The Woman Who Licked Her Paintbrush

It is the blue of blues, the ultra-blue or ultramarine. It is "a color illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colors," wrote Cennino D’Andrea Cennini in Il Libro dell’Arte in the early 1400s.

And for that reason, it is the blue of the Virgin Mary's gown in medieval manuscripts like this one, from the Cloisters Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MS54.1.1 Folio 30r).

The color was made by grinding lapis lazuli, a brilliant blue stone mined in only one place in the world--Afghanistan. The powder was mixed with pine rosin, gum mastic, and wax, kneaded by hands greased with linseed oil, dissolved into lye, then dried and packed into leather purses. If of the best quality, one ounce of ultramine blue was worth an ounce of gold.

It was so costly that only the finest luxury books contain it--and only scribes "of exceptional skill would have been entrusted with its use," writes Anita Radini and her colleagues in a 2019 paper in Science Advances.

So how did bits of ultramarine end up stuck between the teeth of a middle-aged woman buried sometime before 1162 beside a German church?

Most likely, she was an artist who licked her brush.

It's a pretty common thing for artists to do, to get a finer line. It's common especially for an artist illustrating a medieval manuscript, in which the images are often tiny. Except for one problem: "It has long been assumed that monks, rather than nuns, were the primary producers of books throughout the Middle Ages," the researchers write.

Why would a mere woman be trusted with the blue of blues?

Radini and her colleagues weren't expecting to get into the gender politics of art history when they examined the skeletons buried beside the ruins of a 9th- to 14th-century church and monastery at Dalheim, Germany. They were looking for plant particles stuck in dental calculus--the cement-like stuff your dental hygienist spends her time picking out from the backs of your teeth. They were hoping to find out what the people ate.

It took a while, and some creative scientific analyses, for them to realize the blue bits they'd found in this skeleton's teeth were particles of lapis lazuli. Even longer to figure out how a stone from Afghanistan ended up in a medieval woman's mouth.

The simplest answer is that she was an artist of exceptional skill who produced luxury books using ultramarine and that she was in the habit of licking her paintbrush. Repeatedly, over many years.

And yes, the researchers DNA-tested the skeleton to make sure this artist really was female.

Why has it "long been assumed that monks, rather than nuns, were the primary producers of books throughout the Middle Ages"? Why do most medievalists assume that men could be scribes and artists, but women could not? Before the 15th century, scribes and illuminators rarely signed their work, but the names we do have skew strongly masculine.

To me, that proves only that men were more likely to sign their work--not that men were more likely to create it.

Indeed, recent research has identified work by women scribes and illuminators from as early as the 8th century. By the 12th century, several convents and nunneries were busily producing luxury books. One female scribe who lived in the monastery of Wessobrunn in Bavaria in the 1100s, for example, is known to have produced more than 40 books, including a richly illustrated gospel book. Her name was Diemut. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, when "record-keeping in Germany is more complete," Radini and her colleagues note, "more than 4,000 books attributed to over 400 women scribes have been identified."

The mention of record-keeping is key.

The 45- to 60-year-old woman who licked her paintbrush and was buried beside the church in Dalheim in the 1100s was lost to history--along with her sisters and all of the books they may have produced--when the church and the convent beside it burned down "following a series of 14th-century battles." Their cemetary was unmarked. Their graves were rediscovered by the Westphalian Museum of Archaeology, during excavations around the church ruins from 1988 to 1991, and their bones were put into storage until this research team in the 21st century had the idea of cleaning their teeth.

The bits of blue they discovered embedded there change our picture of women's status in the Middle Ages.

As Radini and her colleagues conclude, "As was the case for many early women's religious communities, Dalheim has left very few traces in the historical record. No books survive from the monastery, either from its libraries or in any other surviving works. Nearly invisible in the historical record, the women of Dalheim are known to us today nearly exclusively through the archaeological record and a handful of brief textual references. The case of Dalheim raises questions as to how many other early women's communities in Germany, including communities engaged in book production, have been similarly erased from history."

To learn about other medieval women whose lives have left few traces in the historical record, check out my new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women. Read about it on this blog (click here) or on my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Iceland's Independence Day

Today, June 17, Icelanders celebrate their independence day, on the birthday of Jon Sigurdsson, the leader of the nineteenth-century Icelandic independence movement. Jon was a saga scholar, before he became a politician. He worked briefly at the library in Copenhagen established by the great collector of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, Arni Magnusson.

