Parchment and Paper: Manuscript Culture 1100-1500

1. After 1100 changes were made slowly but surely to the writing process. Thinner parchment was used and more writing was being done.  By 1200 most scribes were professionals instead of the work being done by monks alone but Christian teachings and Latin stayed central for literacy and book production.  In the 12th and 13th centuries lay people and the aristocracy owned books and were also patrons of writers.  Ladies began keeping personal prayer books called Books of Hours.  There was great growth in the amount of literate and an increasing variety of book production by 1400.  People started experimenting with ways of reproducing texts through print.  People started to use books more than ever before, changing the culture and making it the precursor for the invention of printing, although people were very skeptical of the printing press at first.

Eventually Italian Humanists changed the look of classical Latin.  They created a new script along with punctuation in italics which still exist today on our computers and in books.  The Humanists proved to be the most successful propagandists there have been in the book business.  Dante argued that the future of literature lay with the Vernaculars.  Dante tried to make Vernacular consistent but it was very hard as people were not as connected as they are today.  By 1250 Vernacular was supplanting Latin as the language used for legal documents.  French became the new language for treatises and legal documents and it wasn't until the 15th century or later that English was used.  As a consequence of Norman conquest, English writing was not really utilized until Chaucer made it happen at the end of the 14th century.  To make the Vernacular authors more appealing and important, portraits and deluxe editions of their work were propagated.

The rise in dominance of the illustrated manuscript brought along the success of the codex format as the major format for texts to be made and circulated.  Manuscript culture involved readers and commentators adding information to the margins of pages.  Not all books in manuscript culture were given titles.  The friars took over the single-volume copies of the bible produced in Paris and also introduced alphabetical indexing.

After 1100, literacy became a matter of social class more than whether or not a person was clerical or lay.  Reading primers were developed to teach people to read.  It started with the alphabet and ended in Christian readings.  By 1400 it was books such as these that dominated book production.  But the increase in books such as these did not necessarily mean an increase in literacy. Women, for example, for the most part could not write at all.

2. I found this reading very interesting.  The part that amazes me the most is all the time that went into creating manuscripts, namely the job of the scribes as well as the job of the illuminators.  The illuminators especially amazes me because they were able to create such magnificent artwork for something as simple-seeming as a book.  Today, artwork like that would seem sort of elaborate and ridiculous for an everyday textbook or book we read for pleasure.  I also found it interesting to learn the origins of our modern day italics, punctuation, spacing between words, and alphabetical indexing.  I had no idea where any of that originated until reading this chapter.  I find it ironic that at the time the primer was one of the most common manuscripts laying around but now it is one of the scarcest, probably looked at as a treasure whereas for students in 1100, the primer was probably one of the most mundane books that existed.

3.  My question is this:  In the chapter it talked about how many nuns started making books and many women started to own little pocket books and were as likely as the men to own a primer.  If this was the case, how was it that as low as 1% of women were able to write?  It gives the reason in the book that writing was taught in school, which women did not attend, and that the way they learned was through repetition but if nuns were making books and women were reading primers, how did more of them not learn to write?