Writing

From Medieval Wiki

By Kyoko Peterson and Katherine Suzanne Luck

"Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease."-Peter Abelard, medieval philosopher

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain." - Elie Wiesel, writer

Drawing of Writing Tools: Kate Luck

Vocabulary

1)Illuminated manuscript-An ornately decorated manuscript

2)Quill pen-A pen made out of a feather

3)Manuscript- Any handwritten document

4)Parchment-A piece of scraped, stretched animal skin to write on

5)Secular writing-A piece of writing that was not religious

6)Scribe-A person who transcribes documents or undertakes dictation by hand

7)Calligraphy- a type of fancy, beautiful writing that can also be considered an art form

Scripts

This is a example of an illuminated manuscript.

The word script is short for manuscript. Manuscript means anything that is handwritten. Manuscripts were important in the medieval times. Books, legal and business documents, and records were all in manuscript form. Manuscripts were hard to make: they were labor intensive and expensive. Most manuscripts represented major religious, social, and artistic beliefs. They are our primary source of information about the middle ages. Manuscripts tell us about anything that people from the middle ages thought was important enough to immortalize. (This probably wasn't very much since making a manuscript was so hard.) They also sometimes had pictures; those help us learn even more.

An illuminated manuscript was a very, very beautifully decorated book. It was used to show how wealthy and powerful the rich were. It is called a illuminated manuscript because of the Latin word illuminare which means to light up or to illuminate. This illustrates how the medieval people thought that the decoration made the book "glow".The decoration might be an ornate, complex border and include the first letter of the first word. The scribes left space for the decorative scenes and letters. The scribes would also leave notes for the illustrator. Multiple artists/illustrators may have had to work on one book if it had a lot of decoration.

The author of the manuscript was often only the start of the chain of people that reproduced the manuscript through the ages. The first manuscript, the one penned by the author, was called the autograph manuscript. Since manuscripts were handwritten and recopied by other scribes, mistakes were created and then copied by the next scribe.

There were secular manuscripts and religious manuscripts. The religious manuscripts were the bible and encyclopedias of saints' lives, original chronicles of the monasteries, and answers from the pope to questions about religious law. The purpose of religious manuscripts was to record and teach people. Since most people could not read, the scribes were writing for themselves, other monks and priests. Then they could read it to the people who couldn't read so they could listen and memorize the information. The kinds of secular manuscripts were legal documents, business documents, and records. They were written in Latin. Latin was the language of the Church, but it was also the language of business. Some manuscripts for pleasure started to be produced. They were written in French and were legends and tales of chivalry. They were meant to be read by wealthy private owners. These books were expensive to keep and make. Only people who wanted to read them and were rich enough would pay someone to make the books could own them.

After the invention of the Printing Press people stopped writing books by hand because more books could be made with the printing press.

Calligraphy

This is a example of calligraphy. Source:http://www.quillskill.com/extras/calligraphy.jpg

Calligraphy means "beautiful writing". It is a very fancy script. It is also a form of Art. It comes from the Greek word Kalos, meaning beautiful and graphos, meaning writing. It is still is a very beautiful and expressive way of writing. The letters are written in such a way that there are thick and thin parts of the letters. Also the shape of the pen, a broad tip, contributes to how the letters look. This art form is way of writing that dates back to the 1st century when the Romans started adapting the Greek's alphabet. There are many different types of calligraphy. Some of them are: Square Capital, Roman Half Uncial, Batarde Miniscule, and Gothic script. There are many others. Calligraphy was used to write manuscripts. A lot of the calligraphy was done by monks in monastery scriptoriums.

This is a example of the gothic alphabet.

Materials & Tools

This is a example of the book making materials they might use.

Throughout the history of writing manuscripts, the basic tools needed were the same. All a scribe really needed was something to write with & something to write on. The most common writing tool was a quill pen, instead of the reed pens the Romans used. When writing the scribe would need a knife around him when he worked so that he could sharpen the quill if necessary.

To make a quill pen they used a goose feather. First they had to take off some of the feather parts so they would not interfere with the writing process. Then they used a knife to cut off part of the tip. After that they could clean the feather out. Then they buried it in hot sand to change its structure; the sand made it stronger and less fragile. Doing this made the feather pen easier to handle. If a scribe was left-handed he would prefer a feather from the right wing of the bird and the other way around. Scribes preferred it that way because the curve would fit better in their hand. Also the scribes used a hard, rod shaped object with a sharp, pointed end. They pressed it on the paper in lines so that on the other side of the paper there were raised lines. The artist commonly had to make their own inks. A lot of the inks were ground from plants or minerals. The most common ink was black ink; it was used it to write letters, outline drawings, and highlight the artist's drawings. The ink was made from carbon. To make gold on the page, the artist might use real gold! The gold or silver would be attached with either a kind of red clay or some sap gum. Then the metal was rubbed to make it shiny and sparkly. After all the ilumination in the book was done, the book had to be bound.

Before they developed what we call paper today, they used other materials. Some of the materials they used were: wood, bamboo, and bone. These materials were not very practical. But until paper reached the west in the middle ages, parchment was the easiest, and therefore the most common, type of material to write on. Parchment was a specially treated animal skin, also known as vellum. To make a parchment, you had to go through many steps to be ready to write. First you soaked the skin in a lime solution. Then it was scraped and stretched many, many times. They stopped stretching and scraping once the skin reached the desired thickness.

Writers

The monks and the scribes could write. Scholars wrote out manuscripts from dictation or by copying other manuscripts . Most people in the middle ages could not write, and no women could write. Priests, some government officials, and scribes were the ones who wrote often. The scribes had the most important part in producing manuscripts. Since making books was time-consuming and since most people did not know how to write, becoming a scribe meant training many years as an apprentice. In fact, they trained for seven years! Their most prized possessions were their quill pens. They did not live a life of leisure and took work very seriously. They wore the Clothing of peasants. They were often punished if they did not work on copying or writing manuscripts. To be a scribe, you had to have knowledge in Latin, very good eyesight, nice handwriting and literate so they could read and understand the writing that they copied. Monks did the same work as scribes, but they copied different manuscripts, mainly religious ones or documents for the Church. The scribes and monks worked in libraries that were in Castles and monasteries. The monks who worked in the script rooms did not have an easy life. They could not get distracted, or else they would make mistakes, and they worked very long hours Later professional scribes in towns copied books to order.