Paper

 We take paper for granted.  It's all around us, piling up on the desk or table (or chairs or floor...) in the form of memos, magazines, books, and random jottings.  We also use paper for cleaning, that is paper towels and bathroom tissue, to say nothing of cardboard boxes.  Remember when computers promised we would soon have a "paperless office"?  Yeah, like that's going to happen.  But medieval people did not have paper before the thirteenth century.

The word paper derives from papyrus, but it's actually quite different.  Papyrus, used in the ancient Roman empire, is made from papyrus reeds, which are sticky on the inside, slit and pressed together.  The reeds grow along the Nile.  With the breakdown of Roman trade routes and the rise of Islam (sixth-seventh centuries), the West stopped having easy access to papyrus and went over exclusively to parchment, except for the popes, who kept using their carefully hoarded store of papyrus until the eleventh century.  Parchment is made from thin, carefully prepared animal skins (generally sheep).  Parchment had been around for centuries but had not been used for letters or records for the most part, really only being used if something had to be rolled (like a scroll).  It was more expansive than papyrus had been and was considered less elegant.  But parchment survives much better in Europe's damp climate than does papyrus, which can disintegrate when wet.

Parchment remained expensive in the Middle Ages, but its durability means that medieval books and legal documents written on it still exist, unless burned or chewed by rats or otherwise destroyed.

For quick jottings and for writing rough drafts, medieval people used wax tablets and a stylus.  Because parchment was expensive, and all books had to be copied by hand, only the wealthy (including churches) could afford them.  It wasn't worth learning to read for most of the population.

Enter paper.  Paper is made from cellulose fibers, from wood or rags (cotton or linen especially).  The fibers are boiled out (with chemicals), drained across a mesh, then pressed together and dried.  The process was invented in China in the second century AD and spread to the Muslim world in the eighth or ninth century.  Western Europe learned it from the Arabs in the thirteenth century, and by the fourteenth century the use of paper, made from linen or cotton fibers, was widespread.

Because paper was so much cheaper than parchment, books became substantially less expensive.  It became worth it to be literate, because it was easier to own something worth reading.  This especially was true with the fifteenth-century invention of the printing press.  Those writing on paper tended to be much sloppier than their predecessors writing on parchment, when they carefully wrote each letter.  The high rag paper of the late Middle Ages has stood up very well over the centuries, but sometimes the handwriting has one scratching one's head, unlike the neat eleventh- and twelfth-century hands.

The production of rag paper became industrialized fairly quickly.  It stayed essentially the same until the nineteenth century, when wood pulp began to be used for paper.  It was even cheaper than rag paper and was cranked out in paper mills all over the country.  Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century process of making wood pulp paper was very acidic, and over the decades the paper started to disintegrate.  An old paperback you might find at the back of a shelf is probably more likely to fall apart than a fourteenth-century account book.  (In recent decades lower acid ways of making paper have been developed.)

With the advent of wood pulp paper, meanwhile, paper became so cheap that it could be used for throwaways, tissue, paper towels, sanitary products, and the like.  For these medieval people used rags (or handkerchiefs) which would then have to be washed.

Paper mills today recycle a lot of paper, which means fewer pine trees have to be cut down, but they understandably don't want used tissue.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Lapis lazuli

Medieval artists loved brilliant blue.  Stained glass windows included exquisite blue glass (due to trace amounts of copper and other minerals), and manuscript illustrations (called illumination) often included bright blue color.  The Madonna, for example, was routinely shown dressed in blue.

The problem for manuscript illumination was getting a pigment that would make that brilliant blue.  The only way they could do it at that time was to use lapis lazuli, a mineral mined in just one area of Afghanistan.  When ground up, this mineral would produce a color called ultramarine.  It was highly sought after in western Europe, meaning it had to be traded over several thousand miles.

Obviously this was far too expensive to use in other than very small amounts.  Clothing, for example, even expensive luxury clothing, could not be colored ultramarine.  Instead the best medieval people could manage for their clothes was indigo, dark blue, which could be made from certain plants.

Even though lapis lazuli was as valuable as gold, it was extremely desirable.  Recently archaeological excavations at a former nunnery at Dalheim, in Germany, has discovered miniscule traces of lapis lazuli on the teeth of a woman's skeleton.  (Her teeth actually look pretty good--no cavities!)

It is quite clear where the traces came from.  The nunnery, like most religious houses, copied and illuminated books.  Religious books would have luxurious illustrations that required bright blue.  An eleventh-century nun worked on a book's illustrations, doubtless bending close over the very small image she was creating, and kept licking her brush to give it a narrow point as she delicately painted the blue bits.  Tiny flecks of lapis lazuli became embedded in the plaque on her teeth, where she would not have noticed them (the modern archaeologists looked at her teeth with a microscope).

The nunnery of Dalheim and its manuscripts were destroyed long ago, probably during the Thirty Years War in the sixteenth century.  The foundations of its small church and the skeletons in its cemetery are about all that remain.  It is indicative of how little we know about the Middle Ages, in spite of everyone's best efforts.

This case also is suggestive of the activities of medieval women.  It used to be thought that all women, even nuns, were passive and uneducated, and that all art and writing was done by men.  This is now known to be false, and the example of the eleventh-century nun (it's pretty easy to tell if a skeleton is a man or a woman) is a further indication of the artistry of medieval women.  It's too bad that we will never now be able to see the manuscript she was working on.

The discovery of the flecks of blue on the skeletal teeth was carried out as part of the larger project Science of the Human Past.  Here's the link to a news article about the discovery.

(For any readers just starting to look at my blog now, I've put in links above to a lot of other entries you may find of interest.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

"Stuff" in the Middle Ages

Most people reading this blog probably own way too much "stuff," a problem medieval people did not have.  Our many cheap and serviceable possessions are a product of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

In an earlier post I discussed medieval clothing.  Most people in the Middle Ages (and for that matter up through the eighteenth century) would have had two outfits, one to wear and one to wash.  Washing of course was reserved until something was good and dirty; none of this tossing it into the washer after one wearing.  The overstuffed closets of many of us are only possible because of industrial looms, sewing machines, and cheap overseas labor.

One of the biggest causes of clutter in today's house (looking at my own office as I type) is too much paper.  We buy books, we get magazines and catalogues, we get mail, we print out interesting articles, we keep journals, we make notes, we get receipts.  This of course was not a problem for medieval people.

Paper didn't really exist; it first appears along the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century, but only became at all common in the fourteenth.  Without paper, everything was written on parchment, which requires starting with a sheep and doing a whole lot of processing.  Even medieval paper, being rag-based and made by hand, was far more expensive than modern paper, even if cheaper than parchment.

Everything was written by hand until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and even then most things were handwritten.  Books as a result were very expensive, plus you had to know how to read, which left out three-quarters of the population (or more).  A good-sized library might have a few dozen books, and this would not be a personal library but one belonging to a church.  A hundred books constituted a truly large library.  Most medieval books that survive look very well-thumbed, because they were read and re-read.  (Click here for more on medieval books.)

Besides clothing and paper, modern "stuff" includes kitchen ware (everything from pots and can openers to plates), furniture, appliances, linens (sheets and towels), decorative objects, cosmetics, window treatments, electronic paraphernalia (computers, phones, etc.), sound recordings, souvenirs, toys, sporting goods, and tools.  All of it is good and useful or at least seems like it should be, or could be again.  Much of it is imbued with happy memories.  We don't realize how much we have until we have to move or otherwise clear out a house.

It's no wonder that one of the biggest selling books right now is about how to make yourself throw away or give away your possessions.  Many wish (at least in the abstract) for a simpler set of possessions.  Medieval people would also give everything away, but normally only if they were going to go off and be a hermit or something.  And they would have had far less to deaccession.

Many a powerful lord's household in the Middle Ages would pack up pretty much everything they owned and take it with them when they traveled.  The bed frames would be disassembled, the trestle tables knocked down, the few chairs and cooking pots put on a wagon along with the bedding and the extra clothing, and off they would go.  In the late Middle Ages, when the well-to-do got glass for their windows, they would even travel with their glass--after all, you wouldn't want to sleep in a drafty room.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Medieval Literacy

Anyone reading this blog has probably been able to read for so long that the memory of first figuring out that those marks on the paper meant words and sounds is, at best, dim.  We take reading for granted, but it was certainly not the case before more-or-less universal education and affordable books and libraries.

Being able to read was restricted to the upper levels of medieval society:  not just the churchmen and churchwomen, but aristocrats and merchants.  Although late antiquity/the Merovingian era had been a literate age, as most transactions were recorded in writing and stored away in municipal archives.  Yet when urban civilization collapsed in the early Middle Ages, being able to read became much less useful.

Interestingly, in the late Middle Ages/Renaissance period, anyone who could afford it sent their sons to school and recorded all sorts of events and activities in writing.  Notaries flourished, and their records are a treasure-trove for modern historians.

In between the early and the late Middle Ages, reading was a much more widespread skill than writing.  We tend to think of them as going together, but plenty of medieval people who could puzzle their way through the Latin of a charter would have been hard-pressed actually to produce one.  Charlemagne, who read Latin and who could speak Old French and Old German (neither was really a written language yet), could not write.  He had taken it up too late and lacked the fine muscle control needed for a stylus or quill pen.  His biographer told the charming story of the emperor waking up at night and practicing with a stylus on a wax tablet, in case he suddenly got the knack.

