Recently, a colleague was discussing the procurement of personal preachers in particular places during the later Middle Ages, which piqued my interest. So I asked about the arrangement, that is whether these people were paid or if the relationship was based on mutual ties and benefit. When in turn I was asked why this might matter, I ventured that if we are interested in the social relations between the parties the nature of the exchange matters. This impressed upon me that the importance of book prices might not be as self-evident as they seem to me.
If the book is regarded as a sacred object, a reader’s or the audience’s relationship to its authority is fundamentally different from one in which the book is seen as a bought-and-sold commodity. In other words, the attitude towards and indeed the access (or lack thereof) to the material embodiment of the text plays an important role in one’s reading of the text (and/or the authority through which interpretation is transmitted).
In charting the early iconography of the Christian book, namely the shift in depictions whereby the once open book becomes a closed and ornamented object, Armando Petrucci argues for an ‘ideological process of sacralization’.* And in turn sees connected to this development a ‘conception that saw writing not as in the service of reading but as an end in itself’, divorcing the practice of writing from that of reading, enabling scribes to write with little concern or regard for the needs of reading or readers.** (While I admittedly have a hard time getting my head around the notion of writing as an end in itself, this point of view does help explain some of the errors that any reader of medieval manuscripts comes across; you can’t help but think when looking at a text that clearly was corrected either by the initial scribe or subsequent users, ‘Why didn’t they fix That! Surely, everybody noticed that Gedeon shouldn’t be spelled Zedeon?!’). If this accurately describes written culture in the very early Middle Ages, a shift whereby one might ‘buy’ what was a sacred object, written as an end unto itself, strikes me as a rather important and dramatic process.
In addition to issues of access to texts and authority in interpretation, the shift from sacred object to commodity is also an important part of economic history. In discussing Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), Stephan Epstein noted, “Two critical questions were never posed: First, why did the transition to capitalism occur originally in western Europe, even though parts of Asia were previously economically more advanced?”*** There seems to be a parallel question asked for the history of the book. Why did printing develop in western Europe when other societies had the technological tools for the same development and in some cases were (or had been) more ‘advanced’ both in the economies of book production and the technologies of print? Interestingly, it is often suggested that it was Gutenburg’s (and by extension western Europe’s) business sense, or search for profit that engendered the desire and drive to create the press, and that the book market that had developed prior in the Middle Ages enabled its subsequent success.
from http://www.stedmundsbury.gov.uk/sebc/visit/burybibleintro.cfm
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* ‘The Christian conception of the book in the sixth and seventh centuries’ in Writers and readers in
medieval Italy. Studies in the history of written culture, ed. and trans. by C.M. Radding (New Haven, 1995), 29. Originally published as: ‘La concezione cristiana del libro’, Studi medievali, third series, 14 (1973),
961–84.
** ‘Christian conception’, 32–33; See also, Petrucci’s ‘Reading in the Middle Ages’, in Writers and readers. Originally published as: ‘Lire au Moyen Age’, Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome, 96
(1984), 603–16.
*** in “Rodney Hilton, Marxism and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Past & Present, Supplement (Volume 2) (2007), pp. 248-269 at 250.
**** Rodney Thomson, The Bury Bible (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 25-26.
As you can see, I am trying to note medieval book prices as I come across them after Gneuss’s psalter colophon piqued my interest (and so I thought to give categorize the notes).
For the Gutenberg Bible, customers paid around 20 gulden for paper and 50 for parchment. For the sake of comparison, we are told that a stone house in Mainz in the mid-fifteenth century ran 80-100 gulden and a master craftsman earned in the neighborhood of 20-30 gulden a year.*
So rather expensive at a year’s + pay. But I’ve yet to work out how to compare that to the cost of the lost psalter described by Gneuss (perhaps the Załuski psalter is a good nickname).
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* Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010), 29 (citing Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg. The Man and his Invention (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1996), 180-183).
