<_Illuminating][Manuscripts_>
elcome! Here at Illuminating Manuscripts, I will be... well, illuminating the history, culture, and artistry behind these fascinating artifacts. Scroll down to start reading or use the navigation bar on the left to jump to specific sections. What process exists here lies in the code, which can be accessed with a right click and a look at the page source. While this site functions perfectly fine on a mobile device, it is best viewed on a computer. Enjoy!
A Brief History
The history of illuminated manuscripts begins as the curtains slowly draw on the shambling corpse of the Roman Empire. The most important developments to the written word thus far occur during these first few centuries CE: the creation of the codex and an increased preference for parchment over papyrus. The codex, believed to be a late Roman invention in the form of parchment notebooks, is simply the term for archaic manuscripts that prototype the layered, transcribed, and bound form of modern books. This new form proved to be more sturdy than scrolls and more portable than writing tablets.
Most manuscripts at this time were produced by monks purely for use in a monastery. Day-to-day handbooks, Bibles, and Gospel books were among the most common. A majority of these texts were written in Latin and remained in their monastery for centuries, except when taken to another for the purpose of reproduction. Even then, a monk may have to travel himself to a different monastery to copy it. Combined with these long travel times, the exacting craftsmanship that went into making quality materials, and the many hours it took a scribe to transcribe, illuminate, illustrate, and bind a book, it's clear that the dissemination of literature at this time was a long and arduous process.
However, as literacy and the desire for new or personal reading (i.e. religious) material incrementally increased over the years, by the 11th century, roving scribes and illustrators working as freelancers were not uncommon. Anyone with enough money could have commissioned their own Book of Days or Psalter. Sheets of music were popular as well. As we moved into the 12th and 13th centuries, with growing monastic sects and the upcropping of secular universities independent from the monasteries, the industry of urban transcription workshops boomed to meet the demands of monks and students both. Where most books previous were made for personal or localized use, there was now a growing market for books, both new and secondhand. Poetry, epics, and myths began to be committed to paper for close to the first time in history. Books of law, textbooks, medical treatises, charters, tax rolls, diaries, political pamphlets, and accounting books were all produced in codex form during this time.
The introduction of the printing press in the 15th century did not necessarily mean the death of the manuscript. Handwritten, illustrated works continued to be produced, albeit at a slower pace, and largely for texts of great import commissioned by very wealthy patrons. It just didn't make sense to sink so much time and money into something that could now be produced cheaply, quickly, and in mind-boggling quantities. These books were clearly much loved, though, as evidenced by the thousands of near-pristine artifacts we have sitting in archives and, still to this day, monasteries around the globe.
Process
Imagine you are an 8th century monk. You are sitting in your monastery's scriptorium, the scent of oleander from the cloister carried down the hall to you by a mild spring breeze. Here in the Italian heartland, you eat, breath, and live to draw spiritual pay from the scripture and its transcription. In the room around you lie these materials:
- Parchment
- Ink
- Quills
Parchment is made from animal skin, which could include that of a cow, sheep, goat, deer, or pig. Vellum, considered a finer, more luxurious kind of parchment, was typically made from calfskin and used for texts of greater import.
Black and red were the most common colors used for manuscripts. Black ink would have been made from charcoal or tannic acid and ferrous sulfate mixed with gum arabic. Red ink could have been mixed a variety of ways, but the combinations of vermillion, egg whites, and gum arabic, and vinegar-soaked brazilwood mixed also with gum arabic were common.
Goose or swan feathers produced the finest quills. Reed pens were a common alternative.
You select a sheet of parchment, which has already been prepared for you — the animal skinned, and the skin soaked, scraped, stretched, scraped again, and cut for use. You lay it flat over your sloped drawing board and begin to divide the page into sections with a stylus. Indicate the margins, the size of the text, where the miniatures and marginalia will be painted in. If you intend to maintain this structure across multiple pages, you will then use an awl to prick holes through the intersecting points of your grid at the margins.
Dip your quill into your inkwell and begin your transcription. The religious text you are copying from, which arrived from a different monastery last night after weeks of travel, sits off to the side on your desk, weighed open by stones. It is likely that you will use a proto-Beneventan script per your locale, which can be viewed down below. Do not worry if you mess up — it's easy to scrape the ink from parchment to start again.
When you've finished with the text, set your quill aside. Return to the open spaces you mapped earlier for illustrations. While this next step may have been handed off to another scribe, as there were often teams of monks working on a single codex, you are only one person, reader. You must apply your gold leaf before you can put any paint down, otherwise you run the risk of ruining your illustration during the burnishing process. Remove the parchment from your sloped board, lay it down on a flat surface, and apply the gold leaf with glue. Once you have done that, you can burnish the gold and begin to paint.
You have a variety of pigments at your disposal. Cinnabar, madder, dragon blood tree, azurite, turnsole, cobalt, lapis lazuli, malachite, verdigris, saffron, arsenic, white lead, and sunflower have been used to produce a variety of red, blue, green, yellow, white, and purple paints. You likely sketched the illustrations in while mapping the page out. All that's left to do now is follow along from the book you are copying from like a paint-by-number. If you're feeling up to ahead, go ahead and add some bloodthirsty, bipedal rabbits to the margins while you're at it.
