Johnston R.A. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World

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Books

Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. A History of Food. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,

1992.

Unger, Richard W. Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Philadelphia:

University of Philadelphia Press, 2004.

Boats. See Ships

Books

In Roman times, writing books was an important part of the culture.

Greek and Roman scholars, poets, dramatists, and storytellers wrote their

books on rolls of papyrus paper. After the barbarian conquest of the

Western Roman Empire in

A.D. 476, most of these Greek and Roman writ-

ings were destroyed or lost. Most of the books that survived were in mon-

astery and church libraries. During the Middle Ages, books progressed

from single copies, laboriously written with quill pens on parchment, to

bound volumes mass-produced on a printing press.

The development that enabled this revolution was the codex, which

replaced scrolls. A codex was a book made of bound pages. The idea came

from a small Roman tool called a diptych, which functioned as a sort

of scratch pad. It was a folding tablet made of two thin boards hinged to-

gether with string or leather strips. The outer surfaces were leather covered,

but the inner surfaces were coated with wax that could be written on and

then smoothed and reused. By the end of the Roman era, people had begun

binding pieces of papyrus between the wooden covers. This new form of

book gradually replaced scrolls and was especially favored by Christian

writers and copyists. By medieval times, a book was always a codex.

Medieval Titles

By far, most medieval books were of a religious nature, especially lives

of the saints, books about the apocalypse, and psalters, but religion was

not the only reading material. Secular stories, scholars’ works, and practi-

cal nonﬁ ction were also popular. By the 15th century, when printing made

mass production possible, there were many manuscripts that gave practical

advice for medicine, gardening, and craft skills.

The book of hours, a devotional booklet, suggested prayers and Bible

readings for the hours of the day. It included a calendar to keep track of

special liturgical holidays. Many were custom-made for the owner, per-

haps with his or her picture included in the illustrations. Books of hours

are known for their beautiful, detailed paintings of daily life.

Some books told about the wider world most people would never see.

Bestiaries were picture books about animals, both real and mythical. Travel

Books

stories were popular, and since bestiaries claimed that unicorns truly

lived in India, many readers had no way of telling truth from ﬁ ction. “The

Travels of Sir John Mandeville” told about an English knight ’s travels to

the East and all the fantastical people and animals he saw: elephants, head-

less men, cannibals, and one-eyed monsters. In the 14th century, Marco

Polo’s stories about life and travel in China were published in Italy. His

travels were true, but he also reported fantastic hearsay to entertain his

readers.

There were many short works of ﬁ ction. In England, some stories were

popular in the form of cheaply copied short books or ballads. The legends

of Robin Hood were already popular in the late Middle Ages. Another

story, “Bevis of Hampton,” may have been the all-time favorite of medieval

England. It told of a child hero who overcame injustice, crime, violence,

slavery, love, war, monsters, and foreign travel. The story of the “Knight of

the Swan” brings in a sorceress, a hermit, babies who turn into swans, and

a mother imprisoned for giving birth to puppies.

Late medieval England also had a number of didactic works for chil-

dren, including instructions about manners. The Book of the Knight of the

Tower was a collection of stories a father felt his daughters could be read-

ing, and it was among the early publications of Caxton, the ﬁ rst English

printer. People also read Aesop’s Fables in Latin and Stans Puer ad Mensam,

a Latin poem about manners.

Practical books ﬂ ourished in the 14th and 15th centuries. Christine

de Pisan, a young widow, wrote practical advice for women and became

a best-selling author in Italy. A medical book by the legendary Dame

Trotula, a doctor at Salerno, circulated widely among the common peo-

ple. Emperor Frederick II wrote a treatise on veterinary care for falcons,

and many other medical books were copied and recopied. The 14th century

saw treatises on the astrolabe, Arabic numbers, chess, farming and estate

management, hunting, war, and knighthood.

As paper became more available, some wealthy families compiled collec-

tions of stories, copied neatly by hand. These included religious matter such

as the Ten Commandments and prayers and practical compositions such

as medical advice (with pictures of herbs and surgeries) or how to calcu-

late calendar dates. Books remained scarce all through the Middle Ages,

and if someone was able to spend some time with a book, at school or in a

monastery, he wanted to copy parts if he was allowed.

