In The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages, Sara J. Charles opens the door to a world of painstaking craftsmanship, human creativity, and quiet dedication that shaped the medieval book. This journey opens with an imaginary exercise: what does a medieval scriptorium look like? And where does this stereotype come from? What follows is an exploration of the development of monastic and commercial manuscript culture and the rise and fall of centres of book production across the early and late medieval period. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of the practices, technologies, and cultural contexts that shaped book production in the medieval West, situating familiar artifacts within the lived experiences of their creators.
Through lively narrative vignettes that preface each chapter, Charles offers glimpses into the lives of medieval craftspeople, from a monk from c. 600 CE to a twelfth century German nun to a printer based in Mainz c. 1450. These vignettes are backed up by serious academic research. Chapter six opens with the story of an illuminator whose shop is on Catte Street in Oxford, and a few pages later we are shown the legal documents that reveal a Sarah Bradfot and her husband Peter the Illuminator who owned land on Catte Street (244). These scenes, grounded in careful scholarship, serve to remind readers not just of the ingenuity involved in manuscript production, but of its deeply human context.
The first two chapters work in tandem to give a brief but comprehensive overview of the history of text production and materials. Charles opens with a concise history of writing, starting with cuneiform and hieroglyphics, before moving on to the Phoenician, Greek, and Latin alphabets. Her next task is the rise of Christianity and the codex, showing how the concept of the scriptorium developed alongside the rise of Christian faith in the medieval world. This first overview chapter ends with the establishment of the monasteries in the Christian West.
Chapter two covers European manuscript production up to the mid-eleventh century and the spread of monasticism. Beginning with Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville, Charles shows that the codex was closely linked to the natural world. The word for quill, penna, comes from pendere, “to hang” or “to fly.” The pages of books are called “folios” for their likeness to the folia, or “leaves,” of trees. This terminology, Charles notes, is a constant reminder “that references to the natural world run right through the heart of manuscript production” (64). The following description of book production is interspersed with case-studies of manuscripts, drawing on the famous St Augustine’s Gospels (66-7) and the Cathach of St Columba (69-73). These examples show us that we should not think of the medieval scriptorium in this period as a building or a room, but rather as “the sum of the accumulated effort of a certain group of scribes and the ethos of the monastic house” (71).
The third chapter is perhaps the strongest of the volume. It tackles the central question posed by the title: what do we actually know about the medieval scriptorium? To answer this, Charles begins with archaeological evidence of writing spaces and visual representations found in manuscript illustrations. She makes an elegant argument about how everything needed to produce a manuscript was available on site, and how this in turn would have made the process of reading a locally produced manuscript even more intimate, “evoking their communal memories of past scribes and firmly centring them to their community” (117). Then the chapter turns to written accounts of writing spaces, where the author introduces a new idea about the medieval scriptorium, not only as a physical space, but a spiritual one--a writing place that transcended earthly boundaries and operated on a higher plane.
Next Charles turns to the scribes: who were they, what were they copying, and how? Chapter four focuses on the materials used by scribes and the practical side of making manuscripts. A strength of this study is the variety of sources the author draws upon, looking across written records of scriptoria in German and Italian as well as English. The description of the parchment making process is rich in archival sources, for instance referring to the account books from Beaulieu Abbey and Ely Cathedral Priory (174-5). Then on to paper making (briefly), then the manufacture of ink and quills. A neat observation is made about the production of ink, using the records in Ely Abbey which show the price of ingredients as evidence to suggest that inks were likely produced domestically (182). This section ends with the preparation of parchment and finally the writing itself.
Chapter five moves from writing to decorating, beginning with illumination. A detailed description of pigments follows, where they came from and what they were made of, grouped by colour. The discussion of artists’ tools gives this chapter a practical feel, as if one could follow the recipes to recreate the experience of decorating a medieval manuscript. The final stages are the assembly of the manuscript: quiring, catchwords, bindings, and sewing, all explained in a manner that makes them accessible to readers who are new to the field.
The final chapters return to the chronological thread from chapter two, picking up at the Romanesque period and charting the explosion of manuscript production through to the end of the medieval period. Charles begins with an overview of book production in Europe pre-1500, tracing the movement from Caroline miniscule to Romanesque alongside the shift from monastic to commercial enterprise. Chapter seven, titled “the end of the scriptorium,” marks a change in manuscript production sparked by the increasing demands for books. Here we explore the rise of print and the next step in the development of the scriptorium: commercial independent workshops established around university towns. This, Charles notes, fundamentally changed the framework of manuscript production: “it was no longer a religious transaction with God, it was a financial transaction with a customer” (307). The author leaves us with a comment on the nature of modern book production. Something has been lost, she argues, in the move away from handcrafted natural books to the more commercial and automated system of book production with which we are familiar today. In our world of cheaply made paperbacks, medieval manuscripts represent “a truly unique manifestation of natural resources and human hands” (312).
This book is evidently aimed at a general rather than purely academic audience, which is reflected in its price and its sale in (amongst other places) museum gift shops. Overall, it is an accessible introduction to the topic of manuscript production, although there are occasional moments that might be prohibitive to a casual reader--for instance the mention of alum-tawed leather supports early on (14). But otherwise, it is an approachable read with a useful glossary at the back, and full of helpful explanations of the construction of medieval manuscripts complete with diagrams and maps. The sequestering of the references to the end of the volume speaks to this intended audience, but means that a reader who is more familiar with the topic will still find much of interest here.
Charles’s research nuances our understanding of writing spaces in the medieval period, situating the scriptorium not merely as a physical space but as a conceptual framework through which we can understand the intellectual, spiritual, and manual labour underpinning medieval book culture.