So it's fitting that, on this day of Icelandic independence, we remember the role of the sagas in setting Icelanders free.

Reading the Icelandic sagas, you learn of Iceland's early days as a free state, from its founding in 874.

Reading the sagas, you learn how Iceland lost its independence in 1262 and became subject to Norway, which itself was later taken over by Denmark.

And reading the sagas--simply the act of reading and rereading them--is what united the nineteenth-century Icelanders, as I learned while researching Song of the Vikings, my biography of the saga master Snorri Sturluson.

Here's how I explained the connection between Icelandic sagas and Icelandic independence in Song of the Vikings:

In 1835 four Icelandic students founded a political magazine in Copenhagen. They printed their manifesto in the form of a poem, which "was exactly what was needed in order to unite the Icelandic people," says Karlsson in The History of Iceland (published in 2000 by the University of Minnesota Press).

The only one of their ancestors it evokes is Snorri:

"... Ah! but up on the lava where the Axe River plummets forever
into the Almanna Gorge, Althing is vanished and gone.
Snorri's old site is a sheep-pen; the Law Rock is hidden in heather,
blue with the berries that make boys--and the ravens--a feast.
Oh you children of Iceland, old and young men together!
See how your forefathers' fame faltered--and died from the earth!"

Four lines of this poem by Jonas Hallgrimsson (translated here by Dick Ringler) are engraved on a plaque now standing on the site of Snorri's booth in Thingvellir, the great rift valley in the south of Iceland where the Althing, the yearly parliament of chieftains, met during the Saga Age.

The Althing reconvened as a national parliament, with Danish permission, in 1845. In 1874 Iceland received a new constitution and, in 1904, home rule. One of its first demands was that Denmark return the manuscripts of the sagas that had been collected--mostly by the scholar Arni Magnusson--and brought to the royal library and that of the University of Copenhagen in the early 1700s. The Danes declined.

In 1918 Iceland became a sovereign state in a "personal union" with the Danish king--much like the situation in 1262, when the chieftains swore oaths of loyalty to King Hakon the Old. For its coat-of-arms the new nation turned once again to Snorri.

King Harald, Snorri wrote in Heimskringla, was angry at the Icelanders, who had composed lampoons about him. He ordered a "troll-wise man" to spy out the country's defenses. Disguised as a whale, the wizard swam close to Iceland’s eastern shore: "Then came a great dragon down from the dale" and "blew poison at him." He swam along the north coast, "but there came against him a bird so big that its wings neared the fells on both sides of it." The wizard-whale fled to the west: "Toward him came a great ox that waded out in the sea and began to bellow horribly." Swinging wide, he swam south, "but against him there came a great hill giant who had an iron staff in his hand and bore his head higher than the fells." King Harald was dissuaded from attacking. Iceland's coat-of-arms bears a dragon, an eagle, an ox, and a giant.

The Icelanders repeated their demands to "bring the manuscripts home." The Althing passed resolutions in 1930 and 1938, then their literary quest was interupted by World War II. In April 1940 Denmark was invaded by Germany; a month later Iceland was occupied by the British, one result being Iceland’s final break with Denmark. The independent Republic of Iceland was established at Thingvellir in 1944; in 1947 the Althing resolved, once again, to "bring the manuscripts home."

This time, Denmark formed a committee. In 1961 a list of manuscripts was drawn up, and Iceland agreed to give Denmark twenty-five years to deliver them. Ten years later—after being photographed and conserved—the first set steamed into Reykjavik harbor aboard a Danish coastguard cutter. Thousands of Icelanders stood by the docks. Thousands more watched via the first live outdoor broadcast of the state television station. Eventually 1,666 manuscripts and over 7,000 charters (1,350 of them originals, the rest copies) were returned from Arni Magnusson’s collection—slightly over half of it. Another 141 manuscripts were sent home from the Royal Library. The last arrived in Iceland in 1997.

"People still say: 'We want to see the manuscripts,'" wrote Gisli Sigurdsson and Vesteinn Olason in The Manuscripts of Iceland in 2004. The manuscripts "are at one and the same time the repository of medieval Icelandic culture and its visible symbol." They are Iceland's "main source of pride."

If you are in Iceland, a fitting way to celebrate June 17 would be to visit the Settlement Sagas exhibition of the Reykjavik City Museum.

