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Tag: medieval

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Published on 3 Comments on Multi-Quire Codex

Before I begin the Historical Background for Multi-Quire Codices, you may find a few other pages to be useful in learning how to make single-quire codices, multi-quire codices, and parchment.

Multi-quire codices emerged from single-quire codices. A single quire codex takes the form of what we consider today as a traditional book. To learn more about the single-quire codex and codices in general take a look at this page:

Single-quire codex

This link will give you the necessary steps to construct your own multi-quire codex:

How to make a multi-quire codex

This link will provide information on the parchment making process:

Parchment

Here, I will discuss the historical and cultural background information that laid the foundation for the multi-quire codex to emerge.

The development and implementation of the multi-quire codex came as a result of cultural changes occurring throughout Europe and the necessity for documenting religious texts beginning with the 1st - 4th centuries AD. The first shift that laid the foundation for the emergence of multi-quire codices was the transition from papyrus to parchment. Though there were papyrus codices for the first few hundred years of the codex form, parchment eventually overtook papyrus beginning in the 4th century AD. From this initial change in book material, parchment codex gained popularity with the Christian church that utilized first in monasteries. From this point on we see efforts of standardization of scripts and literature, one of the first being Charlemagne. The constant revival of literacy and transcribing that consumed this period are the primary sources of the surviving manuscripts and texts we possess today.

Page from a parchment codex

Courtesy of: Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 37: Johannes Cassianus, Collationes Patrum (www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/bke/0037).

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Published on 26 Comments on Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life

It wasn’t until the fourth century AD that the Medieval world was introduced to monastic life, in the form of a devout Egyptian Christian named Pachomius that thought it was a good idea to have an isolated space to be humbly miserable and to worship God at the same time. His concept spread rapidly throughout the Eastern Roman Empire, and with it, his expectation for all monks to be literate. About two hundred years later in 529 AD, Benedict established Monte Cassino, a soon to be famous Italian monastery close to Rome and Naples, and took literacy one step further than his predecessors. His Rule of Saint Benedict provides some guidelines for monastic life at Monte Cassino, including a section called “On Daily Manual Labor,” where reading is one of the compulsory activities built into a monk’s very regimented schedule. Soon after, Cassiodorus founded Vivarium in South Italy, and pushed for more than just idly reading texts--he made copying them yet another compulsory task. Suddenly, as per popular adoption of Cassiodorus’ Institutes rule book, copying texts of all kinds became an important (and highly pretentious) part of life in monasteries. He saw copying biblical texts as spreading the message of the Christian religion and “fighting with pen and ink against the unlawful snares of the devil” (ch. 30), which seems as noble a purpose as any for devout monks to perform daily as part of their grueling manual labor. And trust me, it was grueling.

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