Author: Birgit Constant

Hello, it’s me, Roger of Wilberfoss. Did you know that many of the people in my home village look at me with suspicion? The priest in particular always freezes when he sees me and hastily reaches for the cross on his chest. He probably thinks that this helps him against the evil aura that surrounds me – and all because I’m left-handed.

You see, in my time, being left-handed is a sign that you are possessed by the devil or at least in league with him.

Even in ancient Greece and Rome we left-handers didn’t always have the best reputation. And now that the Christian faith has widely spread in England and the mainland, clerics like our priest in Wilberfoss make no secret of what they think of left-handers. Good, decent and pious people are right-handed. It’s not for nothing that Jesus sits on the right-hand side of God, while the devil, the fallen angel, who rebelled against God and strayed from the right – ha! – path, is plotting his next evil trick on the left.

But left-handed people like me are no better or worse than right-handers. The Bible knows that – my clever sister confirmed it to me. But the clergy keep their mouth shut. They fear and fight everything that is different. And we left-handers are different simply because there have always been fewer of us and as a result, our singularity stands out all the more. This otherness is enough for a leftie to lead a dangerous life.

Speaking of dangerous life, our master of arms considers all this hustle completely exaggerated and useless. As a warrior, you have to be able to carry weapons with both hands anyway, he says. If you’re left-handed like me, being able to fight with your right hand is especially important when you have to fight in a shield wall on foot or in line with other riders on horseback. If I used my left hand, the only weak spot in the line of defence would be me and that would be neither in my own interest nor in that of my brothers-in-arms and my liege lord.

The master of arms says there is also another very practical reason for the need to be able to fight equally well with both hands: How else can you fight if you lose your right arm or if it is so badly wounded that you can’t use it anymore? There’s only one hope left then, isn’t there?

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Are you left-handed, too? Join the celebrations on 13 August, which is the official Left-handers’ Day.

Books, libraries and free access to both are taken for granted today. However, this has not always been the case. On the occasion of the International Day of Libraries, celebrated annually on 24 October since 1995, I am delving into the history of books and libraries, so, come along and let me take you back in time.

From cave paintings to bound books

Some of the most ancient cave paintings in the world from Satukunda, India

Cave paintings and oral-storytelling traditions show that humans have always loved stories. Although we often imagine ancient and medieval texts as scrolls or handwritten collections of loose pages, bound books have actually existed since the first century AD. While texts were mostly preserved in rolled-up manuscripts at that time, the so-called codex began to emerge.

The term codex is derived from Latin, meaning a tree trunk or wood split for writing tablets. Later, the meaning evolved to refer to what was inscribed on these tablets, such as a legal document, book, index, and later also a manuscript.

While the first books had wooden covers – those very writing tablets of the original meaning of codex – the second century AD saw the introduction of books with soft covers made from parchment or paper, similar to modern paperbacks.

By the early Middle Ages, we see the first books with wooden covers that were leather-bound. The oldest preserved Western European book of this type is St Cuthbert’s Gospel from the 8th century AD, which features wooden boards connected to the leather covers by a clay-like material.

Later medieval book bindings also included staples or were increasingly bound in fabric that was less sensitive to moisture than parchment.

Finding a name 1: When is a book a book?

With the spread of books came a specific name for the object itself. In the Germanic languages, variants of a presumed Germanic root *boks began to appear from the early Middle Ages (8th century) as a term for bound texts, such as Old High German buoh, Old Saxon bok, Middle Dutch boec, Old English boc, Old Norse bok, or Gothic boka. While the singular originally referred to “letter”, “rune” or “(lot-designated) rune stick”, the plural eventually evolved to encompass meanings such as “written document”, “legal document” and “book” for stapled or bound folios of parchment or paper.

From book to library

So, people loved stories, and books already existed, but two obstacles stood in the way of a broader reading public:

1. Most people in antiquity and the Middle Ages could not read. Thus, reading aloud or reciting carried great significance, and until the late Middle Ages, this was certainly the most widespread form of consuming books.
2. Unlike today, access to libraries and hence to knowledge was limited for the public. If someone wished to know something, they had to ask someone who had access to such knowledge. In antiquity, this applied primarily to great rulers, while in the Middle Ages it was mainly clerics, and later also the lesser nobility or wealthy citizens.

Finding a name 2: When is a library a library?

