Ink
At the monastery of Saint Columban in Bobbio, Italy—which
once held the greatest Christian library of the tenth century, with 690
books—Jessica Lavelli runs a project for schoolchildren called CoolTour. After
they understand how to make parchment (see How
to Make a Book: Part I), Lavelli’s pupils get to make their own manuscript.
They copy a page from a tenth-century life of the founder of Bobbio, the Irish
Saint Colomban. The page begins, Beatus
ergo Columbanus, and the initial “B,” taking up a third of the page, is a
maze of Celtic knotwork in red, blue, green, and black. For Beatus, the pupils substitute their own
names; they fill out the rest of the line any way they like.
Lavelli does not supply authentic medieval inks. “The kids
write their names using goose quills and common black ink. Then we give them
paintbrushes, and vinegar and egg white to mix the colors, which we buy at an
artists’ shop. The colors are not easy to find,” she added, “and it can get
very expensive if you want to make your own.”
In the Middle Ages, black ink was made from oak galls—the black bubbles you find on an oak twig where the gall wasp has stung it to lay its eggs. The galls were ground, cooked in wine, and mixed with iron sulfate and gum arabic. Oak galls contain gallic acid, which causes collagen to contract; instead of sitting on the surface, the ink etches the words into the parchment. Crushed iron sulfate (often found together with pyrite) makes the ink black; gum arabic, the sap of the acacia tree, makes it thick. Another recipe called for vinegar and rind of pomegranate. Egg white (preserved by a sprig of cloves) and fish glue were used, in addition to gum arabic, to thicken colors; other common ingredients were ear wax, pine rosin, lye, stale urine, and horse dung.
To make the red ink commonly used for titles, you have to
grind and cook “flake-white,” a white crust that forms on lead sheets hung
above a pot of simmering wine. To make green, you need copper filings, ground
egg yolks, quicklime, tartar sediment, common salt, strong vinegar, and boy’s
urine. An expensive blue was made by grinding up lapis lazuli; a cheaper variety
could be made from the woad plant, which contains the same chemical as indigo.
Yellows were made from the plants weld or saffron, or from unripe buckthorn
berries. Purple came from the herb turnsole, brick red from madder root, and
pink from brazilwood, while earth colors came from filtered and roasted dirt.
The parchment made, the ink mixed, an expert scribe could
write at the rate of forty strokes (five to six words) a minute, which over a
six-hour day adds up to two hundred lines per day. Michael Gullick, in Making the Medieval Book, came up with
these numbers by counting the lines in a manuscript that a scribe claimed to
have written entirely by his own hand in a month. Doubting that anyone could
maintain that speed, Gullick asked the calligrapher Donald Jackson for a second
opinion. Jackson had worked with quill and parchment for thirty years. He
copied lines from the manuscript, taking into account the height of the
strokes, the line length, and “the finesse and skill of the scribe.” Jackson
estimated the maximum possible speed at twenty-five lines an hour. If the
scribe really finished the book in a month, he concluded, he had worked eight
hours a day every single day.
And that was just for the text. Illustrations and the fancy
initial capitals, like the B for Beatus, were usually done by a different
monk, who specialized in drawing. A scholar who examined one luxurious book of
psalms found it to be the work of three scribes, a rubricator (who did just the
red titles), and nine artists.
Bookbinding
Finally the finished pages were sewn into quires (often
gathered together with the text of several other books on the same or different
topics) and bound between boards of oak or beech. The inside of each board was
covered with a fly leaf or pastedown, a piece of fresh parchment or (more
often) one recycled from an unwanted manuscript. Sometimes these old sheets
were cleaned first, by soaking them in whey or orange juice and scraping off
the inks and colors; fortunately, this was not always done—more than one
precious leaf has been saved because it was recycled.
The outsides of the boards were covered in leather
(alum-tawed pig’s leather was preferred, because it was white) and fitted with
metal clasps to keep the book from popping open. Then it would be locked away
in a wooden bookchest to protect it—not from thieves, who could open the chest
with an axe, so much as from borrowers who might “forget” to return it. For a
book was a very valuable thing. A historian who tried to calculate exactly how valuable, found a law book that was
bought for eight denaris: the price
of ninety-six two-pound loaves of bread.
The bread I buy from a local bakery is about $5.00 a loaf,
making the cost of that law book today about $480. My book The Abacus and the Cross, on the other hand, costs $28—in hardback.
The paperback, due out in October, will be only $17, just a little more than
three loaves of bread.
If you visit Bobbio, check out CoolTour and say hello to
Jessica for me:
For an overnight stay, I recommend the farm guesthouse San
Martino. It is (of course!) a horse farm within walking distance of the town:
Bobbio has also been recently identified as the town painted
in the background of the Mona Lisa. As one newspaper said, “brace for
tourists”!
Photos: Detail of a Bobbio manuscript and portrait of a scribe, both from the CoolTour Bobbio website.
Join me again next Wednesday for an excursion into the medieval world at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com
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