (albeit time-consuming) task, but this time, the theme was rather outside my usual expertise: vernacular manuscripts. I work with earlier books as a rule – 1250 is very late by my standards –  and I stick exclusively to Latin. But, stepping out of my manuscript ‘comfort zone’ proved to be both enlightening and entertaining!

One of the manuscripts I requested to show was SCA 40, a copy of the Chronicque de la traïson et mort de Richart II roy d’Engleterre (the Chronicle of the Betrayal and Death of King Richard II of England) written c. 1401-1425 in France. In addition to a titillating story, it contains several beautiful semi-grisaille (that is, done mostly in grey monochrome) miniatures. Based on the online catalogue information available, I thought it would make for a catchy display.

The miniature shown here, at the opening of the Chronicque, shows a glum-looking Richard returning Brest (symbolized by the keys) to the Duke of Brittany, apparently standing on the Breton shore. Leiden Universiteit Bibliotheek Ms SCA 40, f. 1r. Photo JPC Janzen.

The text was originally written by an anonymous member of Queen Isabella’s court shortly after Richard II’s death in February 1400. The work is a propaganda piece, intended to provoke French nobles against Richard’s successor, Henry IV.  It was revised several times in the first half of the 15^th century, eventually ending with the movement of Richard’s remains in March 1406. Altogether there are 37 manuscripts in 4 different versions; SCA 40 is the second version, of which there are 14 other surviving copies.

Here the extremely brutal death of Sir Thomas Blount (1400), one of Richard II’s supporters, is related and illustrated. Leiden Universiteit Bibliotheek Ms SCA 40, f. 42v. Photo JPC Janzen

Overall it’s a charming manuscript with a lovely script, appealing miniatures, and humorous catch-word drawings.

Close up of catch-word “desloyal”. Leiden Universiteit Bibliotheek Ms SCA 40, f. 6v. Photo JPC Janzen

But it also contains a fun surprise! Looking for scarce information on this manuscript, I turned first to J.P. Gumbert’s catalogue entry, which mentioned that it contained children’s drawings on the flyleaves. While I’m not quite sure they’re children’s drawings (heck, I went to art school for a few years and my drawings are not much better) they are certainly amusing!  In addition to pen sketches of Christ and the martyrdom of St Sebastian, there are several colour scenes which (also) have nothing to do with the Chronicque.  Here, spanning the entire opening, St George fights the dragon, who is tied to the princess by her girdle while the king and queen of Silene look on from the castle ramparts.

St George and the Dragon. Leiden Universiteit Bibliotheek Ms SCA 40, ff. 52v-53r. Photo JPC Janzen

In the following opening, male and female courtiers gather in fine dress, meeting toe-to-toe in the gutter.

Fantastic headwear, textured fabrics and luxury trimmings – these are a fashionable bunch! Leiden Universiteit Bibliotheek Ms SCA 40, ff. 53v-54r. Photo JPC Janzen

The drawings were clearly added after the book was bound, which could mean a number of things: perhaps the illustrator prized his or her artistry enough to add it to the blank space of a beautiful book or, conversely, maybe the manuscript was not particularly treasured despite its quality and thus a suitable place for ‘doodles’. The drawings are contemporary with the later 15^th/early 16^th-century pen trials and labels found on the flyleaves, and while we cannot discount that the drawings may be intentionally archaic, the detailed clothing and armour also suggest a date within a century of the book’s production. Their impromptu character, random subject matter, and thoughtful (if amateur) detail make them some of the most pleasing and unexpected evidence of a medieval person’s interaction with a manuscript I’ve yet seen.

J.P. Gumbert, “Medieval Manuscripts in French in the Leiden University Library: A Handlist” in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature, and Translation. Studies for Keith Val Sinclair, ed. P.R. Monks & D.D.R. Owen (Leiden,  1994), 28-47.

J. J. N. Palmer, “The Authorship, Date and Historical Value of the French Chronicles of the Lancastrian Revolution”, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library lxi (1978-9), 145-181.

By Julie Somers

While browsing images of medieval treasure bindings, I noticed that one example I was looking at was not actually a book at all.  In fact, it was an ornamented wooden case made to closely resemble a book. Produced in Germany, it was created to hold various sacred objects, including leaves from actual books, in this case the Gospels, along with other corporeal relics.