A few medieval books became lasting classics and inﬂ uenced later

works. Beowulf is one of the most famous medieval works, read in many

modern English classes, but it was unknown in its time. Only one parch-

ment manuscript survived, and it was damaged by water and ﬁ re. The story

tells about three heroic exploits of a king in southern Sweden as he kills

two monsters in Denmark and, at the end of his life, slays a dragon in his

Books

homeland. The manuscript was written around 1025, in Old English ra-

ther than Latin, and it must be read in translation.

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and became the Mid-

dle Ages’ premier poet. He was involved in the bitter political struggles

between Florence’s Guelph and Ghibelline factions and found himself

exiled to Rome. In Rome, he wrote the long poem he is known for—

the Divine Comedy. As narrator, he explored purgatory, hell, and heaven.

He placed many of his political enemies and others who had lived not long

ago, such as treacherous Popes, in hell.

Giovanni Boccaccio was probably an eyewitness to the Black Death in

Florence; he used it as the frame story for his best-known work, the

Decameron. Ten wealthy young people escape the plague -ridden city to

their country houses, where they spend 10 days telling 10 stories per day.

The stories are short, worldly, and sometimes funny; there are no saints’

lives. Both the Decameron and Boccaccio’s other works provided models

that Chaucer and Shakespeare developed in English.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of stories, The Canterbury Tales, was com-

posed in late 14th-century English and can be read in its original words,

with difﬁ culty, by modern readers. Chaucer, a court ofﬁ cial who read widely

and wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, had probably read some of Boccac-

cio’s works as well as other contemporary legends and stories. In his frame

story, a group of pilgrims sets out from London to Canterbury, and they

each tell a story on the way. The stories encompass the breadth of medie-

val literature: courtly love, tournaments, saints’ lives, folk stories, and

comic stories about improbable sexual encounters.

Manuscript Books

In the early Middle Ages, most books were hand copied by men who

sought a quiet and orderly life working within a monastery scriptorium

(“writing room”). Monasteries were active in producing books, partly be-

cause reading was a required activity in many monasteries and there was a

shortage of books. Most early books that were copied in monasteries were

of a religious nature—the Bible itself, commentaries on the Bible, church

regulations, songbooks, and other writings by Christian scholars. Many

of these books were made of materials produced on the grounds of the

monastery. Parchment was made from the hides of their own livestock, and

quill pens were made from the strong wing feathers of their own geese.

The ﬁ rst step in copying a book was the preparation of the parchment

the scribe would use. Parchment pages could be of different sizes, depend-

ing on whether the book needed to be large enough for including illus-

trations or small enough for carrying. The tiniest was the girdle book, a

small book wrapped in leather strips that could be knotted and tucked

Books

around a traveler’s belt so he could read while he walked. Book pages

were customarily cut to be taller than they were wide because that yielded

the most pages from a sheet of parchment.

The scriptoriums where the scribes worked were on the north sides

of monasteries, with desks or writing boards set so each monk sat by a win-

dow. This arrangement provided full daylight without glare or shadow.

In cool weather, there would be a basin of hot coals nearby, both to keep

the scribe warm and to help the ink dry. Candles were not allowed for

fear the manuscripts might catch ﬁ re.

The scribe’s tools were close at hand—his quill pen and inkstand, a knife

to trim the parchment as necessary and to sharpen the quill pen, a pumice

stone to smooth any rough places on the writing surface, a ruler for mea-

suring columns and margins, and an awl to press little holes into the parch-

ment as markers for columns, margins, and the lines he would write on. A

strip of deerskin held the parchment in place on the desk, and the sharp awl

could be stuck through the parchment into the writing desk so the parch-

ment would not slide around. Alternatively, the scribe could use the knife

to hold the parchment still; there are ancient pictures of a scribe holding

his knife in his left hand to hold the parchment ﬁ rmly to the desk and

holding his pen in his right hand while he wrote.

The scribe received the prepared parchment in sections of eight pages—

two sheets of parchment, folded in the middle to form pages and set to-

gether book-fashion to make the eight pages. This eight-page section was

called a quaternion, with the parchment arranged so that facing pages

would be from the same side of the parchment (the hide side or the ﬂ esh

side) and therefore of the same texture.