During the Old English period, the place where books were kept was called boc-hord, book hoard, boc-cest, chest for books or boc-hus, book house. There was even the word biblio-þece, taken from the Greek words for a bookbox, biblion = book, theke = container, box, which still exists in German and the Romance languages in the form of Bibliothek/bibliothèque/biblioteca.

However, when the Normans arrived in the 11th century, they wiped out both the native and the Greek-stem word by using their own native term librarie, designating a library as well as the books within that library or a collection of books. The Norman word itself comes from Latin librarium, plural libraria (itself via librarius = related/belonging to the book from liber = book, originally the inner bark of trees), which was the name for a book-case or chest for books. So, the current English word library is basically the Norman descendant of the original idea shared by Greek, Old English and Latin.

It was literally this bookbox in which the residents of monasteries kept the small number of frequently used books within reach: in the church, in a chapel, in the sacristy, in the scriptorium, or in the refectory for public readings at mealtimes.

As book collections expanded, their accommodation required a dedicated space, which did not start as a specifically designed room just for books. One simply cleared an existing room and refilled it with books. Gradually, a distinct and dedicated space for books emerged, referred to equally as a library and a reading room, before terms began to diverge during the Renaissance, leading to the reading room becoming a part of the larger library.

Back in ancient days, books were stacked on top of each other, not placed side by side.

How did libraries expand their collections?

There were various methods to grow a library’s collection:

• Copying within the monastery: this was the standard procedure when the manuscript was available on-site, either within the collection or borrowed from another library. In the case of books that were too valuable for lending, monks also travelled to the library holding the manuscript to copy it there.
• Exchanging duplicates or dispensable items
• Purchase
• Donations and legacies
• Acquisition of books from private ownership: this occurred primarily upon entering or returning to the monastery, be it new novices or monks who have completed their university studies.
• External book production by paid scribes: Today, we have traditionally published authors and self-publishers. In earlier times, these were the monks and literate individuals not belonging to a monastery who produced manuscripts for money, apparently quite successfully: as early as the 14th century, paid scribes sold more books than were written by monks.

Ancient libraries

The first library

The first library is considered to be the collection established in the 7th century BC in Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, of King Ashurbanipal, consisting of an estimated 10,000 clay tablets containing about 1,500 texts in Akkadian cuneiform. These included religious and literary traditions, as well as reports on the palace’s finances and government.

Unfortunately, the library was destroyed around 612 BC by the Medes and Babylonians. Around 40,000 fragments were rediscovered in the mid-19th century.

The most important library

An artist’s impression of the ancient library of Alexandria

In the third century BC, Ptolemy I founded the most significant library of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, which contained an estimated 700,000 scrolls, bustling with scholars and students, including Euclid, the father of geometry, and Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of the ancient world. In contrast to other Egyptian libraries of the time, which were accessible only to priests and scribes, this library was open to everyone.

The Hellenistic scholar and poet Callimachus developed an efficient library system here with his students. The writings were differentiated between poetry, prose and scholarly works, with authors organised alphabetically. A catalogue of all writings in the library was also created.

This library too was completely destroyed, between the last century BC (Cesar against Pompey) and the second half of the third century AD (emperor Aurelian).

The first private libraries

By this time, there were also the first private libraries belonging to wealthy citizens or philosophical schools, such as Aristotle’s library (4th century BC), which, after the conquest of Athens by the Roman ruler Sulla in the last century BC, was brought to Rome as war booty, containing not only Aristotle’s writings but also works by other authors.

Already in the second century BC, Romans had plundered the library of the Macedonian ruler Perseus. However, since they were mostly interested in Greek culture and Greek writings, they donated or destroyed, for example, the Phoenician writings of the Carthaginians after the conquest. Thus, even without destruction through wars, further written records were lost for posterity.

The first Roman libraries

As indicated in the aforementioned examples, the first Roman libraries were initially war booty and only later emerged on imperial orders (in peace). The goal was not only the education of the people but also the creation of a symbol of Rome’s global power.

Augustus was the first Roman emperor to establish a public library in Rome: in 28 BC, he installed the Bibliotheca Palatina in the Temple of Apollo. Other Roman emperors established libraries in Rome and throughout the Roman Empire, such as Hadrian, who had a library set up in Athens. By the time of Constantine, the first Christian emperor (fourth century AD), there were twenty-eight public libraries available in Rome.

