Learning to Read in the Middle Ages: What Medieval Manuscripts Say
Johannes
Gutenberg didn’t create his printing press to satisfy an idle curiosity. The
surging demand for books in 15th century Europe spurred him on.
Literacy was spreading quickly beyond the clergy and aristocracy and as more
people, including children, learned to read, more materials were needed to
teach them. Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library is home to
a number of medieval manuscripts used for instruction. Images of many of these
are gathered in the Digital Scriptorium, a collaboration between Columbia and
28 other institutions. Dr. Consuelo Dutschke, Columbia’s Curator of Medieval
and Renaissance Manuscripts and the Digital Scriptorium’s Director, opened the
archives on a recent evening to share manuscripts and insight into how and what
the people of the Middle Ages learned to read.
Before
Guttenberg’s first Bible came off the printing press around the year 1456,
every book was made by hand in a painstaking and time-consuming process. The
process is detailed on the website of the Philadelphia Free Library, another
member of the Digital Scriptorium. Animal skins were treated, cut and folded into
parchment. Black ink was brewed out of a parasitic growth on oak trees called
gall, or from lampblack, while colored inks were made from a variety of
minerals or metals, and sometimes from gold. Scribes sat hunched over the pages
for hours, days, weeks, even months, copying from an original source or from
memory, then ornamenting them with images and designs. When they were finished,
the books were bound in leather or wood, and some covers were decorated. After
all of that handcraft, every manuscript is unique and includes imperfections
that tell a story.
By the end of the
thirteenth century, lay writing workshops had joined monastery scriptoria in
the production of manuscripts for a growing number of buyers. As Alistair
McGrath writes in his book In the Beginning,
once the European feudal system began to give way to a new merchant class,
literacy gained in popularity as a desirable accomplishment and a path toward
social advancement. Families wanted their children to know how to read and to
be educated through books. While the bulk of the texts still centered on
religious life, a variety of other formats were beginning to circulate.
Manuscripts were produced
to instruct people how to read and to count, and many of them appear to be
geared toward children. One in Columbia’s library that appears to have been
created for younger students is catalogued as Plimpton MS 184 Link,
from Germany in the mid-fifteenth century. Written in Latin and some vernacular
German, it includes a variety of instructional aides, including lists of
numbers (Image 1) Link,
rules for calculating interest, and an astronomical model. One illustration,
entitled Allegory of Algorism, shows a teacher using a hornbook to instruct a
child in numbers (Image 2) Link.
Another of
Columbia’s holdings, Plimpton MS 258 Link,
from England in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, begins with the
numbers and the Lord’s Prayer (Image 3) Link.
Significantly, it is written fully in the vernacular English, a reflection that
print was beginning to connect with everyday life outside of monasteries where
Latin was favored. But since religion and faith remained at the center of life
at that time, and certainly at the center of scholarship, much of the rest of
the book consists of other devotional material.
Learning to read
in the Middle Ages came with a heavy dose of grammar. The Lilium Grammaticae
from fifteenth century Germany (Plimpton MS 137 Link)
instructed students in Latin grammar by using grammatical examples with German
translations. (Image 4) Link.
.
Books of lists
aided vocabulary building. One such is Plimpton Add. MS 02 Link
from late fifteenth century England. Several pages, according to the Digital
Scriptorium catalogue, are devoted to “collective names; precepts in “-ly”;
terms of resting and mating; carving terms; items fearful to a wise man;
properties of a good horse” and so on. (Image 5) Link
Dictionaries are
word lists, of course, but at least one medieval dictionary was also a grammar
books. A Latin dictionary penned in Germany in 1471 (X87.B45 Link)
organized words by parts of speech. The first 181 pages consist of nouns. Verbs
follow on the next 29 pages, the initial page of the section illustrated with
an image of a stag. (Image 6) Link.
Fifteen pages of indeclinable words finish the manuscript.
Encyclopedias
represented the full flourishing of the manuscripts that might have been used
to teach how to read in the late Middle Ages. One notable example is the
encyclopedic work of prose by Brunetto Latini entitled Li Livres dou Tresor. Latini had been a guardian to Dante after the death
of his father, but when political events forced him into exile in France from
1260 to 1266, he occupied himself by summarizing all the knowledge, from
categories of natural phenomenon to categories of human behavior. Plimpton MS
281 Link
is a copy of Latini’s encyclopedia penned in France in 1424, replete with
fanciful drawings that would make it engaging reading in any century.
Particularly noteworthy are the illustrations of animals on one two-page
display (Image 7) Link
and the scribe’s portrayal of an elephant (Image 8) Link
—which he had probably read or heard about but had clearly never seen Link.
One illustration may have been true to life however, because the scribe found
room for an image of himself
(Image 9) Link.
In the Middle
Ages, as now, students weren’t learning just to read and write, they were
learning how to behave as well. One Latin manuscript authored by Nicolaus de
Orbellis in Germany during the second half of the fifteenth century (Plimpton
MS 200) Link
interrupts its discussion of Aristotle with an illustration of an angel
hovering above a student (Image 10) Link. The image is accompanied by a quote
from the 12th century work, Didascalion, or On the Study of Reading, by a French scholar and cleric, about the qualities
of a good student:
Humble mind, quiet
life, silent examination, happy poverty, foreign land, that he not be ashamed
to ask questions, and that, having learned, he not snub others; and he should
know that four are the chair-bearers of knowledge: love, labor, care and
vigilance.
Not every student was able to follow this path of righteousness,
however, no more then than today. Tucked inside one language textbook from the
mid-fifteenth century Latin manuscript from Italy (Plimpton MS 138 Link), is a page of handwriting from a likely wayward
student. Over and over the student writes in Latin, “When the teacher beats the
student it is benevolent.” (Image 11) Link Corporal punishment was apparently part of the
pedagogy of the time.
The late Middle Ages was an era of steady growth in the number of people who could read across Europe. Many different kinds of texts were needed to help in instruction, including primers, grammar books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. As literacy grew, so did the need for manuscripts, setting the stage for Gutenberg’s printing press and the explosive growth in literacy that transformed western civilization.
Works Cited
“Brunetto Latini.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia Foundation, 16 Oct. 2013. Web. 25 Nov.
2013.
Digital Scriptorium (Images and Text). Web. 21-25 Nov. 2013.
Dutschke, Dr. Consuelo. Guided Tour. 19 November 2013.
McGrath, Alister. In The Beginning: The Story of the King
James Bible and How It
Changed a Nation, a Language,
and a Culture. New York: Anchor Books,
2001.
Print.
“Manuscript Basics.” Free Library of Philadelphia Website. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment