Additional Medieval Manuscript Readings and Web Pages
For a classic view of scribes' work before the age of print, read the excerpt of Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes (De laude scriptorum), in Writing Material, pp. 469-75. They were the heroes of knowledge survival and spread from the first era of written literacy in the West ca. 700 BCE until 1455 CE. They preserved what was known and made possible the dispersion of new knowledge, eventually including the art of moveable type printing that gradually put them out of a job.Solomon Schechter and the Ginezah fragments--the Cairo Ginezah was a special room that Hebrew scholars used for thousands of years to store manuscripts and manuscript fragments safely because they might contain the sacred name of God. Studying the fragments produced a wealth of new information about the earliest versions of the books of the Christian Bible, as well as classical Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literary texts that were mingled with the theological and philosophical texts.
Visit this web site and explore instances in which MS leaves were sold on eBay: CHD Center for Håndskriftstudier i Danmark, Dismembered Manuscripts, This site was constructed by Erik Drigsdahl (1942-2015) in part to consolidate a collection of digital images of Medieval manuscript leaves that have been sold on eBay and, in most cases, lost to scholarship forever. The site remains useful for students interested in studying the construction and places of creation of books of hours.
Click here for the home page of "Parker on the Web," a joint project of Stanford University and Cambridge University. Survey some of the MSS to get an idea of what they typically look like (i.e., functional, not beautiful), but concentrate on MS #61, perhaps the second most famous Chaucer manuscript that has survived. Folio 1v contains a full-page illumination that appears to show Chaucer reciting his poetry to the Ricardian court, apparently without a manuscript before him (!). Before you look at the images, be sure to consult both descriptions ("desbib") of the MS, and when you get to the images, you might want to take a look at the upper left margin of folio 101v. They occur beside lines 575-81 in Book IV of the poem.
If you are especially interested in early manuscript libraries, you should see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 274.2 D858s 1992 and this Columbia University online exhibit on Manuscript Fragments and Typical Surviving Manuscript Books.