Szarmai's evolution of spine shapes
A little later than the note reported by Helmut Gneuss is a notice found in the pastedown of a manuscript in Pembroke College, Cambridge (dated ?1170).*
It states:**
Pentatuchus. Iob. duodecim prophete. Math. et luc. cum pergameno
salterii et epistolorum et note. xxviii. libre. et x. solThe Pentatech, Job, Twelve Prophets, Matthew and Luke with parchment for the psalter and the epistles and note(?; prob. the notes or glosses of Peter Lombard on the psalter and epistles); 28 livres and 10 sous.
As de Hamel mentions, it is unclear who would have written this inscription, but it does seem that it marks the progress of a major commission. Some books of the Old and New Testaments have been written, and parchment acquired for Peter Lombard’s glossed books of the psalter and epistles, which have not yet been written. De Hamel asserts that nowhere but Paris had the resources for writing books of this complexity and on this scale. The Rouses use the note as evidence of a structure of some sort that will foster the development of the booktrade later in Paris. To them, it looks like the large urban abbeys of Paris, specifically St-Victor, fostered the growth of a booktrade by engaging lay scribes and illuminators.
Similar activity is suggested in England, especially with reference to the re-stocking of libraries after the Norman conquest, in Michael Gullick’s “Professional Scribes in Eleventh- and Twelfth Century England” in English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 7 (1998): 1-24.
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*discussed in Rouse, Richard H., and Mary A. Rouse. Manuscripts and Their Makers : Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500. 2 vols (Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller, 2000), I, p. 26.
**quoted from Christopher de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade (Woodbridge : Brewer, 1984), p. 54.
Forskningsdagene, aka Norwegian National Science Week, involves a number of events intended to make research (most often scientific) available to the public and also to create public awareness about research in Norwegian universities and enterprises. In one event in Bergen (with parallels elsewhere), the University together with affiliated groups and other institutions (such as the architectural school) set up booths within a series of large tents and entertain children and some parents over the course of a Friday and Saturday.
The booth before opening, its only empty period
Åslaug and I worked the booth for the full stints both days. We were aided by Eldar Heide and Frode Hervik on Friday, and Stian Hamre on Saturday. Thomas Foerster and Leidulf Melve helped with the rigging; Biörn Tjällén and Susan Foran, a new postdoc at CMS, with the demolition. Our inestimable director, Sverre Bagge stopped by with two grandchildren on Saturday as did Sigbjørn Sønnesyn and clan. read more…
An earlier post discussed Malcolm Parkes’s idea of sense transfer units, that is the amount of text a scribe retained in memory when transferring his/her attention from an exemplar (the text to be copied) to the scribe’s own copy (the text the scribe is writing).
During a recent meeting, I found myself copying sentences from the handout to my notebook and in noticing some patterns began to imagine a sort of trial to see how Parkes’s principle might work in practice.
Using a Livescribe Pulse pen, which is essentially a digital pen that records, I sat down and copied a few lines (as naturally as possible) from a nearby book. Because it records, the Livescribe pen allows you to playback your writing in individual sessions. In everyday life, this feature is meant to be used by students who, using the pen to record lectures while taking notes, can then tap/click a certain part of their notes (either on the special paper or on a monitor after they’ve been uploaded to a computer) and then hear what the lecturer was saying at the time the student was writing.
For the purpose of this exercise, the recording pen allows us to see my copying in ‘real time’ (more or less, I don’t know enough information on the recording speed and processing time to talk about the pen’s reading/recording precision and accuracy). You can see the pauses in my copying and their duration.
The exemplar
A Carolingian binding
References to the price and labour involved in producing early medieval books in Western Europe are hard to come by. However, thanks to Helmut Gneuss’s reconstruction of a scribal comment (aka colophon) now lost (but transcribed by a modern cataloguer before the loss of the manuscript), we have a unique reference to the price of a book in early English material (it may well be the earliest reference of its sort in western Europe).*
It reads (as reconstructed):
Đeos Boc wæs geal gewriten on feower
Wyken and kostede þreo and fifti syllinges
This whole book was written in four weeks and cost fifty-three shillings.
