Sara J. Charles's "The Medieval Scriptorium"

Sara J. Charles works and studies at Senate House, University of London. She has previously published on various aspects of the history of the book.

Charles applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of the chapter covering monasticism and manuscript production in the West, 500–1050. This page is about the development of book production on the Continent under Charlemagne in the late eighth/early ninth century. It discusses the influence of his spiritual advisor, Alcuin, on the development of monastic scribal culture and the spread of the standardised script, Caroline minuscule.

This page contains a quote from Alcuin which goes right to the heart of what this book is about. The quote reads:

It is an excellent task to copy holy books
and scribes do enjoy their own rewards.
It is better to write books than to dig vines:
one serves the belly but the other serves the soul.

This conveys the central notion that manuscript production was an act of prayer in itself – monks and nuns were writing out the words of God as a sacred task to edify their spirit. This ties into the Benedictine ideal of ora et labora (prayer and work). The development of Christianity and scribal culture alongside each other is central to the theme of the book, although after the thirteenth century manuscript production moved into the secular realm, and it became more of a commercial enterprise. However, the skill and dedication that scribes and artists displayed in creating beautiful manuscripts proves that they did enjoy their own rewards, whether monastic or secular. It also mentions the different texts the scribes copied, indicating that cloistered life was open to different types of intellectual material, which is explored in more detail later in the book.

The second part of the page explains how the Caroline minuscule script spread throughout Charlemagne’s empire. It was part of Charlemagne’s drive to standardise Christianity and to create a unified Church. While this was an early Christian ideal, elsewhere in the book I discuss the various different medieval scripts, and where and why they had the most influence.

Learn more about The Medieval Scriptorium at the Reaktion Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue