Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons shaped the development of medieval Europe
Ostrogoths, a community of Goths who were displaced by the Huns, wanted to be associated with Rome and its history.
Visigoths were highly Romanized and that by the time of their settlement in Spain they had adopted Latin and Christianity as key aspects of their elite culture.
Franks, a Germanic people, were the principal civilization of the early European Middle Ages.
England was generated from the mixing of indigenous peoples, as well as influxes of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman populations.
Our contemporary understanding of history is based on
primary sources created during earlier eras.
* Medieval writers thought about the virtues of good health.
* Christianity was not a native religion to Europe and Christian leaders, both kings and churchmen, were keen on communicating the importance of their faith.
* Medieval peoples were interested in the physical characteristics of their kings. For them, it mattered how a king might look and appear.
* Medieval peoples were aware that sunlight varied during the seasons. Although the Italian astronomer Galileo (1564-1642) would not live until about 1,000 years later, medieval communities appreciated what we might call the natural sciences. Some elements of Ancient Greek knowledge were still circulation in medieval Europe after the fall of Rome.
* For medieval communities it was important to know all of the natural resources (animals, water, lands) that made life possible in their part of the world.
Writing supports
** Archaic writing materials **
Any material able of offering
a relatively flat surface has been utilized as a support for writing.
But also that the degree of literacy in any given society
determines what sort of writing materials that society will use.
A scarcely literate society tends to write on durable and resilient supports,
while a highly literate society uses materials cheap and
abundant but also perishable.
And as a consequence, it might happen that more written pieces have been preserved
from a low literate society than from a highly literate one.
Depending on the origin of the materials utilized to receive writing,
we can materials broadly in:
* mineral, stones and metals
* vegetal
* animal
Mineral, stones and metals
In the Greek and Roman world, documents such as laws, official decrees and
international treaties were usually copied in this type of support
because of their inalterable nature.
From the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain in the sixth and seventh century,
we have slate (leisteen) tablets written with a pointy and hard instrument.
The exemplars preserved are not many, but
some of them contain quite charming school exercises of writing and basic arithmetic.
All sort of domestic objects were recycled to receive writing.
Among them all, the ostraka.
They are small pottery fragments on which the citizens of Athens voted
who should be exiled from the city?
Walls have always been kind of a magnet for graffiti.
From the first century BC to the fourth century AD of Rome have come imprecations,
accounts, names and all sorts of messages written on walls. T
he graffiti of Pompeii are especially famous.
Vegetal
The palm leaf was used in old India for the Pothi books.
And in China, bamboo was adapted for the same purpose.
Plinius refers as well to palm leaves as writing supports previous to
the invention of papyrus.
Birch bark has served as support for writing in several cultures.
The oldest witnesses are a collection of Buddhist manuscripts in the Kanahari
language found in Afghanistan that were acquired by the British Library in 1994.
Textiles of vegetal origin were also used as a support for writing.
From the animal kingdom, of course, the wax is the first substance we think of.
Wax was used together with shellac for the wax tablets.
In 1980, archaeologists found on the coast of present Turkey vessel.
And in it, a diptych of wax tablets dating probably from the 14th century BC.
And together with the wax, there are bone fragments, turtle shells and
silk fabric among others. T
he oldest witnesses of a sort of protozymes have
been found on ostrich egg shells.
They come from South Africa and the age could reach up to 100,000 years.
Animal hides are documented as writing support from 2700 to 2500 BC in Egypt.
A very well known example of hides used for this purpose is
the mathematical text now in the British Museum Manuscript 10250.
In chronological order the three materials
that were massively employed in the West in the making of manuscripts.
*papyrus*
*parchment*
*paper*
** Papyrus **
Papyrus wordt gemaakt van de papyrusplant (cyperus papyrus) (zie afbeelding 1). Deze plant
groeide voornamelijk langs de Nijl en de Egyptenaren exporteerden onbeschreven rollen
naar de rest van de wereld. Om papyrus te maken, werd de stengel eerst in lange dunne
repen gesneden. Deze repen werden kruislings op elkaar gelegd (meestal slechts twee lagen)
en op elkaar gedrukt (zie afbeelding 2).
From Egypt, papyrus used as writing support passed
on to Phoenicia in the second millennium B.C.
and it appears that Phoenicians spread its used into their borderlands,
as a result papyrus was already used in Assyria
and Palestine during the seventh century B.C.
The dates of the introduction of the papyrus in Greece has been highly controversial.
The most optimistic scholars have hypothesized
that it could have happened as soon as the 1500 B.C.
and yet, it could be that papyrus was not known in Greece before the 700 B.C.
To Rome, the most probable arrival date is during the third century B.C.
And here, it became so successful as
basic consumption item.
After the Islamic Conquest of Egypt,
papyrus continued to be sold in Europe at
least for some time until Caliph Abdul Malik forbid exports.
In spite of the fact that there was papyrus manufacturing in Sicily,
it became a luxury product and its use seized
finally at some point during the 11th century and by then,
the Egyptian production had also stopped.
** Parchment **
membrana (the term parchment, pergamenum in Latin, appears quite late in our sources, seems up to the third century A.D., the name with which it is referred to is membrana)
parchment (perkament)
vellum (high quality parchment, very white, thin)
purple parchment
(leaves dyed in tyrian purple, could reach prices higher than gold)
palimpsets (recycled parchment)
Making parchment
Parchment maker scudding a skin. Die Hausbücher der Nürnberger Zwolfbrüderstiftungen [Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, MS Amb. 317b, fol. 77r]
The parchment making process begins the same as all leather tanning and tawing processes – the hair and flesh are removed from the animal skin. The skin is soaked in a lime solution and then ‘scudded’ over a board to remove the hair. The image shows the parchmenter at work, removing hair from the skin with the bowed scudding knife and board. The vat for soaking skins is to his left, below a shelf with books [with spines facing out]. This is the messy, smelly bit that requires soaking time and wet space.
While the hides is been stripped any cut,
however small it might be,
any accidental fissure made on the skin will grow
more conspicurous in the shape of circular or oval wholes.
Quite often, we will find defective hides
which nevertheless has been utilized in the manuscripts.
The defects can be cuts or holes that occur during
a moment of destruction of the parchment maker or a wound of the animal.
Sorting rags into grades of varying quality and strength.
Cutting rags into smaller pieces and removing buttons, pins, and other foreign matter.
The first step in the process was classifying the rags by color,
cutting them in relatively small pieces and
whitewashing them with a kind of bleach made out of wood hash.
These materials were then reduced to a paste in big vats,
where they were left to macerate in water until the pulp was homogeneous.
Vatman, coucher and layer at work.
Drying loft.
In the beginning, the operation was done by hand, and
later by animal powered mill stones.
Finally, during the 13th century, and probably in Italy, the mill stones were
substituted by heavy hammers activated by gears moved by running water.
The resulting paste was then poured in a metallic tub,
where it was kept at constant temperature.
Gelatin sizing.
Glazing the finished sheets to smooth the surface for writing.
The craftsman then takes a rectangular sieve, called a mould, and
introduces it in the top.
When the mould comes out of the top, it's covered with a layer of the paste,
the future paper leaf, that the craftsman lays on felt
to absorb the excessive water and start the drying process.
Then a certain amount of felts with their respective leaves were pressed in
order to eliminate even more water, and that also helped with the smoothing flat.
The following step was to hang the leaves and let them dry completely.
When the leaves were dry, they were submerged in glue and
again pressed and hung to dry.
And the finishing touch consisted in polishing and
smoothing the leaves, one by one, by hand.
Over this whole process,
the single element that developed more changes was the mould (gietvorm).
Three different types of mould are known, * floating mould, * oriental or
flexible mould, and * occidental or rigid framed mould.
The oriental or flexible mould has no frame, and that implies that
the threads that make up the sieve will deform after a short period of use.
The occidental or rigid mould has a frame, and
it insures that the threads will keep in place for a very long time.
The mould framework leaves very characteristic marks on the paper leaf.
The lines that run longitudinally, very close to each other,
are called wire lines and the transverse ones chain supports.
The watermark
Het watermerk met eenhoorn uit het manboek
"Papier werd in deze tijd handmatig geschept met een zeef van metaaldraad, waarop met koperdraad een watermerk aangebracht was. Op de plaats van het watermerk en de draden van de zeef werd het papier iets dunner, omdat hier minder vezels bleven zitten bij het scheppen. Italiaans handgeschept papier kennen we vanaf eind 13e eeuw, in Nederland kwam de papierproductie pas op gang in de 16e eeuw. Je kunt aan de hand van de watermerken vaststellen waar en wanneer het papier geproduceerd is: elke maker, molen of regio kende zijn eigen afbeeldingen.” het handschrift van Hulthem
Since the 13th century, occidental paper has been manufactured with a watermark.
This is a silhouette worked out with metallic threads in the mould so
that it leaves a mark in the paper leaves that could identify the manufacturer.
Together with a watermark, sometimes we find a secondary mark, or
countermark, of a smaller dimension,
most commonly some decorated in the shells placed in one of the corners of the leaf.
The purpose of this countermark was to distinguish between two manufacturers
that use the same watermark or watermarks very similar.
The types of paper used during the Middle Ages can be divided in
two wide classes,
with and without watermark.
The paper without watermark is characteristic of the east, but
the papers made in the west previously to the invention of the watermark in
the 13th century fall as well within this category.
The paste in this sort of paper is normally well glued in starch, and
the surface is flat and of a yellowish color turned into dun.
As already explained, the mould of these papers is of the flexible sort.
And of course, they lack a watermark.
The formats can be very variable.
Watermark paper is characteristically European from the 13th century.
Besides the frame of the mould on the watermark, this sort of paper is
identified through its regular paste and rough surface of absorbent appearance.
The glue is of animal origin and the color light yellowish.
Of course, paper is a far less resilient material than parchment.
And because of that, its preservation is more difficult.
But even so, there are thousands of medieval manuscripts written on paper.
This deficiency of paper was very consciously perceived in medieval times.
And therefore, for a very long time,
paper was considered a sort of poor substitute for parchment.
And maybe because of that, the very first manuscripts copied on
paper have the outer bifolium of its quire of parchment.
Only towards the end of the Middle Ages will you start to find deluxe
manuscripts copied entirely on paper.
* Tablets **
Although on the account of their materials,
writing tablets fall into a sort of nobody's ground between codicology and epigraphy.
The truth is, that they make up the oldest book form known to us.
As a matter of fact, we still have many clay tablets from the third millennium B.C.
mostly coming from Mesopotamia.
Although the clay tablets are adopt less,
the most abundant of all,
the tablet format is not constrained to any material in particular,
