Scribes from the Swerve

In charge of the scriptorium was the person on whom Poggio and the other book hunters would have focused their most seductive blandishments: the monastery’s librarian. This important figure would have been accustomed to extravagant courtship, for he was responsible for providing all of the equipment that was required for the copying of the manuscripts: pens, ink, and penknives whose precise merits or defects would become overwhelmingly obvious to the laboring scribe after a few hours at the day’s task. The librarian could, if he wished, make a scribe’s life miserable or, alternatively, provide a favorite with particularly fine tools. Those tools also included rulers, awls (to make tiny holes for ruling the lines evenly), fine-pointed metal pens for drawing the lines, reading frames to hold the book to be copied, weights to keep the pages from turning. For manuscripts that were to be illuminated, there were still other specialized tools and materials.

Most books in the ancient world took the form of scrolls~ like the Torah scrolls that Jews use in their services to this day-but by the fourth century Christians had almost completely opted for a different format, the codex, from which our familiar books derive. The codex has the huge advantage of being far easier for readers to find their way about in: the text can be conveniently paginated and indexed, and the pages can be turned quickly to the desired place. Not until the invention of the computer. with its superior search functions, could a serious challenge be mounted to the codex’s magnificently simple and flexible format. Only now have we begun once again to speak of “scrolling” through a text.

Since papyrus was no longer available and paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books Was made from the skins of animals-cows, sheep, goats, and occasionally deer. These surfaces needed to be made smooth, and hence another tool that the monastic librarian distributed was pumice stone, to rub away the remaining animal hair along with any bumps or imperfections. The scribe to Whom a poor quality parchment had been given was in for a very disagreeable task. and in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: “The parchment is hairy” . . . "Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text” . . . “Thank God, it will soon be dark.” “Let the copyist be permitted to put an end to his labor,” a weary monk wrote beneath his name, the date, and the place where he worked; “Now I’ve written the whole thing,” wrote another. “For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

The finest parchment, the one that made life easier for scribes and must have figured in their sweetest dreams, was made of calfskin and called vellum. And the best of the lot was uterine vellum, from the skins of aborted calves. Brilliantly white, smooth, and durable, these skins were reserved for the most precious books, ones graced with elaborate, gemlike miniatures and occasionally encased in covers encrusted with actual gems. The libraries of the world still preserve a reasonable number of these remarkable objects, the achievement of scribes who lived seven or eight hundred years ago and labored for untold hours to create something beautiful.

Good scribes were exempted from certain times of collective prayer, in order to maximize the hours of daylight in the scriptorium. And they did not have to work at night: because of an entirely justifiable fear of fire, all candlelight was forbidden. But for the time-about six hours a day-that they actually spent at their desks, their lives belonged entirely to their books. It was possible, in certain monasteries at least, to hope that monks would understand what they were copying: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, to bless this workroom of Thy servants,” declared the dedication of one scriptorium, “that all which they write therein may be comprehended by their intelligence and realized in their works.” But the actual interest of the scribes in the books they copied (or their distaste for those books) was strictly irrelevant. Indeed, insofar as the copying was a form of discipline-an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain-distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement. Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs.

The complete subordination of the monastic scribe to the text-the erasure, in the interest of crushing the monk’s spirit, of his intellect and sensibility-could not have been further from Poggio’s own avid curiosity and egotism. But he understood that his passionate hope of recovering reasonably accurate traces of the ancient past depended heavily on this subordination. An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, but such alterations, over centuries, inevitably led to wholesale corruptions. It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.

A sheet with a cutout window generally covered the page of the manuscript being copied, so that the monk had to focus on one line at a time. And monks were strictly forbidden to change What they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying. They could correct only their own slips of the pen by care. fully scraping off the ink with a razor and repairing the spot With a mixture of milk, cheese, and lime, the medieval version of our own product for whiting out mistakes. There was no crumpling up the page and starting afresh. Though the skins of sheep and goats were plentiful, the process of producing parchment from them was laborious. Good parchment was far too Valuable and scarce to be discarded. This value helps to account for the fact that monasteries collected ancient manuscripts in the first place and did not consign them to the rubbish.

To be sure, there were a certain number of abbots and of monastic librarians who treasured not only the parchment but also the pagan works written on them. Steeped in classical literature, some believed that they could rifle its treasures Without contamination, the way the ancient Hebrews had been permitted by God to steal the riches of the Egyptians. But over the generations, as a substantial Christian literature was created, it became less easy to make such an argument. Fewer and fewer monks were inclined, in any case, to make it. Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. What had begun as an active campaign to forget-~a pious attack on pagan ideas-had evolved into actual forgetting. The ancient poemi philosophical treatises, and political speeches, at one time so threatening and so alluring, were no longer in anyone's mind. let alone on anyone’s lips. They had been reduced to the condition of mute things, sheets of parchment, stitched together. covered with unread words.

Only the remarkable durability of the parchment used in these codices kept the ideas of the ancients alive at all.