Tea at Trianon: The Life of a Medieval Scribe

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, July 10, 2023

The Life of a Medieval Scribe

From Medievalists:

If a medieval person wanted a copy of a book or a poem, acquiring one wasn’t usually quite as simple as heading to the local bookstore. Every book prior to the invention of the printing press was hand-copied from an original, which meant that it involved a lengthy process. Here’s a five-minute look at the process by which a book came to be copied.

Just a quick note before we begin: “book” can mean many things other than two covers and the paper between – think of the gospels as an example. For this reason, historians call the thing with two covers and the pages in between a “codex” – the plural is “codices” – to avoid confusion.

First, a patron would have to arrange to borrow the codex from someone willing to part with it for the months it would take to copy part of it. Because codices were such expensive commodities, this arrangement would have had to be one of great trust between friends, or great care (and perhaps financial exchange) between strangers. Once the original codex was in hand, a scribe would have to be found to do the copying. Scribes could be hired in cities, but if a patron lived outside of a city, he’d likely have to turn to someone from the clergy to do the copying, as they were the ones who were taught to write. Most monasteries had their own scriptoriums in order to copy sacred works for their own libraries; however, private commissions would not have been unheard of.

A scribe’s desk did not look like a modern desk, nor did it look like the kind of flat table we often see in movies and on television. Scribes did their writing on desks that looked more similar to a lectern; the pages were propped up on an angle steeper than forty-five degrees. This looks a little painful to a modern writer, but it was actually very helpful in getting the ink to flow nicely and evenly out of a quill pen. If you look closely at the ink in a medieval manuscript (and, thankfully, there are many websites that have digitized copies), you can often see the places where the ink begins to run out, and the quill is dipped again. If you’ve tried calligraphy or painting, you can imagine how often the scribe must have dipped his pen. (Read more.)