- [Erik] We're in the Royal Library,
the National Library of the Netherlands
in the Hague.
And we're looking at a 11th century manuscript
of mathematical text, which was very popular
in education at the time.
Most books made for education,
in this early period particularly,
are not very fancy.
- [Beth] This 1,000 years old. - [Erik] Yes.
- [Beth] And yet it looks so recognizable.
- [Erik] The book now is still very medieval.
If you look at dimensions, if the height is one
the width will be 0.7, and that's exactly
what we now have at least in Europe.
Because American paper is a little bit different.
- [Beth] So the people of the Middle Ages
found the perfect form factor.
- [Erik] There's some variations.
Some books are more narrow,
other ones are broader.
- [Beth] This wasn't printed,
someone wrote this.
And I can feel that when I look at the ink.
- [Erik] It's what we call a manuscript,
from Latin manuscripta, so written by hand.
Here you see that all individual letters are written.
And even each letter is written in different strokes.
So you couldn't really write one letter at the same time,
you use to break it up into little pieces.
- [Beth] So the person who did this
was a professional.
This was a hard job.
- [Erik] You could only write
if you were a professional.
If you had been trained to write,
not just in this type of script,
and this is what we call a book script,
because it has sort of a formal approach to it.
So this kind of script you can only do
if you have, not only had a lot of training
but also a lot of experience.
So if you open this book for the first time,
there is a number of things that you see
if you're only use to looking at modern books.
One is, there's no title page.
- [Beth] There's no publisher with a date.
- [Erik] There's nothing, no date,
no made in this city, etc.
Actually it's not even saying what the text is.
- [Beth] That's true.
- [Erik] The idea is you know what it is.
Cause when you read the first lines
it's Boethius and it's that particular text of Boethius.
Sometimes later you'll have what we call rubrics,
which is little title written in red on top,
which actually evolves into the title page
that we now have.
So this is not paper.
This was once a cow or calf running through the field,
and it's been turned into a book.
- [Beth] So someone took the skin
of the animal and stretched it.
- [Erik] Yeah, you put it on a frame of wood
after you've put it in a substance of lye and other things.
- [Beth] That clean off the hair and the fur.
- [Erik] Most of the hair
and then you still have cleave the remaining hair
and the bits of piece of flesh.
- [Beth] So I imagine it would take months to make.
- [Erik] It will take a few weeks to make a batch,
but then when you buy it as a scribe
or as a monastery, you still need
to prepare it for writing.
- [Beth] And there were different grades of parchment.
- [Erik] Yes. - [Beth] Looking at this
can you tell what grade of parchment it is?
- [Erik] This is a book made for education
and what's remarkable in books for education
is that it's often not the best quality of parchment.
It's a little bit comparable to textbooks
that we have nowadays.
You go for the cheap one, if there is one.
- [Beth] And that makes sense, you just need the information
- [Beth] that's in it. - [Erik] Yes.
- [Beth] You don't need a fancy book.
- [Eric] So a beautiful book in a church,
a gospel book that was displayed on the alter
would usually be written in a very nice script
and in the best parchment with illumination.
Very few books were illuminated.
It's exceptional to have a book with gold
and shiny colors on the page.
- [Beth] And then the parchment was folded
and put together into groups
and then bound together.
- [Erik] Yeah they're called quires or gatherings.
We can see that usually about four,
what we call double leaves or bifolias,
so long leaves folded once and four of those
folded leaves would produce one quire.
A book like this will probably hold
about four or five of them.
But if you have a longer text like the Bible,
you may 20 or 30 quires.
And so, you would put them together as a scribe.
This is a nice example of a, you can see it's skin
of the animal.
You can even a little bit of hair.
So this was not very good parchment
to begin with, cause it's kind of yellowish
and there's stains over it.
If you look at it you can see that it's white, yellow,
white, yellow, white, yellow.
And so, this animal was not so good to begin with.
But this part here is the edge of the beast.
It should actually have been trimmed.
- [Beth] But it was very valuable,
so you used as much as possible.
- [Erik] And it's for education,
so it's no problem if it looks like it's scruffy.
- [Beth] I can imagine a scribe
dipping a quill pen, a feather pen into ink
and needing to be very careful
about making blotches of ink.
One book must have taken months to make.
- [Erik] It's extremely slow going
to produce this kind of material, even to make it flat
and smooth so you can write on it.
And also producing letters that consist
of various bits and pieces.
So if you have an m for example,
you can't write it down like we do,
because you can't go up with your pen.
So you need to do stroke, stroke, stroke,
down, down, down for an m.
So at the heart of making those quires, the pages
is a number of activities.
One is to prick the margins.
- [Beth] And then put a rule down.
- [Erik] And then you put a ruler over it
and then you draw your lines.
In this case, and this why we can also imparts
that it's an 11th century manuscript.
It's not color that makes the ruling, it's a pressure.
So it's what we call blind ruling,
which means it's blind in a sense
because you can hardly tell that it's there.
It actually means also a sharp device
was used to press down on the parchment.
Sometimes even the whole quire at the same time.
So you push very hard on a closed quire
and then it travels throughout the pages.
If you are beyond the 11th century,
in the 1130s, 1140s, there's a new technique,
which is ruling with plummet, so pencil,
a big piece of lead.
And then you have gray lines.
- [Beth] So you said this was made
in educational context.
- [Erik] Well this is the time
where universities didn't yet exist.
But people in the monastery needed to be trained
in reading, writing.
They needed to have grammar, rhetoric, Latin.
So here we have a scribe that is writing this book
and may just have been by himself.
Or sometimes scribes worked together
either in scriptorum or in their cell,
where two people work in different cells.
A sort of division of labor that you still see nowadays.
- [Beth] And I noticed text in the margins too.
- [Erik] So on this page you have a main scribe
in brown ink.
You have either the same scribe or somebody else
writing a rubric in red ink, from Latin for red.
And you have likely a reader in the margin writing.
There's a little symbol here, an L with a bar through it,
which is Latin for Vel.
It's an abbreviated word, which means alternatively.
So somebody compared it likely to another text
dealing with the same subject and came up
with a different reading of this particular passage.
- [Beth] So why the red?
- [Erik] It catches your eye.
I mean you look at this page, it jumps out at you.
The function is to say, go with your eyes here
because something new starts.
- [Beth] The same thing as the initial letter.
- [Erik] And also sometimes it helps you
as a reader to find what you need.
Imagine your scribe sitting in his cell
or a scriptorium copying a book,
he will have what we call an exemplar in front of him.
- [Beth] The book that's he's copying.
- [Erik] Copying from.
The main activity here, that is the result
of somebody looking at a book in front of him
over and over again, and copying a half a line
at a time onto this until the text is complete.