The remains of the Roman library of Celsus in Ephesus

The first libraries with books

With the adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the third and fourth centuries AD, the first book libraries emerged, into which the ancient libraries were gradually integrated. Christian libraries differed from earlier ones by the use of the parchment books – the aforementioned codices – instead of scrolls of papyrus. Many ancient texts were transferred to parchment during the integration, although some were eventually lost.

Libraries in the Middle Ages

1. Monastic libraries

The continuation of library systems and manuscript production was primarily due to the pioneer of monastic libraries, Cassiodorus. After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, he founded the Vivarium monastery in southern Italy in the 6th century AD and established, according to the rules in his Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, the collection and copying – and if necessary, translation – of religious and secular manuscripts, such as those from philosophers, rhetoricians and poets, as an explicit duty of the monks.

Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the Benedictine order, also prescribed daily study of texts for the monks of his order’s mother monastery in Monte Cassino.

This transformed the monastery from a mere place of contemplation into a place of education and marked the beginning of the medieval monastic library system, which transmitted the knowledge of antiquity into the later centuries. Early monastic libraries arose in locations such as St Gallen, Bobbio, Lorsch, Cluny, York, and Lindisfarne.

In addition to monastic libraries, four other types of libraries grew or spread in the Middle Ages:

2. Cathedral libraries

Rome served as the medieval equivalent of the Frankfurt Book Fair and was considered a book market throughout the Middle Ages, alongside university towns such as Bologna, with approximately 5,000 books, and Paris. Increasingly, bishoprics, as cultural centres, also possessed cathedral libraries for the education of clergy. The cathedral library in Freising was established in 739 AD. Shortly thereafter, in 802, Charlemagne issued a decree at the Synod of Aachen requiring churches and parishes to acquire a small number of books. For England, it is very hard to gauge the amount of libraries and books, owing to a lack of data before the Norman conquest, although monastic and cathedral book collections show an substantial increase during the late 11th and 12th centuries.

3. City libraries

The governance of cities in the Middle Ages required a certain level of knowledge and the ability to read and write. The necessary books for this were usually kept in the town hall and used by council staff, hence the term council library or city library was coined. Many books were donated to the council library by citizens.

4. University libraries

College libraries are those located within schools where professors and their students lived together, which eventually developed into libraries for individual faculties during the high or late Middle Ages, and further evolved into university libraries. Through the engagement of paid scribes, they grew relatively quickly.

5. Private libraries

With the legal and financial empowerment of the bourgeoisie in the late Middle Ages, the number of private collectors’ libraries increased, though they often resembled scholars’ libraries rather than purely private collections.

Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s private libraries from the 14th century became public libraries through princely patronage. The Herzog-August-Bibliothek, founded in 1572 in Wolfenbüttel, was one of the most famous princely book collections at the time of Duke Augustus’ death in 1666 and arguably the largest library in the world, with about 35,000 volumes containing 135,000 titles reflecting the entirety of medieval and early modern literature. After its reconstruction by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the early 18th century, it became the first independent secular library building in Europe.

More libraries, more books, more problems​

Until late in the Middle Ages, many people could not read or read well, yet there were plenty of visitors to medieval libraries. Naturally, these were mainly those who belonged to the community operating the library: clergy, students or wealthy citizens. Additionally, books could be consulted or even borrowed by known or recommended external individuals. Such borrowing was done via messengers, often over long distances. A book of equal value could serve as collateral.

Cataloguing

To keep track of the growing number of books, the following measures were implemented in the Middle Ages to label and catalogue the books:

• Noting the ownership at the beginning or end of the book: for a monastery, this was usually the name of the patron saint, while for private individuals it was name, profession, place of birth and residence, and later also included a coat of arms or, from the end of the 15th century, a corresponding ex libris – a slip of paper pasted into the book or an imprinted stamp with the necessary information.
• Sorting:
  • According to value or chronological order, as prescribed by Isidore of Seville, starting with the Bible and related writings, followed by texts of the Church Fathers, contemporary theologians, ancient authors, and finally the writings of the liberal arts.
  • According to the still valid principle of the tripartite catalogue, which was already used in St Gallen in the 9th century, namely location, author, and subject catalogue.
• Use of table catalogues: these were termed registrum or index until around 1500 and consisted of written parchment sheets on wood, affixed to the fronts of the book desks listing the books contained therein.
• Use of boxes with loan slips.