In monasteries, the scribe worked about six hours a day under a rule

of absolute silence. If he needed something, he would use hand signals to

tell the supervising monk (the armarias) what he needed. Making a per-

fect copy of a text was difﬁ cult. Concentration was essential for accuracy, as

was keeping his eye on exactly where he was working. If he made a mis-

take, he put a series of very ﬁ ne dots under the mistake rather than cross it

out with a big black mark. Copying was hard work. It was physically de-

manding, requiring the scribe to sit still for a long time and constantly

use just the ﬁ ngers of one hand. Some scribes wrote a note, called a colo-

phon, at the end of a manuscript, saying something like, “I have made an

end at last, And my weary hand can rest.” More often, a scribe noted sim-

ply, “Finished, thank God.” A year’s work might be two complete books.

After the pages were ﬁ nished, they went to a proofreader, who com-

pared them to the original to be sure they were accurately copied. They

then went to a rubricator (from the Latin word rubrica, “red earth”), who

added the title, chapter headings, and ﬁ rst letters of paragraphs or sen-

tences in red or other bright colors to make them stand out. Such aids

Books

were needed because early manuscripts did not have spaces between lines

of writing, before paragraphs, or even between words. An artist added illu-

minations in paint to many of the pages.

As the scribe worked through the book, the pages were numbered. The

ﬁ nished product, from the scribe’s hand, was groups of pages nested to-

In a scriptorium, a monk’s main tools were his pen, a knife to sharpen the pen, a ruler

to rest his hand on, a pot of ink, and a rough stone to rub mistakes off the

parchment. (The British Library/StockphotoPro)

Books

gether like little booklets and known as signatures, and then all sewed to-

gether to make what is known as a bookblock—a whole book minus the

cover. To protect the book and keep the pages from being damaged at

the edges, the bookblock was placed between two wooden boards that

reached farther than the page edges. Typically, vellum or parchment would

then be wrapped around the book to make the wooden covers look nicer

and protect the stitching that held the pages together. Sometimes, as a

substitute for a wooden cover, a cardboard cover was made from scraps of

parchment pasted together. To protect the outer edges of the book and

keep the parchment from curling, the front and back covers were hooked

together with a clasp to keep the book tightly closed when it was not in

use. Some books were then ﬁ tted with a chain so they could be fastened

to the lectern, protected from theft or carelessness. Beginning sometime

in the 12th century, leather book covers began to be embossed with de-

signs or pictures stamped into the leather. In the 15th century, some books

also were decorated with gold tooling—the addition of gold ﬂ akes hand

pressed into place—and precious gems. A book so decorated was not kept

in a row of books on a shelf; it had an embroidered silken case.

The practices of rubrication and illumination grew until many manu-

scripts were works of art. They used a wide variety of paints and inks and

often included gold ﬂ akes or gold leaf. The names of these early monas-

tic rubricators and illuminators are not known, as they did not sign their

work. These anonymous illuminated manuscripts are among the most fa-

mous products of the Middle Ages. The early medieval Book of Kells may

be the best known, but there are few books about medieval Europe that

do not draw images from other, lesser-known illuminated manuscripts.

Choir books of music notation, gospels, calendars, psalters, epic legends,

and saints’ lives were the most common kinds of illuminated manuscripts.

One of the richest sources for information about English life in the early

14th century is the Luttrell Psalter. The Luttrell family, minor nobility, com-

missioned a book of Psalms, probably for their parish church and perhaps for

use while praying for their souls after death. The Latin Psalms appear on each

page in regular Gothic script, but every page carries a wide variety of painted

pictures that seem unrelated to the psalms’ content. Most pictures occur at

the bottom of the pages and are called bas-de-page, but others appear in the

middle of large capital letters, in the margins, or even at the end of a line of

words. There are pictures of peasants working on the farm, musicians play-

ing a variety of instruments, the high table at a feast, a grand coach carrying

queens, deceased souls petitioning for mercy, scenes of war, beggars, people

playing games, and both a windmill and a watermill.

Saints’ deaths and Biblical scenes abound in the Luttrell Psalter, but the

noble character of a psalter did not constrain the artist’s imagination.

