Close your eyes for a moment and picture a manuscript.
Depending on your origin and background, this image will look quite different. German speakers might think of the Codex Manesse with its full-page images of knights and singers. For Anglophones, it might be the Book of Kells with its numerous whirls and intricate details, or possibly the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry with its feasts and courtiers in vibrant colours.
It is unlikely that you pictured something akin to this ninth-century commentary by the Archbishop of Mainz, Rabanus Maurus.
There is a discrepancy between our idea of a manuscript and the reality of their form, and not without reason. We are used to books standardized for global markets, where there is no room for imperfections. We expect a spotless appearance, however bland. These expectations are applied to manuscripts, turning them into glossy coffee table books with immaculate pages adorned with glistening gold and splashes of colour.
It is relatively rare to see only text – or even more daring, an imperfect manuscript – when wandering through an exhibition or watching a film. Yet these manuscripts teach us their story through their materiality. This can be on the surface, through marks of usage, fingerprints, erased paint, or parchment darkened through relentless use and touch. At a deeper level, they reveal the appreciation and costliness of the materials, especially using an ‘imperfect’ writing base. Views on materiality are changing, as shown in the Designing English exhibition and the upcoming Sensational Books at the Bodleian Library.
Eleventh-century Manuscript containing Servius’s commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid. Featuring multiple holes and seams: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Lat. 117, fol. 17v
On a practical level, tears and holes such as those visible in our Rabanus Maurus book visibly prove the complex process of parchment production and the importance of using everything as parchment was costly. Holes often occur during the scraping of the soaked animal hide. Too much pressure and a tiny cut will become a gaping hole during the stretching process which turns the animal hide opaque. If a cut can be caught in time, it can be sewn shut, but many a cut escaped the watchful eyes of parchment makers. The effort and care put into sewing holes shut, sometimes even with coloured silk thread, fix the high importance of the material in the understanding of the time. Some manuscript makers even took it a step further by adorning the holes and using them as a creative feature!
From a socio-historical perspective, ‘imperfections’ such as this delicately sewn-up tear also tell us about the contemporary mindset and high regard for the material, an idea which is often lost in our throwaway culture. Although ‘blemished’, this sheet of parchment has preserved a scholastic text for nearly a thousand years.
Resourcefulness is a recurrent theme throughout the Middle Ages, from scraping text off parchment to re-inscribe it, cutting edges of pages to use the blank parchment for other purposes, to cutting out illuminations and initials to recycle them for other manuscripts. The material matters, even in the seemingly imperfect.
Unlike in a display case, digitized objects can be browsed and studied at leisure and more extensively than a carefully chosen opening in an exhibition. Zooming into tears, and holes, sewn up or not, gives a feel for the reality of manuscript production. Even if you cannot touch it, the world of manuscripts is at your fingertips – go explore!
Natascha Domeisen is a DPhil student in medieval German at the University of Oxford, working on the media history of two German manuscripts die Heidin and die Mörin and their fate in times of printing.
Manuscripts featured in this post: