A Companion to the History of the Book (37 page)

Dante had likewise argued that the vernacular must be “cardinal” and “curial”: that is, it must be consistent enough in its spelling and syntax to be fit for legal purposes. In Spain and France by 1250 the vernacular was fast supplanting Latin as the language of legal documents and hence of treatises on law, like Philippe de Beaumanoir’s
Coutumes de Beauvaisis
(completed in 1283) which became a model for other books of customary law in France. Written law in the vernacular encouraged the growth of a non-clerical legal profession. The
Sachsenspiegel
(dating from the 1220s) by Eike von Repgow had a comparable wide success, where it was adapted and translated into Swabian and other variations of German. It was a systemization of Saxon law that was made user-friendly by being illustrated as well as being in the vernacular. For example, a widow could see depicted alongside the text on the page what she was entitled to on the death of her husband: her marriage chest, books, sheep and poultry, shears, cloth, bed and bed linen, and so on. This contrasts with the English lawbook put together by the judge Henry de Bracton at much the same time. It is a scholastic
summa
written in Latin and addressed to his fellow judges rather than the general public. Legal texts begin to be written in French (instead of Latin) in England in the 1250s, but English was not used for legal purposes until the fifteenth century or later.

As a consequence of the Norman Conquest, writing in English was not made illustrious and courtly (in Dante’s terms) until Chaucer achieved this at the end of the fourteenth century. The Ellesmere manuscript of the
Canterbury Tales
celebrates this, as does John Shirley’s copy (dating from 1400) of
Troilus and Criseyde.
This shows Chaucer or a narrator reading to an aristocratic audience, in which ladies are prominent, in a fairytale landscape of rocks, golden sky, trees, and a castle. The Chaucerian narrator stands in a red and gold pulpit; there is not a cleric in sight. At much the same time, the poet Thomas Hoccleve had Chaucer depicted in his manuscript in a very high-quality portrait. Deluxe editions and portraits were intended to make the new vernacular authors the equals of the Greeks and Romans.

The most impressive series of portraits of medieval vernacular authors are those in the Codex Manesse in Heidelberg. This magnificent book was started by Rüdiger Manesse of Zürich around 1300. It includes 137 authors and over five thousand poems and songs. The greatest names in German medieval literature are there: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strasburg, Walter von der Vogelweide. Many of the authors are depicted as knights with their personal heraldic shields and crested helmets. The pioneer of the new German, Hartmann van Aue, rides out with his shield, banner, and surcoat displaying white eagle heads on a dark blue ground. The writers of chivalric romances and love songs are thus depicted as if they were actors in their own stories. The idea of celebrating German writers as chivalric heroes may have had particular appeal in Zürich because the city stands at the intersection of the German-speaking world with its French and Italian competitors. The Codex Manesse demonstrated the richness of German culture.

Books of Theology and Law

The continuing dominance of the illuminated manuscript carried with it the success of the codex format as the principal matrix in which texts were made and circulated. Its pre-eminence is displayed at Chartres Cathedral in the sculpture of Christ at the south door (this figure, now known as Christ the Teacher, dates from the 1200s). He holds a large book whose ornamented leather binding is visible. The bindings of medieval books have mostly been destroyed. A notable survival of a plain binding is that of the de Brailes Book of Hours now in the British Library (Donovan 1991: 31). Around the Scriptures, theologians and law professors built up a body of new learning which took the form of commentaries and collections of citations. In manuscript culture, these texts had a tendency to expand and to spread out over the page in the form of glosses, as readers and commentators added more material in the margins and between the lines.

The basic treatise on canon law, the
Decretum,
created by the Bolognese master Gratian around 1140, is the best example of this. His original book was a concise analysis of the sources or “canons” of ecclesiastical law. It found such favor with readers, however, that within twenty years many more sources were added and the papacy gave it official authority. Around 1210, Johannes Teutonicus added a massive paragraph-by-paragraph commentary, which became known as the Ordinary Gloss. This was supplemented in its turn, along with additional volumes of papal rulings (the Decretals) in 1235. The result was a multivolume text in which Gratian’s original work was overlaid by a patchwork of glosses so bewildering that law students required years of study to understand them. The number of texts that a canon lawyer needed to know in 1300 had increased by perhaps as much as an hundredfold compared with 1100. As no individual could know so much, lawyers had to specialize and rely on formal qualifications to impress their clients. The legal profession and professional books grew together out of the multiplication of texts.