The Saga Man: Arni Magnusson

Lovers of Icelandic sagas are celebrating these days: It's the 350th birthday of Arni Magnusson, the man who, more than anyone else, saved Iceland's medieval manuscripts.

Brought up at Snorri Sturluson’s ancestral estate of Hvamm in the west of Iceland, Arni went to Copenhagen in 1683, when he was 20 years old, and found work as a copyist and translator for Thomas Bartholin, Jr. With Arni's help, Bartholin published a 700-page history of the Danes in 1689. Drawing examples from Snorri’s Heimskringla, Egil’s Saga, and other sagas, Bartholin’s Danish Antiquities Concerning the Reasons for the Pagan Danes’ Disdain for Death made popular the Viking stereotype of the bold, blond, laugh-in-the-face-of-death hero.

Arni became a professor at the University of Copenhagen in 1701, and the next year the king sent him back to Iceland to gather statistics on his country’s land and people. His massive Land Register, compiled over ten years, describes every farm in Iceland, its size and shape, buildings, people, cows, sheep, horses, the bulk of butter and cloth it owed in tithes, the quality of its turf, peat, hay, and woodlots, its fishing and driftwood rights, and the extent of the property ruined by volcanic ash or sand or rendered useless by quagmires, bogs, erosion, or flooding.

Off the record, Arni asked every farmer about manuscripts—and poked about in every farmhouse. In his novel Iceland's Bell, Halldor Laxness imagines Arni searching every nook and cranny, even the stuffing of the mattress:

Dust and poison gushed up from the old and moldy hay within the woman’s bed as they began their search. Mixed up in the hay was all kinds of garbage, such as bottomless shoe-tatters, shoe-patches, old stocking legs, rotten rags of wadmal, pieces of cord, fibers, fragments of horseshoes, horns, bones, gills, fishtails hard as glass, broken wooden bolts and other scraps of wood, loom-weights, shells both flat and whorled, and starfish. 

There were often also scraps of parchment in hiding places like this: Arni collected every one. He found two leaves from a 13th-century manuscript with holes punched in them to make a flour sifter. He found sheets used as dress patterns, shoe soles, knee patches, and even the stiffening in a bishop’s mitre. He pieced them back into books: One 60-page manuscript came from eight different farms.

When Arni's collection was packed for shipping to Copenhagen in 1720, it filled 55 wooden chests and required 30 packhorses to carry it.

Then in 1728 Copenhagen caught fire. Half of the city was incinerated, including the university library. Arni, disbelieving that fate could be so cruel, refused to evacuate his private library until the fire reached the end of his street. He and two other Icelanders had time to rescue only the oldest books. The rest were lost, including, Arni cried, “books that will never and nowhere be found until doomsday.”

We can only guess what wonderful sagas they held.

But the rest of Arni's collection now fills two libraries named for him, the Arni Magnusson Institute in Iceland and the Arnamagnaean Institute in Copenhagen. The Icelandic one held its birthday celebration last week; Copenhagen's is coming up on Friday. (For details see http://nfi.ku.dk/kalender/arne350-seminar/) I'm looking forward to tipping a glass to Arni's memory.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Purple Parchment and the Cave of Smoo

In the year 997, the excommunicated archbishop of Reims sent the Holy Roman Emperor a kingly gift: a copy of Boethius's On Arithmetic written in gold and silver inks on purple parchment. It had the desired effect. As I wrote in The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages, my biography of that archbishop, the 17-year-old emperor summoned Gerbert of Aurillac to court with the plea, "Pray explain to us the book on arithmetic." Archbishop Gerbert became the emperor's tutor, friend, counselor--and ultimately, through the emperor's influence, Pope Sylvester II, the pope of the Year 1000.

Earlier in this blog, I described how parchment and ink were made in the Middle Ages. (See "How to Make a Medieval Book, Part I" and "How to Make a Medieval Book, Part II.")

But purple parchment? How did they color the parchment purple? I hadn't given that much thought.

Then the other day, researching something quite unrelated--the Viking settlements in northern Scotland--I stumbled upon the answer.

In 1992, a team of archaeologists led by Tony Pollard excavated four neighboring caves in a narrow inlet in Sutherland, one being the famous Smoo Cave. (See the great website, from which these photos of the cave were taken, at www.smoocave.org) In 2005, Pollard posted their report online at www.sair.org.uk/sair18.

"Smoo" comes from the Old Norse word smuga, which Cleasby-Vigfusson, the classic Old Icelandic dictionary, defines as "a narrow cleft to creep through, a hole." The related verb is smjúga, "to creep through a hole" of which the past tense is smaug. Bells are now going off in the heads of all Tolkien readers--but I won't be following that digression any farther.

Back to Smoo Cave. Surprisingly, I had visited the cave in 1995. Two balding Scotsmen with rat tails and earrings took me on a river raft under a low stone arch, across a pool into which a sun-sparkled waterfall fell. In the dark cave, it was a real surprise. We disembarked in the dry inner reaches of the cave and had a geology lesson. The outer, larger cavern was made by the sea: the hole, wider at the bottom than the top, is a blowhole. The inner caverns were made by an underground river that feeds from a large lake. The waterfall only runs when there’s been rain—today’s fall is last night’s rain.

As Pollard points out, Smoo Cave has been a tourist attraction since at least the early 1700s. One practical-minded traveler described it as "stretching pretty far underground with a natural vault above." Inside, "there is room enough for 500 men to exercise their arms." (I'm imagining jumping jacks here--but maybe he means to practice their shooting?) There's "a harbor for big boats" at the cave's mouth, a pool full of trout, and "a spring of excellent water."

Earlier visitors also valued the cave for its usefulness--not its surprising bright waterfall. Pollard and his crew of archeologists found signs that Vikings had used Smoo Cave as a fishing camp, as well as a place to sit out a storm and repair a boat. They may have stopped here on their way from the Orkney Islands to Dublin. They butchered animals and cooked them. They ate dried fish they'd brought with them. They ground grain. They carved pins and knife handles and other useful objects out of antler and bone.

But the most interesting thing the Vikings did at Smoo and its neighboring caves was collect and crack open whelks. These were not just any whelks, but Nucella lapillus, also known as Purpura lapillus, the source since antiquity of a purple dye. These whelks are not edible, and they were not used as fish bait, Pollard says. "It is clear that purple dye was being extracted from the shells recovered from the cave."

The whelks, Pollard writes, "had been split from the second and third whorl and also split from the shoulder to the base.... This would have facilitated the removal of the animal from its shell to extract the ink."

In 1895, archaeologists found "Purpura-mounds" in Connemara, Ireland. The shells in the mounds had been broken exactly like those in Smoo Cave, though in Ireland there were many more of them. One heap measured 165 by 45 feet. In one square foot, the researchers counted two hundred whelks. Purpura-mounds have also been found in Cornwall, England, but Smoo Cave is the first record from Scotland, although the whelk is common there.

To learn how to make the dye known as Tyrean purple, Pollard refers the reader to the 1919 book, Shells as Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture by J.W. Jackson. Like Pollard's own report, Jackson's book is available online. (Historical research is so easy these days!)

Jackson, in turn, cites the first-century Roman writer Pliny to explain that "the precious liquid was obtained from a transparent branching vessel behind the neck of the animal and that at first the material was of the colour and consistency of thick cream."

Several kinds of whelks produced purple dye. Small ones were smashed together in a mortar; if large, "the animal was taken out entire, usually by breaking a hole in the side of the shell, and the sac containing the colouring matter was taken out, either while the animal was still alive, or as soon as possible after death, as otherwise the quality of the dye was impaired." The sacs were salted, allowed to sit for three days, then boiled and frequently skimmed. Exposed to the sun, the fluid (smelling like garlic) slowly changed color, from creamy to yellow, green, blue, and finally a purplish red. After ten days, the dye was ready to use.

To dye wool, a clean fleece was dunked into the boiling dye pot and left to soak for five hours. It was taken out, cooled, and the wool plucked off and carded, only to be "thrown in again, until it had fully imbibed the colour" (still smelling like garlic--one reason the wearers of royal purple robes wore so much perfume, suggests Jackson). It took between one and two pounds of liquid dye to color a half-pound of yarn.

To turn parchment purple, Jackson says, the dye was used as a paint, applied with a brush. The "magnificent and expensive style of writing" on purple parchment with gold and silver inks was mostly confined to sacred texts. Jackson cites an English Bible and a Gospel book, another book of the Gospels commissioned by Louis the Pious, king of France from 814 to 840, and a Book of Prayers, "bound in ivory and studded with gems" owned by his son, King Charles the Bald.

It's significant that Gerbert of Aurillac, who would become "The Scientist Pope," owned a mathematical treatise made in this "magnificent" style. The book still exists in the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg in Germany, where it is catalogued as MS Bamberg Class. 5 (HJ.IV.12), but we don't know how it came into Gerbert's possession. Like the gem-studded prayer book, On Arithmetic was commissioned by King Charles the Bald in about 832. But the dedicatory verses apply equally to the young emperor Otto III as to King Charles, and scholars long thought Gerbert (known as a poet) had written them. Otto III may have thought so too, for he answered the gift with a verse.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

The Pope’s Abacus

When were Arabic numerals introduced into Western Europe? We used to think it was in the 1100s. But scholars studying the life of Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II in 999, have pushed that date back nearly two centuries.

People usually think of a Chinese abacus when they hear the title of my biography of Gerbert, The Abacus and the Cross: colored beads strung on wires set in a frame. Gerbert’s abacus was nothing like that.

It was a counting board: a grid of 27 columns, painted on a flat surface. Later, merchants found having a counting board like this so useful that they drew them on tabletops, which they called “counters.” That is why we now do business “over the counter.”

Arabic Roots

To learn about Gerbert’s abacus, I visited Charles Burnett, Professor of the History of Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute in London. In 2001, Burnett discovered a copy of Gerbert’s abacus. It was a stiff poster-sized sheet of parchment that had been trimmed down and reused in the binding of the Giant Bible made for the abbot of Echternach between 1051 and 1081.

The Bible is owned by the National Library of Luxembourg, which had unbound it in 1940 in order to photograph the pages. The abacus was taken out of the binding and, Burnett told me, “It got put in a box. It got lost in the library for several years. My friend, the librarian of rare books, was tidying up and found the original of the abacus sheet.” Noticing the Arabic numerals along the top, the librarian immediately thought of Burnett, who has been writing about the Arabic roots of mathematics since the 1970s.

Shortly after Burnett announced his find, a librarian at the State Archives of Trier called with word of a matching copy “written in the same bold capital letters,” Burnett says. It was also made at Echternach.

           

This second abacus was bound into a manuscript along with notes on multiplication and division, the use of fractions, the etymology of the word digit, and a poem on the names of the nine Arabic numerals and zero. These notes can be dated to 993. Burnett writes, “They appear to be written by a single scholar, at different times, who has made frequent erasures and corrections.” Burnett thinks he was one of Gerbert’s students.

How to Calculate

To use his abacus, Gerbert had 1000 apices or markers made out of cow’s horn. They looked something like modern checkers. Each one was marked with an Arabic numeral. To calculate, Gerbert placed the markers on the counting board and shuffled them around. He could get the answer, one of his contemporaries wrote, quicker than you could say it in words.

Using these new Arabic numerals, Gerbert’s abacus introduced the “place-value” method of calculating: The place, or column, where the marker sat determined the value of the number written on it, whether it meant 5 or 50 or 500.

In 2003, Burnett was a visiting professor at the University of California. “When I was teaching in Berkeley, I actually reconstructed Gerbert’s abacus,” he told me. “I found a shop that specialized in games for children. I bought one of these big rolls of paper and these lovely large numbers—they could substitute very well for the apices, I thought. I drew the columns on this paper—not 27 of them. I didn’t get as complicated as all that. It’s perfectly possible to work out how the procedure worked.”

Did Gerbert Use Zero?

A zero marker was not strictly necessary—to make 50, you put a 5 in the tens column and leave the ones column blank. But the poem in the Trier manuscript does include a zero, looking like a spoked wheel, so Gerbert may have used it as a placeholder. The idea that zero was an actual number would not arrive until much later.

“In the 1120s,” Burnett explained, “there was a change-over from the abacus to the algorithm. The big change is using pen and paper. Also the sign for zero. So the main difference between the look of Gerbert’s abacus and look of the algorithm is, with the algorithm you don’t actually draw the lines for the columns and you have a zero instead of an empty column.”

For a thousand years, we have added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided essentially the same way Gerbert taught his students at the cathedral of Reims.

Photos & Links:

Arabic numerals appear on two pages from the notebook of  one of Gerbert’s students, which Burnett dates to c. 993. The second page shown here is a copy of Gerbert's abacus board. (From MS Trier, Stadtbibliothek 1093/1694 fol.)

One of the frescoes by Gabor Szinte in the Church of St Simon near Aurillac shows a young Gerbert learning about Arabic numerals in Islamic Spain. You can learn about the frescoes on the Aurillac tourism website, here.