Children in well-to-do households got their first education from their mothers.  Boys would generally graduate to a teacher or tutor (often in someone else's house, if for example they entered a monastery or were training for knighthood or were an apprentice in a guild).  Girls generally stuck with Mom unless, as sometimes happened, they entered a nunnery as a day pupil.

Being able to read Latin was necessary because Latin was the language of learning and of law, as well of course as the language of Christianity.  By the twelfth century one was also taught the vernacular--Old French, Old German, Old Italian, and so on.  This was the language of literature, of stories, of epics and romances (on which see more here).

The well-to-do could and did learn to write the vernacular, both to keep track of things and to compose stories and songs to entertain others.  The epics and romances were meant to be read out loud (most were written in verse), to wile away long winter evenings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on reading and writing in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Books in Print

We take the printed book for granted.  And yet before the late fifteenth century, every book (or scroll) had to be copied by hand, which meant that every one was slightly different--and expensive!

Think about trying to copy even one page by hand without making errors.  Now think about copying a book as long as the Bible.  Medieval scribes really wanted to be accurate and were constantly checking for slips, but in practice errors were inevitable. Even if the text of two manuscript books were identical, the page breaks and line breaks would vary.

If someone had written a chronicle or treatise of which he (or she) was particularly proud, s/he would loan it to others, who would then copy it.  Two twelfth-century monasteries located near Dijon, St.-Bénigne and Bèze, shared a chronicle, written originally at St.-Bénigne (with a lot about the wonders of that monastery), but which the copier at Bèze modified to make his monastery look more interesting.

Johannes Gutenberg developed the first printing press, producing several Bibles, his most famous production, in the 1450s.  It had long been possible to carve a piece of wood, ink it, and press it onto paper (they had paper by the fifteenth century), but it took an awfully long time to carve a piece of wood, working backwards, and it really didn't work for text.

Gutenberg's big contribution was movable type.  Rather than trying to carve a whole page, one just had to make a whole lot of individual letters.  Then, one assembled a page out of the letters, inked them, and pressed them onto paper, making as many copies as one wanted.  (It's called a "press," by the way, because one pressed the inked letters very hard onto the paper, using a screw mechanism, to make sure the ink transferred.)

Once a page was set up and locked into place, one could make as many pages as one wanted very quickly, certainly far more quickly than copying by hand, and each one was identical.  When one was through with the page, the letters could be tossed back into their boxes for the next time.  The metal used for the letters was very high quality, having been developed as part of the advances in metallurgy needed as gunpowder became more common (one did not want a cannon that would blow up).

The price of books immediately dropped, putting them in a price range far more people could afford.  Indeed, it has been argued that the rapid spread of revolutionary ideas during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was only made possible by the printing press, which was able to produce pamphlets, broadsheets, and the like.  (For more on medieval books before the printing press, click here.)

Gutenberg's style of printing persisted until the nineteenth century, then was replaced by industrial printers and linotype.  More recently, typesetting has all been done by computers, and a lot of books are actually ebooks, rather than physical books.

But a lot of people, including me, still prefer a printed book, which is why I have had "The Starlight Raven" printed.  It can be ordered directly from the publisher, CreateSpace, by clicking here, and is also available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon; you get a discount from Amazon if you buy both the ebook and printed versions together. It can also be ordered through any bookstore.

And check out this interview!

© 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

Stories Told Out Loud

Medieval entertainment consisted largely of stories told out loud.  Before radio, before TV, before the internet, one mostly had to rely on other people for entertainment.  There were books, but before printing developed (late fifteenth century), books had to be copied by hand and were rare and expensive.

The great mass of the population could not read or write, so they would have to rely on someone remembering or making up a story.  Among the aristocracy, most people could read at least to some extent, although writing was a more unusual skill.  Aristocrats could and did own books, at least a few. So an evening's entertainment could be everyone sitting around while someone with good reading skills read a story out loud.

Even in today's culture, we like the sound of a human voice.  Listening to someone reading a book out loud is different from reading it to oneself.  Hence the popularity of audiobooks.

Above is the cover of the audio version of my first novel, A Bad Spell in Yurt.  It's read by Eric Vincent, who does a very good job with the voice of my wizard hero.  When I first heard the audio files it was a little startling, because of course in my own head he sounds like me.  But a good narrator can bring out aspects of a story that a rapid reader might miss.  I've been so pleased that I'm having all the Yurt books done as audiobooks.

They're available on iTunes, Amazon, and Audible.com.

For more on my books and audiobooks, go to www.Daimbert.com.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014