Leaves, vines, trees, and ﬂ owers frame most pages. The margins are ﬁ lled

Books

with grotesques who may represent demons but who may also just be fan-

ciful products of the imagination: dragons; creatures who are half human

and half ﬁ sh, bird, or beast; and creatures with two heads, bird’s legs, or

wheels. Such images are also called drolleries and appear on manuscripts

from the Book of Kells to the late medieval books of hours.

Illuminated manuscripts developed the artistic potential of the letters of

the alphabet. Calligraphy—beautiful writing—was a new idea. Although

the text was usually carried forward in a standardized style, special letters

became playgrounds for the artist scribe. Artists developed a certain deco-

rative style for capital letters and carried it out, with variations and an array

of colors, on every page. The ﬁ rst capital letter on a page, or beginning

a section, often got even more imaginative treatment. Some letters were

made out of human ﬁ gures standing, lying down, or joining hands to

form the shape. Other letters display imaginative shapes and ﬂ ourishes,

and many act as frames to very ﬁ nely painted scenes.

Around 1150, professional scribes and illuminators began to take over

the book business. Not all scriptoria were in monasteries, and not all scribes

trained in the monastery remained there for their work. Schoolmasters,

wealthy lords, and scholars owned writing chambers in towns, especially

in cathedral or university towns. They would commission scribes to pro-

duce various kinds of written materials or would do the work themselves.

These books were more functional than the illuminated manuscripts.

Readability was the chief concern, and conventions for word spaces, sen-

tence spaces, and paragraphs began to develop.

Because of the cost of parchment, a draft or “scratch copy” of the work

was given to a clerk on a wax tablet or a slate, rather than using parchment

for the ﬁ rst draft. Or the author might read his work to the clerk, who

would write it onto wax and then transcribe it onto parchment. Many sto-

ries or songs that had been only in the oral tradition were put into writ-

ing in this way. Clerks also served as secretaries, writing letters for their

employers. There was even a bit of a black market in illicit book copies

made without permission. Today’s scholars have found letters written by

medieval folks who complained that their friend borrowed a book and did

not send it back until he had surreptitiously copied it.

With the rapid founding and growth of cathedral schools and universi-

ties, beginning around 1100, commercial book production surged. Most

schoolbooks were plain columns of text on pages bound between wooden

boards. Colophons in manuscripts of that era identify some 23,774 names

of scribes and illuminators, most of whom were trained in universities or

monasteries.

See also: Alphabet, Animals, Calendar, Libraries, Monasteries, Parchment

and Paper, Pens and Ink, Printing, Schools, Universities.

Bricks and Tiles

Further Reading

Alexander, Jonathan J. G. Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Bell, David N. What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nun-

neries. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995.

Brown, Michelle P. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical

Terms. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1994.

Brown, Michelle P. The World of the Luttrell Psalter. London: British Library,

2006.

Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven, CT: Yale University,

2001.

De Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1981.

De Hamel, Christopher. Scribes and Illuminators. Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1992.

Howard, Nicole. The Book: The Life Story of a Technology. Westport, CT: Green-

wood Press, 2005

McMurtrie, Douglas C. The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Murray, Stuart A. P. The Library: An Illustrated History. New York: Skyhorse

Publishing, 2009.

Reeves, Compton. Pleasures and Pastimes in Medieval England. New York: Ox-

ford University Press, 1998.

Brass. See Lead and Copper

Bricks and Tiles

Bricks and tiles were both strong building traditions in the Roman Em-

pire and remained strong industries in Italy. Northern Europe, espe-

cially along the coast of the North Atlantic and Baltic Seas, had good

clay deposits. During the 12th century, cities in these areas began using

brick for building; the craft may have been spread by Cistercian abbeys

that used brick. Because brick and tile were not ﬂ ammable, they be-

came attractive building materials as medieval cities wearied of massive

ﬁ res. Unlike stone, bricks and tiles were small and light and could be

moved about in carts. The use of bricks and tiles spread all through

Europe.

