Tag Archives: book history

Cross-Post: Books Before Print

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Medieval

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Erik Kwakkel, Books Before Print (Amsterdam University Press/ARC Humanities Press, 2018) EUR 34 (paperback), 105 (hardcover), 105 (ebook) (available on Biblio)

Erik Kwakkel, excellent book historian and blogger, has a new book out on the medieval manuscript as a well-engineered tool shaped by readers’ habits and desires.

This beautifully illustrated book provides an accessible introduction to the medieval manuscript and what it can tell us about the world in which it was made and used. Captured in the materiality of manuscripts are the data enabling us to make sense of the preferences and habits of the individuals who made up medieval society. With short chapters grouped under thematic headings, Books Before Print shows how we may tap into the evidence and explores how manuscripts can act as a vibrant and versatile tool to understand the deep historical roots of human interaction with written information. It highlights extraordinary continuities between medieval book culture and modern-world communication, as witnessed in medieval pop-up books, posters, speech bubbles, book advertisements,and even sticky notes.

If you are a little bit interested in the middle ages, most of the illuminated manuscripts you have seen are from the 15th and early 16th century … they are roughly contemporary with the first printed books in Europe. Fifteenth-century Europe was richer than Europe a century or two earlier, it had more rich people who could pay for lapis-lazuli blue and gold dust and silver leaf, and the styles of art are closer to our taste. Early printed books imitated manuscripts like ebooks and websites imitated hardcovers and magazines. But medieval book culture was also different than ours: big margins were fashionable, and books were meant to be memorized not read once and passed on. Specialists called codicologists and art historians know many things which sometimes get brushed over in books aimed at a larger audience.

If you work with medieval books, but didn’t get to take university courses on the subject, reading this and a few of the books in the bibliography would be an excellent idea. You can find the affordable paperback edition on Biblio.

Full Disclosure: I know the author

Twilight of the Scribes

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Ancient, Modern

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The BBC has a short piece on the vanishing of professional letter-writers in India (link). A generation ago, someone who wanted a letter written or a package addressed could hire someone to do that for them outside most post offices in big cities. In the author’s view, rising literacy rates make letter-writers less necessary, but the final blow has been the availability of cheap cell phones which let people communicate across long distances without writing.

What the article does not say is that people have been making a living writing letters and simple documents for about four thousand years. In the cosmopolitan world of the Late Bronze Age, Egyptian villagers had the local scribe write them letters and contracts. Soldiers on the island of Elephantine sent short notes to and from their friends and relations on the mainland. Of the several hundred which survive from the Achaemenid period, many are written in a single hand yet under many different names. High medieval teachers wrote textbooks on formal letter-writing. While many men in some societies could read, the skills to write neatly and to compose an elegant letter or official document tended to be rare, so many people in a wide range of societies preferred to find a professional. After such a long time, it would be sad if the trade ends not with universal literacy but with the triumph of the spoken word.

Further reading: J.M. Lindeberger, Ancient Aramaic and Hebrew Letters (1994), Jac J. Janssen, “Commodity Prices From the Ramesside Period.” E.J. Brill: Leiden, Netherlands, 1975, James J. Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts (1971)