The hand-written catalogue description of this lost manuscript (probably written very roughly around 1100) has not been printed but Gneuss relates that it was 21×15 cm and contained a Latin psalter and canticles over 152 folios (with another seven folios added later). However, the statement itself gives no indication as to whether the cost involved the materials or only the labour.
Nonetheless, it seems worth gathering some (provisional) points of comparison (about which corrections are welcome; I am especially uncertain about conversion rates and the like). In 900 in England, a sheep was valued at 5 pence (?or about 1 shilling) and a pig at 10 pence (?or about 2 shillings).**
In the medieval Islamic world, an ordinary book could cost 10 silver dirhams (?7 dinars by weight) and a fine one 100 dirhams (?70 dinars). The annual income necessary to support a middle-class family was around 24 dinars. The library in Cairo under al-Hakim (r. 996-1020) had an annual budget of 207 dinars per year, 90 of which went to paper for copyists and 48 for the librarian’s salary. The keeper of the supplies and the repairer of books each earned 12 dinars.***
In Byzantium, annotations from around 900 in the books of Arethas, Archbishop of Caesarea, value his copy of Plato at 21 nomismata (6 8 [Thanks to Marilena Maniaci for the correction!) for the parchment) and Euclid at 14 nomismata (perhaps not including the parchment). Manual workers in Byzantium were paid 6 to 10 nomismata per year. Those in the civil service appear to have earned about 72 nomismata per year at the lower end of the scale (the average perhaps in the hundreds).****
This only represents the early end, which interests me in considering a/the development and/or shift from sacred book to commodity. More examples and comparanda kindly solicited.
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* Helmut Gneuss, “More Old English from Manuscripts” in Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture presented to Paul E. Szarmach ((Tempe, AZ: ACMRS in collaboration with Brepols, 2008), pp. 411-421 at p. 419.
** from VI Æthelstan, see s.v. coinage in Lapidge et al., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
*** from Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001), pp. 117 and 121.
**** from Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), p. 132.
A Parkes-owned Cappelli
One of the most interesting (admittedly, to me) characteristics of manuscript culture, that is a literate culture distinct from print, is the handwritten transmission of texts, a phenomenon that demands a better understanding of the mechanics of copying. In short, how does the individual read while s/he is writing and/or write while s/he is reading. And how does this practice affect the way that texts shift, move and change.
At the heart of the copying process is the scribe, whose education, habits and working practices vary according to time, place and any number of considerations. Nonetheless, I think that we might be able to talk about some general principles that apply to copying as a practice. At least I would like be able to talk about generalities about reading and writing that can be applied to the specific mechanics of copying.
One attractive principle is the notion of ‘transfer units’ as described in Malcolm Parkes’s Their Hands Before Our Eyes, A Closer Look at Scribes, a significantly revised and augmented book based on the Lyell lectures at Oxford in 1999.
When a scribe copied a text he had to divide his attentions between exemplar and copy, and the degree of concentration required is reflected in the frequency of the transition from one to the other. The transitions may often be detected from minor discrepancies in the spacing or the alignment of the handwriting on the pages of the copy…(In the example under discussion, a scribe, Hrannigil) reproduced the scriptio continua of the exemplar for certain groups of words, which indicate the amount of text he retained in his memory when transferring his attention from the exemplar of a difficult text to his copy. These ‘transfer units’ can be seen in the copy…(and) are also ‘conceptual’ units. (63-64)
A wonderfully fun book! I read this last winter for a break from the medieval and was well rewarded. I admit that the title initially made me think that it might be a lament for print or an encomium for the digital. However, reading some of the reviews as well as the author’s website and blog assured me it was neither. This is a description of the continuing function and role of print in a late capitalist, consumer-driven society.
