I.1. The Monastic Scriptorium

And for much of the Middle Ages beginning in Late Antiquity, the centers of book production were located in monastic scriptoria (“rooms for writing”)—where monks labored with book production as part of their daily religious duties. Among the more famous monasteries with robust scriptoria were the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow in northeastern England (home of the Venerable Bede); St. Martin of Tours in France; Santo Domingo de Silos in northern Spain; and Monte Cassino in southern Italy. Scriptoria most often had a division of labor; there was close collaboration among monks who prepared parchment, ruled lines for the written space, copied text (including rubrics and various forms of display scripts), and drew and painted decorative initials, borders, and miniatures. The binding of the completed manuscript could range from a simple parchment wrapper to sturdy wooden boards, and the book might be covered in its entirety, or in part, in leather or cloth. Styles of bindings varied as much as those of script and decoration, each depending upon geographical location and period of production.

In the early Middle Ages, the type of handwriting used in a scriptorium could be unique to a particular monastery and then also practiced in houses founded by the monastery. Each letterform and each abbreviation of a word would be composed of a deliberate sequence of strokes—the “ductus” of that letterform or abbreviation. The shape, direction, and order of the strokes were determined by the style of script selected. Some scripts were definitely cursive, or running, hands with strokes joining letters together in interlocking patterns. Other scripts were text hands; these are more even, angular, and upright in appearance. Letters might also be capitals, called majuscules, which developed from Roman epigraphy. But most medieval scripts fall into the category of minuscule, a script derived from Roman cursive, and refined into Caroline minuscule script under the auspices of Charlemagne (cat. no. 15). Caroline minuscule eventually spread across Europe until it was slowly superseded by many types of Gothic scripts, both cursive and text.

This catalogue contains several excellent examples of early minuscule scripts. The six leaves of Gregory s Moralia in Job (cat. no. 12) were written c. 675-725 in the Merovingian French monastery of Luxeuil in a cursive minuscule script. This script is notable for spiky ascenders and descenders and for the fluidity of its ductus. Another style of Merovingian script was used in Theodores Commentary on the Pauline Epistles (cat. no. 13), a somewhat later fragment (c. 750-800) that follows the calligraphic tradition of the French monastery of Corbie. Both of these fragments might be compared with the notated missal from southern Italy (cat. no. 17) that was copied c. 1075-1100 in the “Bari-type” of Beneventan script. The bold script is distinctive with its tall broken-back C, and the soft shades of yellow, blue, and green are characteristic of decoration in manuscripts written in Beneventan script.

Whatever the script or scripts used, the goal of a scriptorium was to produce legible, textually accurate, and coherently organized books both for reference, and for reading or singing aloud. Cat. no. 5, a lectionary originating in the monastery of Morimondo, contains both decorative initials that are spirited in design and execution, and the marking of some words of the text with pronunciation “ticks” above particular letters (e.g., line 7 at left, “liberemur”) to guide the reader. 1 Although a person today may have difficulty deciphering the dense letterforms, the juxtaposition of the rubricated heading, the multi-line red initial, and the carefully written text script (with the occasional pronunciation guides) enabled the medieval monastic reader to navigate elegantly through the manuscript.

The Houghton Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston are fortunate to own a group of manuscripts that are all from important Cistercian monasteries that flourished in the twelfth century, notably Morimondo, Pontigny, and Royaumont. The Cistercian order, founded at Citeaux in 1098, established strict rules for the scribes and artists of manuscripts. Analysis of these manuscripts reveal how Cistercian scriptoria functioned. The underlying aesthetic principles adhere to the rules of the monastic order, which emphasized austerity in all areas of monastic life including book production, but each monastery was able to interpret those rules in distinctively recognizable ways. The volumes, when placed alongside one another, demonstrate certain Cistercian characteristics: large-size formats, bold text hands, and elegant aniconic decoration.

Cat. no. 7 is a cutting from what was once a bible with dazzling, yet appropriately aniconic initials, made in Troyes c. 1190 for the Cistercian monastery of Pontigny in Champagne. The cutting was once part of a multi-volume monumental bible of remarkable beauty—with the clarity of the calligraphy as striking as the intricacy of the interior vine-stem designs of the initial (with its little border extension) skillfully illuminated with gold and colors. When compared to the volumes from Morimondo (cat. nos. 5 and 6) mentioned above, it is possible to discern an overall Cistercian style of execution. This bible, however, also exhibits the influence of an English Cistercian monk from Canterbury who was working in Troyes on a number of manuscript commissions. Manuscripts might travel in the Middle Ages for personal use or as gifts, but scribes and illuminators might also travel, and thus influence the book-making practices in a neighboring or distant scriptorium.