Book Theft

While all books were accounted for, their human users were not. Many times, these individuals did not adhere to borrowing prohibitions or return obligations. The example of Emperor Otto II (955-983), who took the finest books from the St Gallen monastery library and never returned them, proves that book theft was not a phenomenon limited to the lower classes – who, after all, neither could read nor had access to libraries. By the 15th century, professional manuscript hunters roamed the lands, taking the best pieces from monastery libraries using letters of recommendation from bishops or popes.

Peculiar Books from the High Middle Ages

A chained book: the chain was used to fix the book to the shelf or desk to prevent theft.

Not least to combat book theft, it was decided in the 13th century to chain books to the desks where they were laid out for easier access. Thus emerged the libri catenati, the chained books of the Middle Ages. The Benedictine monastery in Schaffhausen still possesses around forty chained books in its ministerial library.

There was also a chained-book equivalent for private individuals: today, we have e-books and a search engine on smartphones. Back then, there were the so-called girdle books, in which the world’s knowledge was preserved. These books were bound in leather and could be attached to a girdle, allowing the bourgeois population to carry books – primarily religious texts – with them at all times.

Libraries Then and Now

Medieval libraries varied in size from several dozen to two thousand volumes, with two to three hundred volumes considered well-equipped and five to six hundred volumes viewed as very well-stocked.

Typical public libraries in Western countries have media collections in the range of high five-figure numbers, while large libraries boast collections in the single- to double-digit million range. According to https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public-libs, the New York Public Library, for example, contains over a whopping 25 million ebooks, print, audio and video materials.

With such a wide selection, there is surely something for everyone. So, why not visit your local library again and browse through the analogue and digital offerings?

Further reading

Uwe Jochum: Geschichte der abendländischen Bibliotheken, Darmstadt (WBG) 2018
https://www.dwds.de/wb/Buch
https://www.buecher-wiki.de/index.php/BuecherWiki/Bibliotheksgeschichte
http://www.bibliothek-alexandria.de/sites/altebibliothek.html
https://www.hab.de/bibliothek/
https://www.catawiki.de/stories/4615-eine-vergessene-kunstform-die-geschichte-der-buchbinderei
https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de
https://bibliotheksportal.de/informationen/bibliothekslandschaft/oeffentliche-bibliotheken/
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521792745 (The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland)
https://libguides.ala.org/librarystatistics/largest-public-libs (Top 25 largest public libraries in the US)

Just like modern writers, their medieval counterparts also had a tried-and-tested process to produce a well-written and goodlooking manuscript – only that this process was a lot more complicated and lasted much longer than today. Join me in the scriptorium to discover the individual steps involved in producing a medieval manuscript or book, from the inspiration of the muse – or a divine angel – to the transcript copied for a wide audience!

Preparations for making a medieval manuscript

When we think of manuscripts, images of yellowed scrolls and monks equipped with a quil and hunched over books in dim candlelight tend to pop up. But the manuscript had already gone a long way by the time it arrived on someone’s desk, and it all started with the preparation of the writing material.

If “manuscript” comes from “manu scriptum,” meaning “handwritten,” then these preparations fall under “manufact,” from “manu factum,” meaning “handmade”, because in the absence of notebooks and laptops, the medieval artists first needed something on which they could let their thoughts flow: a writing surface.

Materials

So, first of all, depending on the size of the work to be written, they obtained a nice stack of parchment, either from the monastery’s own production or, especially from the 13th century onwards, from the medieval specialized shops of tanners or so-called parchmenters.

Parchment or Paper?

Until the late Middle Ages, parchment was the most popular writing material. It was obtained through an elaborate process from tanned animal hides (calf or sheep; Italy mainly used goat skins) and could be folded and sewn together after being written on – as long as the material didn’t dry out too much because then it would become hard as a rock and impossible to write on. If preserved carefully, though, it could last for millennia. Errors could simply be scraped away, and the corresponding spot would be overwritten – which could lead to copyists making (unwelcome) changes in the text of medieval manuscripts.

Paper did exist – it arrived in Europe from China through Muslim Spain in the 12th century – but it only became widespread from the 14th century, especially with the invention of the printing press towards the end of the Middle Ages. Since paper was made from linen rags – only from the 19th century was wood cellulose used – it was cheaper and easier to produce than parchment, although less durable. Additionally, paper was relatively forgery-proof since texts could not simply be changed by scraping away the writing, which made this material perfect for all kinds of legal documents.

Anything else?