Read more about Professor Charles Burnett and his work at the website of the Warburg Institute, London, here.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in the medieval world.

How to Make a Medieval Book, Part II

As I said last week, for me the hardest part of writing a book is deciding what to say. But in the Middle Ages, as I learned when researching the technology of book-making for The Abacus and the Cross, a lot more work was involved. Last week, we learned how to make the parchment for your book’s pages. Here’s how to make your ink and bind your book.

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:

http://www.cooltour.it/

For an overnight stay, I recommend the farm guesthouse San Martino. It is (of course!) a horse farm within walking distance of the town:

http://www.agriturismo-sanmartino.com/

Bobbio has also been recently identified as the town painted in the background of the Mona Lisa. As one newspaper said, “brace for tourists”!

http://www.newser.com/story/109501/art-historian-identifies-mona-lisas-home-town.html

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

How to Make a Medieval Book

For me, the hardest part of making a book is deciding what to say. In the Middle Ages, there was more to it than that, as I learned when researching the technology of book-making for The Abacus and the Cross. This week and next, I’ll share what I found out.

CoolTour Bobbio: 

Today the greatest Christian library of the early Middle Ages—at the Italian monastery of Bobbio—is empty. Half of its 690 books went to Milan in the 1400s; from there, in the 1600s, some were sent to the Vatican. In 1803, after Napoleon shut down the monastery, the remaining manuscripts were auctioned off. Many were bought by the National Library of Turin, which burned down in 1904. “We don’t have even one to show the kids,” Jessica Lavelli told me. “The library in Milan will not even lend us one.”

An energetic young woman committed to Bobbio’s reputation as the library that “saved civilization” (Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, visited Bobbio, which was founded by an Irish monk), Lavelli makes up with imagination what she lacks in resources. She calls her project CoolTour. From October to March, she invites one school group a week into the monastery and teaches them how to make a manuscript; in April and May, it’s thirty kids a day. “They come from all over northern Italy: Milan, Genova, Brescia, Parma, Cremona. Anywhere that’s less than two hours by bus.”

After a tour of the ancient walled town, with its castle on the hill and its hump-backed Roman bridge over the rushing river Trebbia, the children march through the arched gate behind the basilica and into the high-walled monastery complex. They pass through the cloister, its shady, columned arcades opening onto a sunny square where the monks would have had their herb garden, into a pair of bright classrooms; there they are issued goose quills, ink, and parchment. They learn the history of script from hieroglyphics to computer typesetting and how to make a book starting with the sheep.

Parchment: 

In one corner stands a sample of parchment stretched on a drying frame. “I got a sheepskin from a brasserie, a butcher, last spring,” Lavelli told me. “In Italy, it’s common to eat sheep for Easter, so they had many skins. A lamb would be half this size. From one sheep you can get two pages—four sides when it’s folded. From a lamb you only get one.”

How did she learn to make parchment? “From a book. We found a book and tried to do it. It’s a very long process. It takes four days to prepare and one week to dry, so after about ten days we can cut out our page. You dry it not in the sun or in the dark, but in the penumbra. We put it here”—she motioned toward a shady niche in the cloister where high walls block the sun from three directions. “The smell of the skin is not good,” she added, wrinkling her nose. “When it stops smelling, it’s dry.”

According to Pliny’s Natural History, written in the first century A.D., parchment—in Latin, pergamenum—was invented for the king of Pergamos (modern Bergama, Turkey) to break the Egyptian monopoly on papyrus. The sedge used for papyrus was common only on the banks of the Nile. Sheepskins were everywhere.

 The oldest known recipe for turning sheepskin into parchment was written in the Italian city of Lucca at the end of the eighth century. “Place it in limewater,” it says, “and leave it there for three days and extend it on a frame and scrape it on both sides with a razor and leave it to dry, then do any kind of smoothing that you want.”  A twelfth-century manuscript offers more precise—but still somewhat mysterious—instructions on how “to make parchment from goatskins as it is done in Bologna”; this process takes twenty-four days plus drying. Book conservator Leandro Gottscher compared the two methods during a series of experiments one hot summer in Rome in the 1990s. Both made acceptable parchment, though the shorter soaking time made for harder work scraping off the hair.

