Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

Their work lay between that of the monastery monks and that of the city scribes in another respect. As before indicated, the work of the scribes in the scriptorium was performed for no individual remuneration. If the manuscripts were sold or were exchanged for property of one kind or another, the benefit of the sale or exchange accrued to the monastery. On the other hand, the scribes of the cities, as they came to organise themselves into an accepted trade, arrived at a system of fixed charges for their work. The Brothers of Common Life, while living together in monkish centres, did not withdraw themselves from the life of the world, but made it their first duty, using their monastery homes simply as a starting-place or place of consultation or as centres of education, to go out into the highways and by-ways, teaching what they had to teach direct to the people whom they met; and as an important means of this instruction they used their facilities as scribes for manifolding the tracts and the scriptural classics with which they provided themselves. It was their recognition of the enormous service that could be secured in influencing a community through the distribution of books, that made them so prompt in their appreciation of the value of the printing-press and that caused them to take place among the first printers of Germany.

The term commonly given to the earlier German scribes was clericus, or pfaffe, and nearly every well-to-do nobleman or citizen had a clericus, or pfaffe, to take charge of his correspondence and his accounts.

While the general use of this term indicates the ecclesiastical origin of the scribes and confirms the previous records to the effect that the first scribes undoubtedly were monks trained in the monasteries, it is of course by no means to be accepted as evidence that the art of writing continued, at least after the fourteenth century, to be limited to ecclesiastics. As has before been indicated, the monastery schools accepted very many pupils who had no intention of entering the Church, but who secured from their monkish teachers a knowledge of reading and writing.

As early as 1403, mention is made of a certain Heilmannus, formerly a cleric of the diocese of Trier, licensed as a public scribe (eyn offenbar schreiber). At about the same time, Dr. Conrad Humery, of Mayence, is referred to in the chronicles as pfaffe, jurist, and chancellor of the city. Ulrich Zell, who later became the first printer in Cologne, was accustomed to add to the imprint of his works the designation clericus from Hanau in the diocese of Mayence. Notwithstanding the term clericus and the reference to his diocese, Ulrich had never been an ecclesiastic.[393] The ecclesiastical divisions, parishes or dioceses, were utilised in those times, as political divisions are to-day, as the territorial designations that would be most readily understood.

The trade in books in manuscript was developed from two great sources. For a certain special and restricted class of work, the trade came into existence and continued, as we have seen, for some centuries, in the Italian universities, in the University of Paris, and in two or three of the older German universities. Some little time later, the scribes found place among the hand-workers and dealers of the larger cities. Their work was at first carried on most actively in connection with cathedrals and churches, and, later, associated itself with the annual markets and fairs.

In the trade centres, where the goldsmiths, designers, and illuminators found profitable occupation, the skilled writers (that is to say, those who were competent to prepare the elaborately ornamented manuscripts) soon found occupation, while the writers of common text came to be employed particularly, as mentioned, in the markets and fairs in connection with the records and correspondence required for business transactions.

Throughout the first half of the fifteenth century the production of manuscripts, which, from the beauty of their script and the artistic finish of their illustrations and ornamentations, could be classed as works of art, became an important industry, an industry of which the centres in Germany and the Low Countries were Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Strasburg, Augsburg, Ulm, and Vienna.

As before indicated, the manuscripts produced in the Netherlands and in Burgundy far surpassed those of Germany and, for that matter, those of the rest of the world, in beauty and in the elaboration of their artistic finish and ornamentation. The Dukes of Burgundy took a large personal interest in this special industry of their dominions, and their patronage did much to make the art fashionable and to further its development.

When, after the introduction of printing, the printers and book-makers instituted their trade-unions or guilds in Ghent and in Bruges, they absorbed into their organisations the existing associations of fine writers, scribes, illuminators, etc.

In the library of S. Mark’s, in Venice, there is a beautiful breviary known as that of Grimani, which was produced in 1478 by certain artists of Bruges, among whom is mentioned John Memmling, and which was purchased in 1489, for five hundred ducats, by the Cardinal Grimani. About the same time, that is to say, between 1468 and 1469, was produced the copy of Froissart’s Chronicles which had been prepared in Bruges for the son of Duke Philip of Burgundy, and which is at present in the possession of the library of the University of Breslau.