Of course, making medieval manuscripts required additional supplies, such as ink, writing utensils, thread, leather and wood, but unlike parchment, these were readily available.For less valuable and/or official manuscripts, such as invoices and private documents, the remnants from book production or the less beautiful scraps of parchment from the edges of animal hides were sufficient. In everyday use, wax or slate tablets were also used, as in ancient times, which could be written on with a stylus and erased to be used again.

Pre-writing handiwork: folding, marking, sewing

Now, how did they turn the animal skin into a book format as we know it? Quite simply, through manual work, as follows:

1. Folding: First, a sheet of parchment was taken, cut to the appropriate size and shape, and folded in the middle. This resulted in a bifolium (= double sheet), i.e. four pages with a front side (recto) and a back side (verso). This nomenclature is the origin of the obscure citations from manuscripts, such as folio 1v = back side (verso) of the first page of a folded parchment. The formats for medieval manuscripts ranged from small, for girdle books carried on your belt, to huge, such as the Winchester Bible measuring 58 x 80 cm, the most beautiful and largest of the oversized Bibles produced for liturgical purposes in the 12th century in England and on the continent.
2. Marking: Lines were then marked on the pages, either with a knife or an awl and small holes, or with a ruler and a blunt stylus with black or, rarely, brown ink. In large scriptoria, this monotonous task was usually carried out by a junior scribe to free the experienced scribes for the actual work on the manuscript. The length of the lines depended not only on the format but also on the status and quality of the text: works such as Bibles and hagiographies were laid out with wide margins for illuminations and illustrations; less important works had narrow margins and consisted mostly of text.
3. Sewing: Four or six bifolia were then placed one inside the other and their backs stitched together to form booklets called quires.

Handwriting medieval manuscripts

Writing

Equipment

Only now did the author or scribe, as part of the monastic morning routine, begin the actual writing work. Armed with a pen, usually a goose quill, a penknife for sharpening the pen and erasing any writing errors, as well as black ink, usually made from ground oak galls mixed with iron salts and tannic acids, both male and female scribes pursued their craft, meticulously and artfully putting letters on the prepared parchment.

Duration

In addition to sufficient physical writing materials, medieval scribes needed one thing above all: time. This was not only due to the fact that the quills had to be constantly dipped in ink but also to the nature of the script being used: Each letter was written individually, and depending on the script style, the pen had to be lifted and repositioned multiple times.

An average scribe of the 10th to 12th centuries wrote or copied approximately 200 lines of text per day, which corresponds to 33 to 40 lines per hour. The introduction of cursive scripts in the late Middle Ages did not change much regarding the time required for manuscript production. For the transcription of Gregory the Great’s commentary on the Book of Job from the 15th century – if I’m correct, it’s this over 370-page specimen – it is estimated that it took approximately fifteen months to complete.

Rubrication

Once the text was finished, the scribe proceeded to highlight important parts of the text in red for easier reading and guidance. This was done by either the scribes themselves or by passing the task to a rubricator, who added headings and initials in red ink, or highlighted smaller initials with red strokes.

The rubricator or someone else also proofread the text for errors and corrected them, if necessary. Other elements, such as table of contents or marginal notes, were also added to the text at this point.

Illustration

The third and final step in creating the content of a medieval manuscript, if applicable, was the more or less elaborate illustration of the text through various types of decorated initials or pictures within the text. This typically involved one or more individuals drawing, gilding and colouring the illustrations.

Especially with Bibles, this step could significantly postpone the completion of a book – not by weeks or months, but by years – or even prevent it altogether. The illumination of the aforementioned Winchester Bible, for example, took fifteen years and shows the individual drawing, gilding and colouring stages. It also proves the collaboration of many different artists, each with their own “handwriting” when it comes to illustrations, working on the project over a long period of time. Incidentally, the reason why we can see the various stages at all, is that, even after fifteen years, the illustrations were never completed.

From medieval manuscript to book

If the finished medieval manuscript was a simple text such as an invoice, document or letter, it would now be “signed” or sealed and then put to its purpose. For longer and more elaborate texts, another manual step followed, in which several or many quires, as appropriate, were sewn or stitched together along their spines to form a codex, a book.

Organization

To ensure that the individual quires were bound in the correct order, scribes noted the first few words from the beginning of the first front page of the next quire on the last (back) page of the preceding quire. Alternatively, they numbered the last pages of each booklet in alphabetical order.

Binding

Once the quires were in the correct order, book covers made of oak or beech wood, sometimes leather, were then sewn onto them with thread. A layer of calf or goat leather, secured to the manuscript with parchment inserts on the inside, provided additional protection for the wooden book covers.

Decoration

High-quality texts could also have covers made of, for example, sealskin or be decorated with ivory, metalwork, gemstones, or pearls.

Who wrote medieval manuscripts?

We can now understand how a medieval manuscript or book was produced from a craft perspective, but a mystery still remains: To whom do we owe the content, the texts? Who are the people behind the letters? Who wrote the first version, and who ensured its dissemination?

Definitely not only the stereotypical monk in his lonely scriptorium, as some of the surviving documents may suggest, even though many manuscripts and pieces of evidence were lost, especially in England, through the dissolution and destruction of monasteries and their libraries by Henry VIII in the 16th century. Assigning a name to a text is also often difficult because many manuscripts are neither signed, titled, nor mentioned in other texts.

Not always men

Still, it is probable that women were equally diligent and sometimes highly sought-after scribes and copyists of medieval manuscripts. One such proof is, for example, a letter with a poem in it, dating from around the year 732 from Saint Lioba, a nun in the double Benedictine monastery of Wimborne in Dorset and later abbess of the monastery in Tauberbischofsheim, to her relative and English Benedictine monk Saint Boniface.

This not only makes her the first named English female poet, but also shows that nuns, who were generally highly educated anyway, did not only write letters, but also poetry – an art that she apparently learned from Abbess Eadburga, who was so skilled that Saint Boniface specifically asked her to produce a copy of the letters of St. Peter for him.

In some manuscripts where the author is unknown, the consistent use of feminine word endings points to the fact that they were most likely written by women. Unfortunately, a gender differentiation based on handwriting is impossible since the script styles used left little room for individual characteristics.

A study in March 2025 examined colophons in the Benedictine catalogue of a Swiss monastery, i. e. the words indicating names, places and/or time at the end of manuscripts and found that at least 1.1 % of texts were copied by a female scribe. This deceptively tiny number looks quite impressive when calculated in absolute numbers. Of approximately more than 10 million manuscripts estimated to have been written in the Latin West between 400 and 1500, some 750,000 have come down to us. Therefore, according to the results of the study, at least 110,000 manuscripts, of which approximately 8,000 might still exist today, were produced by female scribes.

Not always monastic

Parchment was extremely expensive, and writing was time-consuming, so the production of manuscripts was not only a matter of time but also a matter of money. However, as the development of a wealthy bourgeoisie advanced and the use of inexpensive paper as a writing material became more widespread, the late Middle Ages saw an increase in the available spare time and money that fostered manuscript production by people outside the monasteries. Furthermore, there was a growing demand for books and written materials, leading to an outsourcing of writing work from monasteries to specialized professional scribes.

Not always the actual author

No title, no name, no printed, unchangeable text, not to mention copyright? In those days, it was only a matter of time until manuscripts would be subject to changes, corrections, but also falsifications.

As early as the proofreading stage, a scribe could already scrape away and change letters and words in the first version of a text. Those copying the manuscript could even add or omit entire sentences and passages – there was no definitive, final and unchangeable printed text like today – which, in addition, might even be officially recorded and registered somewhere. Thus, subsequent scribes and editors had free rein in dealing with the text and could copy, edit, change, transform, shorten, and/or supplement it with more or less useful and related material as they saw fit for their purposes and needs.

Depending on the changes made, the texts selected, and how they were combined – with a manuscript composed of individual booklets, it was easy enough to sneak in an additional sheet of parchment with completely different texts – this could deeply affect the meaning of the original text or the way it was intended to be understood or was understood.

Marie de France, the first named vernacular poet of France, is quite aware of this danger to her texts and tries everything to ensure her texts are read and understood correctly. So the question of who wrote medieval manuscripts often also entails another question, namely whether what we’re reading is indeed what the author originally intended to say.

Further reading

Mary Wellesley: Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers
Mittelalterliche Geschichte: Kodikologie: Schriftträger
Mittelalterliche Geschichte: Kodikologie: Buchherstellung
British Library: A rough guide to making a manuscript
Medievalists.net: Seven videos on making medieval manuscripts
Link to the full study: “How many medieval and early modern manuscripts were copied by female scribes? A bibliometric analysis based on colophons“