History Book Review: The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles

The book consists of seven chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion. The chapters are: 1. The Beginnings, 2. Monasticism and Manuscript Production in the West, 500-1050, 3. Locus Scribendi - The Place of Writing, 4. Material World: Parchment and Ink, 5. Illumination and Painting, 6. The Twelfth-Century Renaissance, and 7. The End of the Scriptorium. The book ends with a short glossary, references, further reading, and photo acknowledgements.

Each chapter starts with a fictional first person account of a worker detailing some aspect of manuscript creation. I’m not usually a fan of this kind of thing, but here it helped put me into the correct mindset that I was dealing with a different time and place, and to really let me experience that world for a moment.

The book provides a fantastic overview of how manuscripts changed over the centuries. The author mentions different fonts and decorative elements (various types of pen flourishes, illustration styles, etc). She goes into a lot of detail for how inks and parchment were made (and she’s tried making some herself, which she has documented on her Teaching Manuscripts website and blog). 

The book has a decent number of photos, but given the highly visible nature of the topic, there are more referenced than have been included, which you can look up on your own. Here’s where the ebook is an advantage, as I could cut and paste the references straight into my browser to see the manuscript being discussed. There were a lot of these, so I didn’t look them all up, only ones with elements I was interested in, or wanted the visual to understand the text better. Unfortunately, occasionally the manuscript wasn’t digitized, so unless wikipedia or an article brought up the specific image mentioned in the text, I was out of luck seeing it (ex: Lincoln Cathedral MS 147, fol. 15v. I found a single cropped image of another page on a Lincoln University article via google but not the one referenced). Often the author will give more than one reference though, so if one image isn’t searchable another one likely is.

The language is very clear, making this an enjoyable read. The breadth of information is wonderful. If you’re interested in manuscript production, medieval inks, and how manuscripts changed over time, this is a great resource.

Book Review: Towards a Global Middle Ages Edited by Bryan C. Keene

Pros: essays on a wide range of places and periods

Cons: dense prose, some essays a challenge to read

The book begins with a prologue followed by an introduction. The introduction starts with highly academic prose in its explanation of why it’s important to broaden the field of medieval studies into a global discussion, acknowledging that the field has centred heavily on Europe and ignored the many points of contact (via trade, religion, war, etc.) with nations outside Europe. The editor points out that the world has always been global, and at a time when nationalists and white supremacists are turning history into polemics on segregation it’s past time medievalists broadened their studies to show how interconnected peoples of the past truly were. He then gives short descriptions about manuscript traditions throughout the world during this period.

This is followed by a quick time line of the items mentioned in the essays to follow. The book is separated into four parts, each with an introductory essay: Glimpsing a Global Middle Ages (5 essays and 1 case study), The Intermediality of “the book”: Bound, Rolled, and Folded Textual Objects (3 essays and 2 case studies), Identity: Finding One’s Place in the Medieval World (3 essays and 3 case studies), and Itineraries from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Travel, Circulation, and Exchange (3 essays and 3 case studies). The book ends with an Epilogue that goes over the importance of museums in creating collections and exhibitions that foster a more global outlook.

This is a book for academics. While the case studies are accessible to a wider audience, most of the essays are not. I struggled through several of them due to dense prose. Having said that, the struggle was worth it as I learned quite a lot about the challenges of including certain areas of the world in a medieval discourse (like how most artifacts containing writing as well as wooden carvings in tropical climates have decomposed, making it difficult to study pre-modern eras). I loved that the essays spoke of wildly different areas including Ethiopia, China, India, and Mexico.

Several of the case studies mentioned a lot of interesting details and I finished the book with the intention of looking up several of the manuscripts mentioned (the end notes give web addresses if they’ve been digitized).

The standouts for me were the case study: “Traveling Medicine: Medieval Ethiopian Amulet Scrolls and Practitioners’ Handbooks” by Eyob Derillo and the essay by Sylvie Merian, “Reproducing the Resurrection: From European Prints to Armenian Manuscripts”, which both dealt with topics I find fascinating.

The globalization of medieval studies is important and it’s great seeing a collection that brings researchers from different disciplines together. This is a challenging book to read, but worth the effort you put in.