The introduction invokes familiar names for those interested in the every day and the book (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Marx); makes special mention of Febvre and Martin’s The Coming of the Book; and suggests that the idea that books are more than a commodity (they represent learning, knowledge and so self-improvement) is in itself a way of distinguishing the good in the commodity market (9).
And in the subsequent chapters amidst the discussion of cultural structures of book production, we learn about bookshelves becoming an integral part of the modern ‘home’, the development of the barcode system and the market in Harry Potter-derived media. All very clearly exposed and tantalizingly spun. read more…
n 30 June (which makes it way dated, I know!), the Palaeography Working Group at King’s College issued its final report. Michelle Brown at the School for Advanced Study in London wrote a letter clarifying some (mis)representations, but expressed support for the report’s recommendation to re-establish a chair in palaeography.
The people appointed to the group (and its recommendation) suggest that the group was not hand-picked to whitewash the matter. And given the likely support for palaeography from these individuals, the rationale behind sacking one chair in palaeography only to have to re-establish a chair in the future is perplexing. Of course, I can run through possible reasons, but these would not even be based on gossip or other sources of unreliable information. And I spend enough time talking about stuff I know nothing about when I’m teaching (so I’ll refrain here!).
Most striking to me is how serious or grave or possibly cynical and maybe even short-sighted the thing was. Let’s assume a position is re-established on more advantageous financial footing and suiting the remit envisaged by the working group’s paper. The person offered the new position will be fully aware of the fate of her/his predecessor and other prominent, productive academics who were cut as part of the restructuring at King’s.
Imagine: Hey, we just fired a guy who held this permanent position because we thought it was untenable…erm, you want the job?
Or are we as academic workers so ready to acquiesce, that it ain’t even worth a second thought?
Edward Tenner’s column at The Atlantic (Higher Education’s Tech Dilemmas) discusses research that shows that hyperlinked reading is not serving students. For a course a couple of years ago, I and the other instructors wrote the lecture notes out in full sentence and paragraph form (These 15-20 pages for each lecture served as the course reading; it was a short, not a full-term course). Rather than footnote information, I used lots of hyperlinks so that students could click through to manuscript images, library homepages and in at least one case some medieval music. For example, the following on some of the Italian humanists and their writing (just as an image, without working links):
But during the lecture and afterwards, it was made very clear to me that the students weren’t sitting at their computers and eagerly clicking through…in fact, most of the students were printing the reading out and simply following along during the lecture with their paper copies in front of them. I save myself a lot of time by not copying and pasting links into the lecture notes/readings now.
I think the issue is/was that students (at least in a lecture format) want to be told what is important and expect that if it is important the topic, issue or image will be discussed further in class. They’re reading rather pragmatically, not curiously.
Tenner’s column then notes reading speeds (possibly suggesting that the matter is related to the question of hyperlinks???), noting studies that indicate Kindle and ipad reading is somewhat slower. I suspect that this has to do with habits and comfort. The primary constraint on reading text presented in lines is the movement of the eyes which hope and skip around. Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain relates an experiment demonstrating that:
If a full sentence is presented, word by word, at the precise point where gaze is focalized, thus avoiding the need for eye movements, a good reader can read at staggering speed–a mean of eleven hundred words per minute, and up to sixteen hundred words per minute for the best readers
This is three to four times faster than normal, quick reading. Readers who read from four hundred to five hundred words per minute are, according to Dehaene, already close to optimal within the constraints of eye movement (no page numbers for references; I read it on an electronic reader!).
If we want students to read as much as possible as quickly as possible (while retaining respectable comprehension), then we need to hook them up to screens that flash words sequentially based on the individual readers gaze. Of course, this won’t teach them to read curiously, to branch out from the required reading and to consider topic more in depth. Giving students reading material in which links could suggest reliable, well presented and informative sources for more depth seemingly promised to pique their curiosity. That such a format distracts more than allures, not that it might cause you to read a fraction of a second more slowly, is the real bummer.