The Writing Room

An important function of medieval monasteries was the creation and copying of manuscripts. Copying religious and secular works for the edification of others was not only important to them, it has enriched immeasurable our understanding of their time and culture.

The scriptorium or "writing place" was a standard part of a monastery's architecture, and an early non-agricultural example of an "assembly line." Some monks had an excellent hand for lettering, some were good at illustration. Of course, even before anything could happen in the scriptorium, someone had to make parchment and ink (see the links).

Cassiodorus considered scriptorium work so vital that he established careful training for scribes, and exempted the top performers from daily prayers and allocated extra candles so they could spend more hours copying texts. A scribe therefore might work from six hours per day up to twice that or more for the best ones.

Even good scribes, however, were not always happy in their work. The scriptorium was placed in the complex to be distraction-free. Imagine working long hours in a silent room, bent over, eyes close to the page, no "coffee breaks" unless it were for prayers, the pressure to copy texts exactly. The need for decent lighting meant having windows that were open to the cold air all winter; gloves would have interfered with the fine penmanship needed. Monks were stressed, and often gave themselves breaks by inappropriate notes sketches in margins. One manuscript ends with the personal observation “Now I’ve written the whole thing. For Christ’s sake, give me a drink.” (You can read all about it in here, page 40.)

The illustration above is likely not a good depiction of the actual environment. The light from the windows needs to be on the page, not in the monks' eyes. A better layout is seen in the Plan of St. Gall, which I wrote about here. It is a manuscript that shows the layout of the Abbey of St. Gall, and the scriptorium is clearly a room with desks around the edges and a worktable in the center. You can see it on the left side of the illustration to the right of this paragraph.

If you like the term "Dark Ages" and think there was no education for centuries in Europe, we must agree to disagree, but I will say that monasteries helped preserve culture and learning. They were not just copying the Bible and works by Christian authors like Augustine: Aristotle and others from the Classical Era were being preserved and shared, and the act of copying also educated the monk who was doing the reading. Abbot Trithemius (1462 - 1516) wrote

As he is copying the approved texts he is gradually initiated into the divine mysteries and miraculously enlightened. Every word we write is imprinted more forcefully on our minds since we have to take our time while writing and reading. (In Praise of Scribes)

All seriousness aside, however, much can be made of the frivolous illustrations tucked into and around the lines of text. They are definitely worth looking at next time.