Marginalia

Medieval manuscripts, pre-printing press, naturally were all hand written and hand illustrated. Sometimes someone with artistic ability would just take an initial letter and make it fancy.

 

But often, for a high-class book, there would be actual illustrations. Most of these illustrations were something to do with the text itself. So the initial letter of one of the prophetic books of the Bible (like Isaiah for example) might include both the letter itself and a picture of a prophet with his long beard.

This wasn't enough for some illuminators (as they were called, the artists illustrating a book). They would do their appropriate illustrations, but then they would add things in the margins that might have nothing to do with the actual text. Although they would usually refrain if illuminating an actual Bible, other books were not off-limits to marginalia.

These marginal illustrations were often witty, sometimes bawdy.  They might be a commentary on the society of their time. Rabbits frequently featured, portrayed for example as suited up in armor and jousting with other rabbits. Strange hybrid creatures sometimes appeared. Sometimes they were subtle or not so subtle digs at those in authority.

 

In the above image, a fox, wearing a bishop's mitre and carrying a bishop's staff, is preaching to his flock, quite literally a flock of birds, geese, swans, and other fowl that, presumably, the fox has intentions of eating. The birds seem quite attentive. There's a Dutch proverb that goes something like, "Watch your chickens when the fox preaches the gospel." A good warning indeed.

(The images above are, respectively, the second cartulary of Montier-en-Der from the thirteenth century, Archives de la Haute-Marne, 7 H 2; and from the fourteenth century, British Library Royal MS 10 E IV.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

 

Illuminated Manuscripts

 "Illuminated."  It means lit up, flooded with light.  So what's an illuminated manuscript, other than one sitting on your desk with a bright desk lamp?

Actually it means something somewhat different.  A medieval illuminated manuscript is one with drawings and paintings in it.  Because, you remember, the printing press was only invented at the end of the Middle Ages, medieval books were all unique productions.  They were copied by hand, mostly on parchment before the fourteenth century, and they were special and valuable.  Drawings and other images made them even more special.

 For something like a Bible, it was considered appropriate to be especially prolific with images.  One of the most common forms of illumination was to make the initial letter of a section into a little picture.  This is a capital D (for Deus, God) from a ninth-century book of Psalms, done at the monastery of Corbie (eastern France).

 Full page illustrations were also found, though less commonly.  Sometimes (like here) they would be in a few subdued colors, but other times they would be done in vivid colors.  Usually the copying of the text and the drawing of the illuminations would be done separately, by different people.  There are plenty of medieval manuscripts where the person who was supposed to be drawing the fancy initials started but then never got back to the project, because there are big blanks where an illuminated initial is supposed to be.

Those doing the illuminations seem sometimes to have gotten bored with their careful, devout images and started drawing little scenes in the margins, demons, cats, people with faces in unusual parts of their anatomy, horses, or whatever took their fancy.  Usually these do not show up in Bibles, but they were common in illuminated books of history and the like.

When the Middle Ages became popular and romantic in the nineteenth century, wealthy people started collecting illuminated initials.  They would even have scrapbooks, where they would carefully cut an especially nice initial out of a medieval manuscript and paste it into their scrapbook, then toss the now-mutilated piece of parchment.  This makes medievalists' stomachs hurt just to think about it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval manuscripts and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

The Messiah

Last weekend we went to a terrific performance of Handel's "Messiah" (not a singalong version).  The program had all the words with their sources.  Although officially the piece is about the birth of Jesus (which is why it's usually played at Christmas), most of the words are from the Old Testament, not the New.

This is because the idea of a Messiah did not start with Christianity.  The Jews had been looking forward to the coming of a Messiah for at least half a millennium before a decree went out from Caesar Augustus.  The so-called Old Testament prophets (Isaiah gets most of the attention, along with Jeremiah and Zechariah, plus a few others) wrote around the time of the "Babylonian captivity," when the Babylonians captured the city of Jerusalem and took a lot of Jews back home as slaves.  (The Jews got back to Jerusalem a generation or so later, after the Babylonians were in turn attacked by the Persians, but that's another story.)

