The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara Charles

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

By Sara Charles 

Reaktion Books 2024

Not at all ironically, rather extremely intentionally, the first impression any reader will have when encountering The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara Charles is a very old-fashioned one: it’s a lovely physical production. It’s got a strong, flexible binding and heavy pages filled with clear, beautiful illustrations. In these chapters, Charles tells the history of the medieval manuscript, its evolution, its various technologies and the skill of their use, and although she’s plainspoken about the seedier realities of her subject – “the making of a medieval manuscript was dirty, smelly, often boring and certainly back-breaking,” she writes, mentioning that it involved “blood, urine, excrement and earwax” – she’s clearly charmed by the entire physical reality of old manuscripts. 

She also clearly wants to share that charm, even going so far as including brief fictional vignettes designed to bring history to life. Each of the book’s chapters opens with one of these scenes, and of course there’s some 21st-century academic (or social media?) revisionist fantasy mixed in, as when the first of these scenes presents readers with Paula, a scribe in fourth century “BCE” Bethlehem (“What better way to keep God’s message in their hearts,” she thinks, “than by basing themselves in the very place where it all began” - “it all” presumably being the Common Era, for Christ’s sake), who wakes up (in her Portland condo, one assumes), stretches, and takes herself off to her room of one’s own to work all day, alone, unsupervised, on transcribing with iron gall ink into a papyrus codex, which constituted new techniques at the time, since “she believes a new religion needs a new way to express itself.” 

If we leave aside the fact that Paula wouldn’t have existed, wouldn’t have been allowed to work the way Charles describes, and certainly wouldn’t have considered her religion to be new, the enthusiasm of such a semi-novelistic approach is tough to resist, even when the the fictional vignettes are even more ridiculous, as when Johannes Gutenberg, about to debut his printing press in 1450 Mainz, looks around the room “feeling the excited hubbub that he has created” and thinking he might be “on the verge of something big.” 

This kind of stuff is silly but harmless, a natural-feeling adjunct to the lively way Charles tells the rest of the story of how medieval manuscripts evolved and refined to become such exquisite works of art. This is a familiar and often-told story in the history of the book, in many ways culminating in what’s referred to as humanist script, which Charles describes as spacious, elegant, and “an absolute joy to behold.” 

This narrative energy is appreciated, of course, and fairly compensates for its own strange little excesses that crop up at various points in the book, as when Charles, in describing the scriptorium in a 9th-century monastery plan, mentions that the place was not a spiritual place but a spiritual one. Locus scribendi, contemptus mundi, she reminds her readers, means “the place of writing is the contempt of the world.” Which might be true, although it’s worth remembering how many millions of priceless documents those monks have burned over the centuries, but perhaps Charles lets her enthusiasm for her outdated subject carry her away:

While of course the workshop manuscripts are often things of absolute beauty, something perhaps is lost in knowing that they were not created with a higher purpose in mind. Although we know that the members of religious orders liked to complain about the mundanity of their daily scribal duty, there is something far more profound about manuscript production in the early medieval period, when scribes were feeling their way through this new medium, keen to share knowledge and fulfill their religious duty. 

Since we can presume Charles is happy for every non-Catholic, non-Christian, and non-believing reader she can reach, we can be briefly happy that most books aren’t made anymore with that “higher purpose” in mind. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News