The Medieval Book

This week in class we began the increasingly tedious task of transcribing our medieval manuscripts. One might think “oh well, this must be easy, all I’m doing is copying what I see in front of me!”. To a new transcriber, that thought is so wrong, so very, very wrong. Medieval Latin has this “amazing” thing where it uses unfamiliar abbreviations, sometimes there are no breaks in sentences or words and occasionally the letters do not look how they do in today’s modern alphabet. It took me an hour to transcribe 3 short lines of my manuscript, and there are definitely some questionable words I have created, due to the fact that I cannot decipher the correct letters and/or spelling. While this process is ridiculously frustrating, it is also incredibly fascinating (if you like this kind of stuff, that is). While I spent my time trying to configure my 3 lines, I came to think: “if I’m struggling with 3 lines, how on earth did monks copy/transcribe whole volumes of books?!”.  It wasn’t as simple as copying line per line; most of the time Latin was not the first language of monks (depending on where they were from), so copying Latin texts was no easy feat – or even if they spoke Latin flawlessly, a lot of texts were in Greek as well. This all lead to my final question, how or why did monks transcribe? Where did it begin? So I did some further research to find out.
I came across a fantastic website from Dartmouth University called Dartmouth Ancient Books Lab, which offers historical background on paleography, codicology and papyrology.  The specific article I looked at is called Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life, which explains the origins of copying texts. It all began with an Egyptian Christian named Pachomius who believed that all monks should be literate, and then some two hundred years later a man named Benedict established an Italian monastery called Monte Cassino.[1] From there, Benedict created guidelines, which he called Rule of Saint Benedict, and describes what the daily routine of a monk should be (which included tons of reading).[2] Soon after, copying texts became part of a monk’s life, due to a man named Cassiodorus’s Institutes rule book.[3] Monks believed that copying texts, especially biblical texts, were a way to spread the word of god and to fight the “snares of the devil”.[4] They often worked grueling hours, especially if they were particularly skilled at copying texts, which could lead the monks to feel anxious, hopeless and apathetic.[5] This was known as acedia, or as we know it today, depression (I mean who wouldn’t feel these things after sitting hours and hours a day inside with little to no conversation).
Not only was the copying and reading manual labour, there were also some issues that arose with it. For one, human error is inevitable, so words were spelt wrong, miscopied, forgotten or skipped on purpose (or sometimes even entire lines were just eradicated from the copied text).[6]
There were so many difficulties that a monk faced on a day-to-day basis, it’s hard to believe that people worked with these conditions. After writing this post I definitely feel I got the better end of the stick then the monks, and I’ll have to remember that copying my 13-line manuscript is not as grueling as a monk’s work!

If you want a more detailed explanation of a monk’s work, then check out these websites: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ancientbooks/2016/05/24/medieval-book-production-and-monastic-life/

http://ultimatehistoryproject.com/the-medieval-scribe.html

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-europe/a/medieval-manuscripts

 

[1] Victoria Corwin, “Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life,” para. 1, Trustees of Dartmouth College, May 24^th 2016, https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ancientbooks/2016/05/24/medieval-book-production-and-monastic-life/

[2] Corwin, Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life, para.1.

[3] Corwin, Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life, para.1.

[4] Corwin, Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life, para.1.

[5] Corwin, Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life, para.2.

[6] Corwin, Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life, para.3.

 

Greetings, my name is Ian Kerr and I am a history major with third year standing, and I am currently in the process of earning my BA Honors degree. I’ve always been extremely interested in Ancient history and ancient societies such as Ancient Greece, Rome and Ancient Egypt to name a few. However, one of my main passions ever since I was a little kid was my fascination with the middle Ages, particularly the culture and the imagery associated with the era Knights, Kings, Queens, Bishops and so forth, and as such I’ve always wanted to learn more about the era in general. I chose this course because it seems like one of the best opportunities I will ever get to learn about this culture and actually interact with pieces of medieval history first hand, as well as being able to analyze and discuss them, so I am very excited to be taking this course. Some random things about me are that I have a Siamese cat named Benkei (named after the Japanese warrior monk folk hero, who according to legend held a bridge against 20-40 enemy soldiers in one of the most memorable epic last stands in history. Another random thing is that I really enjoy video games, particularly any strategy or fantasy games, such as World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2 or the total war strategy game series. Overall, I am really looking forward to taking this course throughout the year, meeting all of you, and of course learning some really neat stuff about the middle ages.

Ever since I was a little kid I have been fascinated and intrigued by the culture and imagery associated with the Middle Ages. I believe the thing that started my interest in the culture was the film “A Knights tale” starring the late Heath Ledger released in 2001, as a kid, I absolutely adored this film, and although of course it took a more Hollywoodesque approach, I loved how it depicted the culture and society of the Middle Ages, the knights, squires, kings and Queens, and of course, jousting. I loved seeing the different knights hailing from different noble families, each with their own colours and heraldic symbol representing their house, it really got my imagination going as a kid, and every since I saw that film I know I have wanted to learn as much as I can about the period.

This film is also what started my great interest into medieval fantasy such as Lord of the Rings and later Game of Thrones, as well as fantasy games that depict an almost dystopian Middle Ages such as the Dark Souls series, and ones will a more light hearted approach such as World of Warcraft.

So all in all I am super exited to be taking this course because that means I get to learn more about this incredibly interesting period as well as look over actual historical artifacts preserved from this period, it is honestly an incredible opportunity and a dream come true. It honestly kind of blows my mind that we even have access to these historical artifacts not to mention permission to touch them, which reminds me that I need to be less sleep deprived and very careful when I handle such artifacts in the future as to avoid furling the edges, and possibly damaging them. Although, I am currently having a hard time completing and navigating some of the more technical aspects of the course, such as the humanities commons site as well as some of the other sites, I am looking forward to being able to navigate these sites with eventual ease and am thankful I am learning them now, as having accounts set up and knowing these services might be very helpful going into my last couple years of University. All in all I am very much looking forward to learning a combination of technical as well as analytical skills, and just simply having fun and learning about the Middle Ages in this course.