The prophets wrote about how the Jews had brought it all on themselves through their sin and turning from God but also offered hope:  a Messiah would come, someone who would bring about peace and prosperity.  Indeed, there is some debate among scholars whether the book of Isaiah was written by one or two (or more) authors, the despairing, denouncing Isaiah and the hopeful Isaiah.

Jewish hopes for a Messiah continued for the next 2500 years--indeed until now.  During the life of Jesus, many Jews had a more specific hope, that the Messiah would drive the Romans out of their land.  The group called the Zealots were especially eager to give the Romans a violent shove.  The Romans heard Jesus being hailed as the Messiah and decided he was a Zealot and put him to death as a traitor, one working against the Roman state.  (He wasn't, but that's also another story.)

One version of prophecies of the Messiah was that the Messiah indeed appears every generation, but if the people are not ready--not prepared to overcome their sinful ways--they will kill him.  That's why there's a lot in the Old Testament about the Suffering Servant, the innocent man on whom the stiff-necked people turn.  When Jesus was put to death, it appeared to be one more example of a Messiah the people rejected.

But in this case, his followers said that he had come back from death.  This was totally different.  Paul, the person who essentially started Christianity as its own religion (not just a sect of Judaism), understandably found this extremely significant.  His letters, the earliest part of the New Testament, are all about this.  "As in Adam all shall die, so in Christ shall all be made alive."  For Paul, the Messiah was to be understood not only as bringing about peace and prosperity, beating swords into plowshares and the like, but as bringing about triumph over death.

But He was still supposed to be the Messiah prophesied by the Jews centuries earlier.  The Book of Matthew in the New Testament is addressed to a Jewish audience, explaining how Jesus's birth, life, and death fulfilled all the prophecies.  The word 'messiah' by the way is from the Hebrew, which in the Greek in which the New Testament is written became the 'Christos,' the 'anointed one.'  (You didn't think Christ was a last name, did you?  Good.  I didn't think so.)

Once it was determined that Christians would adopt the Jewish Bible as their Old Testament (on which see more here), it became quite easy to interpret all Old Testament references to a Messiah as leading straight to Jesus Christ.  For medieval theologians, looking at a Bible that said all sorts of different contradictory things (not surprising, as it was written over a thousand-year period for a great variety of purposes), the goal was the interpret it all so that it all made sense, making a single, coherent statement.  It was like working with the universe's most complex puzzle, further complicated because not only did they have to make all the different parts of the Bible make sense, but they had to deal with earlier theologians, popes, and councils and their version of what it all meant.

Although the letters of Paul suggest that the glorious new world that the Messiah was supposed to bring in was thought to be imminent during his time, as the years and centuries went by the world we know continued to be as painful and stubborn as ever.  Quickly the coming of the Messiah (second coming in fact) and His glorious time of peace was put off further and further into the future, indeed into the time when death would be overcome, as He had already demonstrated possible.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more about medieval Christianity and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

The Bible in the Middle Ages

As I noted in my previous post, the western medieval Bible was in Latin, having been translated from the Greek by Saint Jerome around the year 400 so that people in the western Roman Empire could more easily read it.  This meant that, throughout the Middle Ages, Latin remained both the language of government (following the Roman model) and the language of religion.

It also meant that the Latin church and the Greek Orthodox church, which continued to read the Bible in Greek, decided that the other guys did not understand the Bible properly at all.

There never was a single "original" Bible from which all others were copied.  The different sections, or books as they are called, presumably each had an original version when they were first written, but different congregations over time adopted slightly different collections of books and put them together slightly differently.

Add to this the fact that, a thousand years and more before the printing press, everything was hand-copied and thus never precisely alike, and it's easy to see why there was variation.  This worried medieval people.  Because the Bible was supposed to be God's word, they didn't think that a lot of variety was appropriate.

Around the year 800 Alcuin, the head of the school at Charlemagne's court, decided to prepare a definitive Bible.  He and those working with him looked at all the oldest Bibles they could find, comparing them line by line, trying to determine when there was a variant which was the "real" reading. This is the approach modern scholars still take when trying to determine the original or most accurate version of a text.