Much the same is true of theological books. Before 1100, there was already a massive corpus of material to read, as there were the writings of the Church Fathers as well as the Scriptures themselves. The works of St. Augustine stood in pride of place and his books remain the most frequently copied of the Church Fathers throughout the Middle Ages. When Peter Abelard came as a student to Paris in 1100, his masters, William of Champeaux and Anselm of Laon, were famed for their lectures on logic and divinity which students flocked to hear from all over western Europe. These masters do not seem to have written treatises of their own, as they depended on attracting students to their schools through their oral lectures. However, summarized statements (called “sentences”) of these masters circulated among students. Around 1120, an anthology was made of these entitled
Liber pancrisis
(meaning the “all-gold book”). This contained “sentences” of the Church Fathers matched by those of the “modern masters,” by which was meant William of Champeaux, Anselm of Laon, and the canon lawyer Ivo of Chartres. Once “modern masters” were given prestige equal to that of the Church Fathers, the way was open for the proliferation of texts, and university stationers began to provide for this by supplying copies of lectures piece by piece. New expositions of theology therefore established themselves, of which the most successful were Peter Lombard’s
Books of Sentences
dating from the 1150s.

Abelard in the 1120s had commented in
Sic et non
(Yes and No) on the overwhelming mass of words that students had to cope with; a century later, this had increased enormously. By the fifteenth century, Peter Lombard’s
Sentences
was symbolically depicted as topping a high tower of knowledge, with the ancient Greeks and Romans (Aristotle and Cicero) below him, and grammar (or beginner’s Latin) at the foundation of everything. Abelard had called his own doctrinal treatise
Theologia
(Theology), the first use of this Greek term as a book title. (In manuscript culture not all books were given titles. Abelard gave provocative titles to his books in order to emphasize the importance of his work.) He was twice condemned as a heretic and his books were ordered by the pope to be burned wherever they might be found. However, at least one cardinal in Rome held on to his copies of Abelard and some of his works continued to be copied into the thirteenth century and beyond. Banning books seems to have been no easier to enforce in manuscript culture than in print culture, though the public burning of heretical books was quite common. The books of Wyclif and Huss have likewise survived despite being condemned. Even the preachers’ pocket-books of the Cathar and Waldensian heretics have survived. A group of very small Waldensian books, translating the Scriptures into Occitan, exist from around 1500. Possibly heretics’ books were made very small in order to conceal them.

In the course of the thirteenth century, theology and the interpretation of Scripture came to be dominated by the Dominican Friars. They were the “hounds of the Lord”
{Domini canes)
who led the papal Inquisition against heretics and aimed to control the written word. Friars differed from monks, as they worked in smaller units which were more centralized and more focused on mission. They needed numerous books, primarily for purposes of consultation and reference rather than for liturgical use. They disseminated the single-volume copies of the Bible that were being produced in Paris. By using very fine parchment and miniature script, the scribal workshops of thirteenth-century Paris produced texts the size of pocket-books. These Bibles usually have colored initials, in blue and red for example, but they are not lavishly illuminated manuscripts. The Friars introduced alphabetical indexing, which in its turn demanded consistent numbering of the books and chapters of the Bible. By 1239, the Dominicans in Paris had an alphabetical concordance of the Bible. By 1300, the Franciscan Friars in England were making a union catalogue of books in more than 180 ecclesiastical libraries. They gained access to the most exclusive and ancient cathedral and monastic libraries, such as Canterbury and St. Albans, and treated the books they found in them as so many units of information. In the Rule of St. Benedict, a monk had been allocated a single book to mull over for a whole year, now the Friars were demanding immediate information from many books so that they could go out and preach.