The Teutonic Knights, a late Crusading order based in Germany, built

many castles of brick. By the late Middle Ages, attacks using ﬁ re had be-

come standard ways to burn down or collapse a castle. Brick walls were im-

mune to the effects of ﬁ re, since bricks had already been baked in kilns at

very high temperatures.

Bricks and Tiles

Bricks and Roof Tiles

Brick making is one of the few crafts that were not depicted in any sort

of medieval art until the 15th century. A Bible from 1425 showed a brick-

yard with a two-story kiln in the background, a work shed, and handcarts

ﬁ lled with bricks being moved into stacked lattices of rectangles. The pic-

ture shows the basic steps of making bricks, which do not vary across place

or time, but it also suggests some of the methods at use in that particular

place, which may not have been uniform.

All bricks and tiles begin with the right kind of clay, dug out and cleaned

of rocks. Some clay must have sand or water worked in to reach the right

consistency. Brick makers use molds to shape each brick, either one by one

or in sets. In the Middle Ages, they worked at benches in sheds. Bricks have

to dry for at least two weeks, and some medieval European brickworks kept

bricks in rotations such that they could dry for a year or more. Once they

have cured slowly this way, they can be ﬁ red in a kiln. Kilns could be like

bread ovens, such as the two-story kiln in the drawing. Here, a bottom ﬁ re

compartment heated the upper drying chamber. Kilns could also be tempo-

rary; the bricks were built into stacks, covered with a temporary roof, and

ﬁ lled with wood between the rows. When the bricks were ﬁ red in a clamp

like this, the whole thing was dismantled to remove the bricks.

Medieval bricks could be thicker or thinner than modern standard bricks, and

different clays varied their color. This Cistercian abbey in Germany added decorative

bricks. (Andreas Bauer)

Bricks and Tiles

Cistercian abbeys used bricks extensively, and as these monasteries

spread into Northern Europe, brick use did too. Bricks were a major build-

ing material in the Hanseatic towns like Lübeck and in the Netherlands,

then called Flanders. There are still ﬁ ne medieval town gates, guild halls,

cathedrals, and even castles made of brick in these regions. As brick use

moved into England, bricks were adapted to the timber-framed construc-

tion method. Brick and mortar could ﬁ ll in the gaps between the square-cut

timbers that framed the walls.

Brick could be used in decorative techniques. Some bricks could be

painted white with lime after the building was completed. Bricklayers

learned to create patterns in the walls by turning bricks around to stand out

from the ﬂ at surface, and they planned patterns by using the natural color

variations of bricks. Bricks easily made Romanesque and Gothic arches;

brick walls could have both galleries and blind galleries.

Bricks became especially useful in building chimneys. During the late

Middle Ages, city roofs shifted from thatch and smoke holes to slate or

tile roofs with chimneys at the side. Although the ﬁ rst chimneys in castles

were made of stone, brick was far more convenient for any building that

was not a fortress.

Greece and Italy had produced roof tiles since classical times. Other

European regions also began to make roof tiles. Flemish roof tiles were

curved and interlocked, like Mediterranean tiles. A row of concave tiles

required a narrow row of convex tiles to cover the join. English tiles were

ﬂ at, simpler to make than the curved Mediterranean tiles. They hung on

pegs along the rafters. Although the rafters could still catch on ﬁ re, roof

tiles were very resistant to sparks.

Decorative Wall and Floor Tiles

The Islamic world began using wall tiles in building, either decorated or

as mosaics made from broken pieces of different colors. Muslim builders

used tiles as both indoor and outdoor wall coverings. The use of wall and

ﬂ oor tiles spread into Northern Europe primarily through Cistercian ab-

beys. Eventually, tiles were used to surface heating ovens in the colder parts

of Northern Europe; their widespread use in Germany pressed potters to

develop the craft more than it was developed in England or France.

Tile techniques followed the general development of ceramics. Like

pottery jars, tiles began unglazed or glazed with simple brown, yellow, or

green lead-based glazes. As the tin-glazing technique spread, tiles could

be white, and with the growing availability of cobalt, they could be white

and blue. The full development of tin and cobalt tiles in Northern Europe

came after the close of the Middle Ages with the development of the Delft-

ware trade. In Spanish Andalusia, though, it was fully developed in the tile

art most famous in the Alhambra palace.