Main content
Medieval Europe + Byzantine
Course: Medieval Europe + Byzantine > Unit 3
Lesson 1: Making the medieval book- Listening to the Medieval book
- Parchment (the good, the bad and the ugly)
- Skins and scraps
- An introduction to Medieval scripts
- The work of the scribe
- Words, words, words: medieval handwriting
- A Medieval textbook
- Making books for profit in medieval times
- Decorating the book
- Medieval supermodels
- Binding the book
- Clasps: hugging a medieval book
- Medieval books in leather (and other materials)
- Making manuscripts
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Listening to the Medieval book
Dr. Erik Kwakkel and Dr. Beth Harris look at two manuscripts: 1) Boethius, De institutione arithmetica, c. 1100, The Hague), Royal Library, MS 78 E 59 and 2) Paris Bible, mid 13th century, The Hague, Royal Library, MS 132 F 21 . With special thanks to Ed van der Vlist, Curator of Medieval Manuscripts, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Is there any historical or anthropological information on the eyesight of the medieval scribes AND of the itinerant friars who wrote and/or read the small Paris Bible? Did they have medieval versions of eyeglasses or magnifying glasses, such as the eyeglasses portrayed in the movie Name of the Rose (1986), which was set in Medieval Europe with itinerant/traveling monks?(7 votes)
- I have also heard that it was possible to magnify work by filling a glass orb with water and using a candle to provide better lighting so that the actual size of the working area could be increased.(9 votes)
- I notice in the Paris Bible on the pages shown atand 1:35there are words that seem to be struck, or crossed through in red ink. Why would this be? 2:00(3 votes)
- Those are images of the same page. In this instance, a word (linxerunt) was written twice by the scribe, and the corrector crossed out the first instance using red ink. The crossed-out word is also expunctuated, that is to say "dotted out": the first and last letters have dots under them, indicating that the work is extraneous.(4 votes)
- Would any specific tools be used to write this small?(4 votes)
- Keep in mind that scribes often prepared their own writing utensil whether it be from a feather or from a reed. This means they cut the point as wide or as fine as they liked (or as fine as they could manage). In another video from a different model they show the preparation of a feather for writing and you can see how the scribe cuts it down to write a certain width. I see that this video is shown at the end of this model as well. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-europe/v/making-manuscripts(2 votes)
- "Third Book of Kings"? There are only two.(3 votes)
- Samuel and Kings of the Hebrew Bible are called I-II Kings and III-IV Kings in the Latin Vulgate. In Protestant Bibles, those books are called I-II Samuel and I-II Kings. The book referred to in the video as III Kings is in all versions of Jewish and Christian scripture.(2 votes)
- at, Dominican friars are mentioned, what are they? 2:28(2 votes)
- Friars in the Order of St. Dominic, who became very important in the 13th century. They are famous for disputing heretics (such as Cathars), and for their frequent positions at medieval universities. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was a Dominican friar.
More details: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dominican-order(2 votes)
- what type of animal skin was the parchment made out of?(2 votes)
- Usually calfskin (which is often called "vellum), sheepskin, or goatskin.(2 votes)
- was that gold leaf? 1:03(2 votes)
Video transcript
(piano music) - [Voiceover] We're
looking at an 11th century Boethius used in monastic
education, I think. If you listen to the page, there's a sort of-- - [Voiceover] It sounds hard. - [Voiceover] It's a stiff page. It's a very thick page. You actually can feel it as well. It's a firm page, and as a result, when you turn it, it's very odd to talk about pages like this, but it has a lower sound to it. - [Voiceover] So we're
listening to the book. - [Voiceover] If you're a musician, you'd probably tell what the tone is and all that, but I can't. - [Voiceover] This is cheap parchment. - [Voiceover] Yeah, it's sort of almost at the lower end of the scale, I think. You can see it as well. It has dark stains and
gaps and it's uneven. It's yellow-white rather
than being one color. - [Voiceover] So this is
a very utilitarian book. Let's listen to another book. - [Voiceover] All right, here we are at the very opposite end of the scale. The book that, it almost makes no sound. So I'm flipping through the book now. There's sort of a high pitch, almost like water running from a tap. It's very, very thin parchment. It's about the thinnest
parchment you can have. It's what we call a Paris Bible, which means a Bible with all the books in one physical volume rather than having two or three volumes,
and so it had to be thin. It has no gaps, it has no holes, it's as white as white will be. If I try to flip one page, so it's still making noise, but I can now flip it and it will not make any noise, I think. A little bit of a high pitch crackle. - [Voiceover] So this is
really high grade parchment. This was an expensive book to produce. - [Voiceover] This is an
expensive book to produce, and also, it was meant to be expensive. You want to show off. You can notice on the
page there's decoration. - [Voiceover] And the writing, the script, is much smaller, much finer. - [Voiceover] Yeah, it's a
script specially designed to produce tiny Bibles like this. So this Bible is 133
millimeters, which is roughly the iPhone height. So this is something
that somebody needed to work really hard to write this finely. There's even less than two
millimeters to the line. - [Voiceover] It's hard to imagine a nib small enough to write like this. I notice at the top we have something that I would assume would
be the title of the book? - [Voiceover] Yeah, if
you buy a modern book today, in the upper margin will be usually the complete title of the volume. But here it's even smarter. It gives you REG, the Latin for Kings, and on the other side it says three, which is the third book of Kings. - [Voiceover] So this was a book made for a wealthy person. - [Voiceover] Well it
will have been expensive to buy, but does that mean it's made for a wealthy person? Not necessarily because what happened with these books is many of them were actually used by Dominican friars, monks on the road going
from city to city preaching. You know, when you're on the road, you try to get everything
as small as possible, your phone, your computer, your laptop. - [Voiceover] This is portable. - [Voiceover] This is portable, so this was made to fit in your bag, but also, that's why the pages are so thin because you want to have the entire volume in a small object. The same Bible could
easily have been copied in 20 volumes, and 200 years earlier it would have been 20
volumes of large letters, of large space, but that's not what was the idea behind this book. So this was made for somebody on the road. Everything that he needed was in this little device, as it were. (piano music)