Written Treasures: Medieval manuscripts and bookmaking

“Every manuscript permits a sort of time travel – bringing us closer to an understanding of how people in the Middle Ages made, read and used their books.”
—Irene O’Daly

Last fall, I had the opportunity to work on a fascinating book about medieval manuscripts, Written Treasures, featuring 50 manuscripts from Leiden University Libraries’ Western Medieval Manuscripts collection. The book was compiled and edited by André Bouwman, a curator for Leiden University Libraries’ Special Collections, and Irene O’Daly, an assistant professor in Leiden University’s Centre for the Arts in Society. Bouwman and O’Daly also wrote the introductory essays and several of the manuscript essays.

The manuscripts

Written Treasures is organized into nine sections, each with a different theme:

1. The word of God
2. Personal devotion
3. Makers and materiality
4. Reading, correcting, annotating
5. Words and languages
6. Counting and classifying
7. Fables and fiction
8. Presenting the past
9. Old texts, new readers

Each theme features a handful of essays on medieval manuscripts of historical significance, ranging from “workaday items, sometimes written on inexpensive materials, lacking substantial decoration and speedily copied to save both time and money” to “objects of high value,” “richly decorated in a variety of pigments, highlighted with gold and written in careful script.” As O’Daly explains, “every manuscript selected for this collection can be regarded as a ‘treasure’, whether on account of the text(s) it contains, a particularity of its production or its capacity to bring to life an aspect of the conditions in which it was produced and used.”

Each manuscript is identified by its shelfmark, which denotes the location of the manuscript within the library, similar to a call number. It also distinguishes it from other manuscripts, including other copies of the same text. The vast majority of medieval manuscripts are not autographs, texts written in the hand of the original author, but are instead copies of these works created by medieval scribes, sometimes hundreds of years later. The manuscripts used for copying, called exemplars, were exchanged between individuals and institutions throughout medieval Europe and used to produce new copies.

Medieval bookmaking

One of the key subdisciplines of medieval manuscript research is codicology, the study of the bound book (known as a codex) and the materiality of the manuscript.

Before the introduction of paper to Europe, the preferred medium for medieval manuscripts was parchment, made from the skins of grazing animals, such as cows, sheep, and goats. It was readily available, resistant to humidity, easily cut, and difficult to tear. Prepared sheets were cut to size, trimmed, and folded twice, with the bottom or top folds cut to create four folia (leaves). The folia were then assembled to create quires, often in stacks of eight leaves, called a quaternion. European paper production began in the thirteenth century in Italy, extending into France, Germany, and then England by the fifteenth century. Paper and parchment were each preferred for different reasons: although paper was lighter, and thus easier to use and travel with, parchment was more resistant to tearing.

Dark-brown or black ink was generally preferred, as it contrasted with the lighter colour of the parchment or paper. A common medieval ink recipe included ground oak galls (tannin-rich growths), a stabilizer such as gum arabic (the dried, hardened sap from acacia trees), and iron sulphate. Quill pens, made from the wing feathers of swans or geese, were used for writing.

Some medieval books were bound in protective wood boards, while others were bound in parchment or leather. Original medieval bindings are scarce—most medieval manuscripts have undergone a series of rebindings, some with their own history and story to tell.

The study of medieval manuscripts has been significantly transformed by technological advances, in particular digitization and the International Image Interoperability Framework. Researchers can now view manuscripts onscreen, zooming in to see small features in minute detail. Text-recognition technology has also come a long way in just the last 10 years, and even medieval handwriting can now be interpreted to a reasonable degree of accuracy. The accessibility of these manuscripts also means that their study is no longer limited to scholars with institutional access but is available to students at all levels, as well as non-scholars and the general public.