[10] The Missal is a book containing the service of the mass for the entire year. The Psalter the book of Psalms.
[11] From manu scriptum, meaning written by hand.
[12] So expensive of time and effort was the production of books by this method that many of the manuscripts now extant were written crosswise on sheets from which the previous writing had been largely erased by chemical or mechanical means. How many valuable ancient manuscripts were lost in this manner no one knows. Fortunately the practice was not common until after the thirteenth century, when the rise of the universities and the spread of learning made new demands for skins for writing purposes.
[13] That the printing was not always carefully done is shown by the constant need, throughout the Middle Ages, of correct copies for comparison. The following injunction of the Abbot Alcuin to the monks at Tours, given at the beginning of the ninth century, is illustrative of the need for care in copying:
"Here let the scribes sit who copy out the words of the Divine Law, and likewise the hallowed sayings of Holy Fathers. Let them beware of interspersing their own frivolities in the words they copy, nor let a trifler's hand make mistakes through haste. Let them earnestly seek out for themselves correctly written books to transcribe, that the flying pen may speed along the right path. Let them distinguish the proper sense by colons and commas, and set the points, each one in its due place, and let not him who reads the words to them either read falsely or pause suddenly. It is a noble work to write out holy books, nor shall the scribe fail of his due reward. Writing books is better than planting vines, for he who plants a vine serves his belly, but he who writes a book serves his soul."
[14] West, A. F., Alcuin, pp. 72-73.
[15] The largest monastic library on the Continent was Fulda, which specialized in the copying of manuscripts. In 1561 it had 774 volumes. In England the largest collections were at Canterbury, which in the fourteenth century possessed 698 volumes, and at Peterborough, which had 344 volumes at about the same time. The library of Croyland, also in England, burned in 1091, at that time contained approximately 700 volumes. These represented the largest collections in Europe.
[16] The Hortus Delicarum of the Abbess Herrard, of the convent of Hohenburg, in Alsace, was a famous illustration of artistic workmanship. This was an attempt to embody, in encyclopaedic form, the knowledge of her time. The manuscript was embellished with hundreds of beautiful pictures, and was long preserved as a wonderful exhibition of mediaeval skill. It was lost to civilization, along with many other treasures, when the Prussians bombarded Strassburg, in 1870.
[17] He there "enjoyed advantages which could not perhaps have been found anywhere else in Europe at the time—perfect access to all the existing sources of learning in the West. Nowhere else could he acquire at once the Irish, the Roman, the Gallician, and the Canterbury learning; the accumulated stores of books which Benedict (founder and abbot) had bought at Rome and at Vienne; or the disciplinary instruction drawn from the monasteries on the Continent, as well as from Irish missionaries." (Bishop Stubbs, Dictionary of Christian Biography, article on Bede.)
[18] West, A. F., Alcuin, pp. 45-47.