Round the Chapter House of the Dominicans at Treviso (north of Venice) there are imaginary portraits of the leading men of the order, all of whom are shown reading or writing. It is as if the Chapter House is a gigantic scriptorium with the Dominican scholars laboring at their books in the gallery. This painting was done in 1352 by Tomaso of Modena. To make the portraits look realistic, he recorded a wide range of readers’ and writers’ actions, even though each scholar sits at an identical desk with a bookshelf above it. Tomaso’s pictures emphasize that the Friars were capable of writing their own books like professional scribes. Thomas Aquinas (who was a Dominican) was exceptional in having a secretary with him day and night. According to his hagiography, while he was having dinner with St. Louis, king of France, he suddenly called on Brother Reginald to get up and write at his dictation another paragraph of the
Summa theologiae.
Among the Dominicans portrayed at Treviso is Hugh of St. Cher (d. 1263), who had taught theology in Paris like Aquinas. Hugh is shown wearing reading spectacles. These would have been familiar to Tomaso the painter, as they were a north Italian invention probably of the late thirteenth century, but they would not have been used a century earlier when Hugh of St. Cher was teaching in Paris. By the fifteenth century, reading spectacles were quite common.
The Book of Margery Kempe
describes in 1436 how the priest, who was writing for her, tried a pair of spectacles which made his eyesight worse. As Margery lived at the port of King’s Lynn, these spectacles had probably been imported from Germany.

Making Personal Books

In manuscript culture, individuals might make books of their own, either by writing them themselves or employing scribes. Even when a person knew how to write, it might be difficult to get hold of parchment, pen, and ink. (In the case of Margery Kempe, however, she had considerable difficulties finding anyone capable or willing to write down her spiritual experiences.) The sketchbook of the artist Villard de Honnecourt dating from 1200 serves as a how-to-do manual as well as a personal record. It has explanations (in French) for sixty-six pages of drawings which serve as models: they show, for example, how to depict a lion from the front, or design the apse of a church, or make a crane or a siege catapult. Likewise from the thirteenth century is Richard Hotot’s estate book, which was probably intended as a how-to-do book for his heirs. He was a middling Northamptonshire landowner who practiced law in London, and compiled a list of his tenants. What is unusual about his book is that he used his own system of signs to make a series of footnotes on the pages.

The chronicle of Matthew Paris, written between 1235 and 1258, can likewise be understood as a personal book, as he did his own drawings as well as writing and emending the text himself. Like the Codex Manesse, he used heraldry as an integral part of his design. When a great man died, Matthew showed his coat of arms reversed in the margin; if he died shamefully, the shield is shown shattered. From fourteenth-century Florence come the earliest “secret books”
(libri segreti)
of Italian merchants in which the owner notes details of his family, his business partners, his finances, and occasionally his hopes and fears, as if writing gives a secure point of reference for the future. In London between 1360 and 1375 James le Palmer compiled his own alphabetical encyclopedia, with illuminated initials of novel design, entitled
Omne bonum
(Everything Good). The strangest books are those of Opicinus de Canistris, who found favor with Pope John XXII in the 1320s. He identified the geography of Europe with his own body: rheumatic aches signified the strife of Germany and France; Britain represented the pain of purgatory. Opicinus’ books, with their maps and diagrams, are like a parody of a scholastic treatise, although they were meant in all seriousness.

Interacting with books was theoretically the monopoly of the clergy because they alone were officially literate. Their privileges were as great in the period after 1100 as they had been before, and they were reinforced by the energy of the Friars. Nevertheless, after 1100 they no longer had as exclusive a control over books as they had formerly claimed. In any century there had always been some literate lay men and women among the aristocracy, but from the twelfth century this became more general. After 1100, social class is of more significance in literacy than whether a person is technically clerical or lay. Lords and ladies had books in their homes. Guy de Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, possessed at least forty books in 1306, including the Bible, saints’ lives, romances and histories, a book of physic and another of surgery, a child’s reading primer, and an encyclopedia. Most of these books were in French, the language of the English aristocracy until the fifteenth century.