Then Alcuin had the whole Bible carefully copied out in the "corrected" form, using a new, tidy type of handwriting, called Caroline miniscule.  It looks a whole lot like modern printing, for the excellent reason that modern printing is based on it.  Other churches around Charlemagne's empire were urged to come, look at the Alcuin Bible, and make careful copies of their own of this definitive text.

The Bible in the Middle Ages, like now, was an extremely popular book, with an enormous number of copies made.  Because it is so long, it never existed in a single volume, but rather would be broken up into several volumes.  A volume just of the Psalms, or just of the Gospels, was very common.

Anyone learning Latin (which had separated itself off from Old French, Old Italian, etc. by the ninth century) would do so in large part by studying the Bible.  This meant that Jerome's vocabulary and syntax became the standard for medieval Latin.  Churchmen essentially memorized large parts of the Bible.  Monks would sing their way through the whole Psalter in a week or so, then start over.  Biblical turns of phrase peppered their writings, not necessarily direct quotes but references to biblical ideas.

At the schools and developing universities, the Bible was a major source of study.  No one read the Bible literally, or at least not just literally.  There was far too much in it, from Jewish dietary laws to Jesus's suggestion that his followers needed to give up all their possessions and wander barefoot around the Sea of Galilee, that people who considered themselves good Christians did not adhere to.

Rather, the Bible was to be read at four levels, literally to start, then morally (seeing what sort of message was conveyed), allegorically (so that the love poems that make up the Song of Solomon were interpreted as meaning Christ's love for His church), and anagogically, the last meaning that the Old Testament prefigured the New, so that Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac was considered to refer to God's sacrifice of His only son.

Many, many people wrote Bible commentaries.  In the twelfth century, "glossed" Bibles became common, where the Bible text was written in large letters in the center of the page, and commentary on each verse was written in the margins, or even between the lines, in a much smaller hand.  Often there would be strips of commentary down the side, here is what Augustine had to say, here's what Jerome said, here's what Bede said, and so on.  These glosses became fairly standardized, but again, no two volumes were exactly the same.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Medieval Books

Books as we know them (rectangular pieces of paper, attached along one edge, ready to be read by turning the pages) first appeared during the Roman Empire.  In the ancient world, the standard had been the scroll, a continuous sheet of writing material that could be rolled and unrolled as one read.

(There used to be a hilarious video on YouTube, "medieval help desk," originating in Scandinavia, showing a monk upset because he couldn't figure out how to work a book, rather than a scroll.)

Medieval books were normally made of parchment.  Parchment is sheep skin, carefully treated and bleached until it looks and feels like what we would call heavy paper.  Parchment lasts very well across the centuries; I have seen and handled parchment over 1200 years old.  As long as one's hands are clean, the oil in one's fingers is actually good for the parchment.  Ink was made of a mix of oak gall and lamp black.  For most of the Middle Ages, ink was more brown than black, though late medieval Italy was proud of its dark black ink.

All books were copied by hand, because the printing press was not invented until the fifteenth century, at the end of the Middle Ages.  This meant that no two books were exactly alike.  Because parchment is fairly thick, big books (like the Bible) were generally done in several volumes.  Between the cost of the parchment and the slowness of copying, books were very valuable.  Copying books was one of the works that monks undertook.  A monastery with a very big library might have a hundred books.  Books were regularly borrowed and handed around.

For most of the Middle Ages, most books were in Latin.  A library might include various volumes of the Bible, many works of theology by the Church Fathers, philosophical works from classical antiquity, histories (Bede was quite popular), and collections of charters all copied into a single book.  The latter was called a cartulary.  Above is an image of a thirteenth-century cartulary.

Starting in the twelfth century, works of popular fiction, written in the vernacular (that is, Old French, Middle High German, and the like), might also be found in a library.

Paper was invented by the Arabs and first appeared in southern France in the thirteenth century.  But it did not become common until the fourteenth century.  Then, however, it was widely adopted.  Medieval paper was "all rag content," much higher quality than modern wood-pulp paper.  Late medieval paper is often in better condition than a twenty-year-old modern paperback.

Because paper was much cheaper and easier to produce than parchment, the price of books went down.  Scribes also became sloppier, often writing in cursive rather than the carefully printed "book hands" of much of the Middle Ages.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014