Once this and any other pages are completed, you can now bind them together. Stack about eight sheets of your transcribed parchment and fold them all together down the center. This is called a signature. You will gather as many signatures together as is needed to complete your book and sew them to leather thongs placed across the spine, then lace them through the wooden boards that will serve as the codex's front and back covers. You can encase these covers in fabric or leather if you so choose. And with that, you are done!
Congratulations! In the amount of time it took you to read these few paragraphs, you have gone through a full process that would normally have taken several months to a year to complete. If this were a few hundred years down the line, in the secular, industrious workshops that catered mostly to university students, this may have been shortened to a few days or weeks. Go place this book in your monastery's library and get ready for the next project to come!
Bestiary
One of the highest points of entertainment when learning about illuminated manuscripts is delving into the weird and wild world of marginalia, or those fucked up little guys that like to hang out in the page margins. The Medieval Bestiary is a wonderful online guide to the various creatures that feature in these manuscripts. Here is a showcase of some of my favorites:
Conclusion
In my junior year of high school, I wrote an essay on the day I spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as my grandparents had taken me on a trip to New York City over the summer. Just as my path in reality was desultory and meandering, the essay itself was narrated like a loosely understood dream sequence. In it, a formulative sequence of movement and moments guided me past shields shaped like lions' heads, silk kimonos raised aloft like pinned butterflies, and the exact same Monet that a print of hung on my bedroom wall back home. It was exciting to write. The thread that I maintained through the entire piece was that art, in an all-encompassing sense, is meant to be a conversation. A "centuries-long cultural exchange," I believe I called it. The dreaminess of the experience was then more reflective of timelessness. Take the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting, The Artist (Marcella), on the right. Such a contemporary sample of style and loneliness, despite having been produced in 1910. While Marcella wasn't a piece on display during my visit to the Met, the same comingling of time periods, oozing out from earthenware and well-worn leather gloves in porous displays of relatability, was a constant source of awe. It is so, so important that we keep that alive. My essay concluded with a similar statement — it is our duty as artists and witnesses to maintain the exchange, to demonstrate that we have never been alone in our humanity and will never be alone again. Preservation is key to that process.
It is my pleasure to tell you that I am a complete and utter failure in this regard.
Well. Maybe not pleasure. But I do think it's funny to mention that the essay I've described here no longer exists in any tangible way. It, alongside nine years worth of writing, illustrations, and design work, vanished into the digital aether when my school purged my graduating class's Google accounts in the months following our graduation. I knew this was going to happen. I had plans to upload everything to a new account. I kept putting it off, saying I had time, it hadn't happened yet, I can organize the files this weekend. Then I woke up one day and they had vanished. Nine years of work. I was devastated.
For quite some time now, I have held a very passive interest in archiving and preservation, specifically in regards to digital content like websites and online games. I presented my graduating thesis in a video on this topic, titled New Age Archaeology. (That, too, has been lost.) I believe there is immense value to the internet in archival spaces, and not just as an innovative tool to digitize and disseminate physical material, but as a source of new cultural artifacts that are more exemplary of the now than anything else currently being considered for preservation. It wasn't until this moment, however, post-senior year, that I had any vested interest in participating in this process.
This site is sort of the culmination of that. I learned how to use HTML and CSS in order to create a website, at first just to catalog my own interests, but eventually out of a desire preserve them and give attention to the things I believe deserve preserving. The creation of this site was not easy. There is nothing in this world I am an expert in, least of all this. I made a lot of amateurish mistakes, had to look up the same attributes fifty million times just like I was glossing for beon-wesan over and over again, and many things continued to break despite doing my damndest to fix them. I wish I had taken screenshots to show you the worst of it. As I was referring back to my sources through the creation of this, though, I felt that much closer to the scribes and their efforts in preserving their history, culture, fascinations, and ways of life. This was my way of recording their work and history. I'm sure typing a few lines of markup code into a computer is nowhere near as intensive as working on a massive handwritten and illustrated codex for weeks on end, but I'd like to think that this is me proving myself in my artistry and my capability of maintaining the exchange. I know this site isn't perfect. I know the content itself is thin, like a baby's first introduction to medieval manuscripts, but at least it's out there, accessible, and has the potential to make someone as interested in the topic and process as I was.
I very much doubt that this site will continue to exist in the same way you are viewing it now, but that's the beauty of an online space. Things can evolve and improve forever as long as someone is there to maintain it. A living, breathing document. I hope this site's heart will continue to beat long after I've left it to fend for itself, just as the splendor and quality of illuminated manuscripts have lent themselves to preservation for centuries.
Thank you for visiting.
Citations
Bland, David. A History of Book Illustration: The Illuminated Manuscript and the Printed Book. University of California Press, 1974, archive.org/details/historyofbookill00blan.
De Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. Phaidon Press, 1994, archive.org/details/historyofillumin0000deha.
Gill, D. M. Illuminated Manuscripts. Brockhampton Press, 1996, archive.org/details/illuminatedmanus0000gill/mode/2up.
Lovett, Patricia. Calligraphy and Illumination: A Practical Guide. Harry N. Abrams, 2000, archive.org/details/calligraphyillum0000love/page/n7/mode/2up.
Roberts, Colin H., and Theodore C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. Oxford University Press, 1983, z-lib.sk/book/Vq7nWWpQzA/the-birth-of-the-codex.html.