Book Shaped Reliquary c.1000 (Germany) Cleveland Museum of Art

This type of reliquary is often known as a cumdach, or book shrine.  An elaborate ornamented box or case used to hold relics or, more often, manuscript fragments that were considered sacred in some manner. Usually quite small, they served as a portable vessel meant for the preservation of a sacred text that represented a direct connection or association to a saint. They were often decorated in metalwork or ivory carvings, with precious stones to symbolize the valuable nature of the object inside, imitating a treasure binding. These ornamented boxes would be used for the swearing of oaths, protection or even healing purposes. The cumdach of the Book of Durrow (c. 877) is the earliest recorded book-shrine, however it has been lost. Several examples exist from Ireland in the 11^th century.

Believed to contain a copy of the Gospels that belonged to Molaise of Laserian, a contemporary of Columba, the cumdach of Molaise was produced in the early 11th century.

Book-Shrine or cumdach of Molaise, c.1001-25 (National Museum of Ireland, Dublin)

The cumdach of Columba’s Psalter, a copper and silver plated book-shrine was made between 1062 and 1098 to hold the Psalter of St. Columba, a manuscript produced in Ireland which dates to the late 6th or early 7th century. The manuscript it held became known as the ‘Cathach’ or ‘Battler’, and the case protected the manuscript as it became a talisman carried into battles.

Cumdach of Columba’s Psalter (National Museum of Ireland, Dublin) 

Another example, known as the Domnach Airgid or “Silver Church” holds a fragmentary gospel manuscript from the 8^th or 9^th century, and acts as a reliquary with a connection to St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Produced over several centuries, estimated from as early as the 6^th century and still being reworked and ornamented in the 14^th century, this reliquary was most likely intended to hold bodily relics, while the manuscript was placed inside at a later time.

Shrine of Saint Patrick’s Gospels. early 20th century (original dated 1080–1100) The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The cumdach of Dimma’s Book was produced in the twelfth century to encase the 8^th century Gospel Book copied by the scribe Dimma (Dublin, Trinity College, MS.A.IV.23). A reproduction of the case was created by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and can be viewed online.

“Book of Dimma” Shrine early 20th century (original dated 11th century) The Metropolitan Museum of Art

One last example of a book-shrine, the cumdach of the Stowe Missal, produced in the 11^th century, now at the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy.

Book or Shrine, Cumdach of the Stowe Missal. early 20th century (original dated 1025–52) The Metropolitan Museum of Art

It is evident from these examples that these cases were meant to directly resemble a book, symbolizing the important manuscripts found inside. Even today, we place important mementos or documents such as love letters or birth announcements within the pages of a family Bible or book of poetry, or even personal items within a faux dictionary safe placed on a bookshelf. This tradition of encasing our precious items has endured.

By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel)

It is the evening of Thursday 27 February, 2014, and at the moment I am sitting in The White Horse being stared at by Inspector Morse, who frequented this pub back in the day – and who seems to have left a portrait behind every time he did. When I look out the window I can see the Bodleian Library, that treasure trove of medieval books. For the past week this is where I have been: Oxford, more precisely Corpus Christi College. Invited to be the 2014 E.A. Lowe Lecturer in Palaeography, I came to the college for a week to give lectures on medieval script. This blog has everything to do with medieval manuscripts, but it is more personal than usual, if you forgive me: I thought I’d give a sense of what it entails, doing lectures in a historical place like this. So here is my week of being part of a stimulating academic world.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford (pic: my own)

I arrived in Oxford last Thursday afternoon, just in time to hear @WillNoel do the annual McKenzie Lecture in bibliography in St Cross College, titled “Bibliography in Bits”. Will, Twitter celebrity par excellence, is a well-known proponent of Open Access and making digital data available for all to download and use. (“For free!” he would add to that in a loud voice.) He talked about digital surrogates of medieval books: how a manuscript’s digital representation is its own entity, how it exists – is – in its own right. He showed how a digital manuscript is a resource that teaches us things the material object itself may not reveal. His lecture (and the dinner that followed) formed a great start of my week here. It would also be the last thing I would do – until now, sitting in this pub – without a certain amount of pressure.

That pressure was not just generated by the venue, but also by the fact that the data at the heart of my lectures had just been harvested – with the indispensable help of my Research Assistant, RV. The paint of my lectures still wet, much of my free time was filled with going through my data and deducing how to expand the scope of my papers with their help. My three lectures aimed to show how the major book script of the Early Middle Ages (Caroline Minuscule, in use from c. 800 to c. 1100) morphed into the major book script of the Later Middle Ages (Littera Textualis, or Gothic script, used from c. 1200 to c. 1600). It’s a great topic because the century in between the two is filled with experimentation by scribes, of mixing older and newer features, and of fights for dominance between opposing letter shapes. My approach was threefold. First, finding a way to describe in objective terms what the actual difference is between the letter shapes in the two scripts. Second, registering in a database whether scribes in different ages and geographical areas preferred the Caroline of Gothic presentation of a letter. Third, translating this data into graphs that provide insight into the transformation from the one script into the other. Each step of my research came with challenges and limitations, but also with opportunities to advance our knowledge.

Title slide of my first lecture

So, here we are, on the Friday: my first lecture. It focuses on how the transitional script from the Long Twelfth Century evolved over time. The theater is filling up nicely (about 75 people have come) and I start to do my thing. I discuss the method for about twenty minutes and then dive into the paleographical depths of the complex hybrid script. Highlighting differences between letter shapes I begin to carve out an objectified description of the road between Caroline and Gothic, focusing not on the overall impression but on hard, measurable features. I challenge the traditional temporal boundaries of the two scripts and feel brave enough to query, at the end of the lecture, whether we ought to perhaps abolish our notion of Caroline and Gothic being different scripts. Would it not be better to regard them as different expressions of the same writing system? My data certainly backed up this provocative idea. After the lecture a dinner was organized in the founder’s room of Corpus Christi Corpus: a great end of my first performance.

Then came the weekend, which I spent with family just outside Oxford – walks, pubs, and a newspaper on Sunday. On Monday I did an extra-curricular masterclass for the Centre for the Study of the Book, which runs under auspices of The Bodleian Libraries (here). It had been arranged only a few weeks earlier, within half an hour, and entirely through Twitter messages between me and @DanielWakelin1 – medieval books are so modern! In a seminar room filled with graduate students, faculty and nine medieval manuscripts I talked about two unusual book types: the elegantly tall and narrow holsterbook, and the off-cut manuscript, which is made from recycled strips of parchment. The students had picked out a selection of specimens from the Bodleian Library, adding to the class’s hands-on character. In the afternoon the Fellow Librarian of Merton College gave me a private tour through their medieval library, which is Britain’s oldest surviving library designed for use by scholars (I blogged about it here).

Medieval Library at Merton College (pic: my own)

Then came Tuesday and my second Lowe Lecture. Having done temporal development last Friday, it made sense to focus on the enormous regional variation in the transformation from Caroline to Gothic. When you place a manuscript from Germany next to one from France you can sense that they are not equally advanced, but with a new tool I developed I could support such intuitive verdicts with a number. I introduced the notion of Gothic Weight, which measures the “Gothicness” of a script written between 1075 and 1225. It gives a value to each of the thirty or so features I track in my database: 2 points for Gothic, 0 points for Caroline and 1 point if the script trait in question is presented in a mixed form – meaning that the scribe uses both Caroline and Gothic on the same page. When the points are added up, you end up with one number representing how advanced or behind an individual scribe was with respect to his handwriting. It means you can compare a German and a French manuscript objectively, as well as comparing Germany and France as a whole (by taking the average Gothic Weight), or even map the increase of Gothiness over time within European regions.

Sculpture of a scholar, Bodleian Library (Pic: my own)

Wednesday and Thursday were filled with working hard on the third paper, in which I aimed to show how Gothic script evolved not over time or in different regions, but as a novelty that was passed on to new generations of scribes. How did idiosyncrasy turn into new norm? My database did not provide an answer to this question, but using my data in combination with broader questions I could explore the very difficult question of a script’s dissemination – albeit without providing a definitive answer. The paper mainly focused on training, as I figured this was the moment when a new script feature had the chance to jump to a new user – a novice in a monastery being trained to write for the first time. In fact, such transmission would depend on the person in charge of training novices: if he was modern and advanced, then likely so would his pupils be. The main part of the paper therefore examined two cases where teacher and pupil were found on the same page: the first prompting the latter, monitoring progress, and correcting mistakes. It is exciting research given that you study, in a sense, the “homework” of a medieval scribe.

After the lecture I was invited for dinner in St Edmunds Hall and after that I retreated to the White Horse, where I am currently writing this blog. The bell for the last round has just rung, so I must be off – away from this pub and, tomorrow, from Oxford. One last time I will open the medieval gate of Corpus Christi College with my electronic key chain – a contrast that strikes me as a suitable parallel for my week of studying digitally the handwriting of medieval scribes.

More information – The full abstracts of my Lowe Lectures are found here. More about my approach to medieval script in this blog about kissing letters. Download this free book if you want to read an article I wrote on mapping script objectively.