The limewater is the key to the process. It was made by burning crushed limestone (or marble, chalk, or shells) in a kiln to make quicklime, placing that in a vat or barrel, and adding a little water. The limewater would seethe and bubble and be ready in about ten minutes. Gottscher spread a pulp of limewater onto the skin, folded it, and set it aside for a few days. Other experimenters prefer to dilute the limewater until it is milky and soak the skin. The lime eats into the epidermis, the outer layers of the skin, loosening the hair on one side and the fat on the other.

To remove the hair, rinse off the lime and pull or pluck out whatever hair you can. (Gloves are a good idea—any remaining lime will eat into your skin too.) Next lay the skin over a log or trestle and rub it with a wooden hone, a bone spatula, or a dull knife, a procedure called scudding.

To remove the fat, the hairless skin can be dunked in fresh limewater or rubbed with lime powder, then spread on the trestle, hair-side down, and scudded again. Lean sheep make better parchment than fat ones; excess fat makes the parchment slippery and the ink doesn’t stick. On the other hand, parchment that is scraped too thin can become wrinkly and transparent.

The dehaired and defatted skin is soaked again and stretched onto a wooden frame to dry. To avoid tearing holes, first wrap a corner of skin around a pebble (called a pippin), tie one end of a cord around the pippin and another to a wooden peg in the frame. As the skin dries, tighten the pegs.

While leather-making is a chemical process, parchment-making is a physical process. What’s left after all the soaking and scudding is mostly collagen, long spiraling proteins that form tough, elastic fibers. As the skin dries, these fibers try to shrink. Stopped by the frame, instead the fibers’ structure begins to change.

When it’s dry, the parchment is scraped again, still on the frame, with a crescent-shaped blade called a lunellum (“little moon”), powdered again with lime or chalk to bleach it, and rubbed thoroughly on both sides with a pumice stone to raise a nap. Then it is taken down and cut into sheets of a standard size. The first sheet is easy: a rectangle that, folded, could become four pages of a large book (or eight pages of a small one). Then the cutter has to become creative: A sheepskin is not square. Where the head, legs, and tail were cut off, the skin curves. Scholars often come across manuscript pages with a corner missing—where a page runs into a neck hole. Other blemishes are insect bites (little holes), wounds on the animal (bigger holes), and gashes (where the knife slipped during the flaying); some of these are sewn up, but usually the scribe just wrote around them.

The color of parchment depends partly on the process and partly on the animal it came from. Low-grade parchment could be dark pinkish-brown with a chalky surface, peppered with hair follicles, streaked with scrape marks, or so thin that the ink bled through. Sheepskin, well cured, was “butter-white” or yellowish, but still sometimes greasy or shiny. Goatskin was greyish. Calfskin was the whitest, though the veins could be prominent. The parchment Jessica Lavelli made to show her pupils at Bobbio had a large brown spot. She shrugged. “It was a spotted sheep! I didn’t think it would matter.”

If you visit Bobbio, check out CoolTour and say hello to Jessica for me:

http://www.cooltour.it/

For an overnight stay, I recommend the farm guesthouse San Martino. It is (of course!) a horse farm within walking distance of the town:

http://www.agriturismo-sanmartino.com/

Bobbio has also been recently identified as the town painted in the background of the Mona Lisa. As one newspaper said, “brace for tourists”!

http://www.newser.com/story/109501/art-historian-identifies-mona-lisas-home-town.html

Photos: Saint Luke at his writing desk, from Bernward's Evangelary (Dom Museum Hildesheim). The town of Bobbio, Italy. Portrait of a scribe from the CoolTour Bobbio website. Detail of a Bobbio manuscript, also from CoolTour Bobbio.

Arabic Science Comes to the West

To write my most recent book, The Abacus and the Cross, I traveled throughout Europe interviewing experts on medieval science around the year 1000, focusing especially on the interests of the Scientist Pope, Gerbert of Aurillac: Arabic numerals, the astrolabe, celestial spheres, the acoustics of organ pipes, and astrology. None of this material made it into the final book, but in coming weeks I'll be sharing here a few vignettes of "the writer at work":

I was in the manuscript reading room of the National Library of France in Paris, a bright, hushed room, floor-to-ceiling bookcases to my left, floor-to-ceiling windows to my right, ranks of long tables studded with wooden bookrests and velvet rolls to gently prop open the fragile parchment pages. Most of the chairs were filled with hunched-over scholars. 

To be admitted I had to write ahead and state my credentials, submit to an interview, show my passport, prove myself a "scholar" by handing over a letter from my publisher, be photographed (at another desk), get a plastic ID card, go down to the cashier and pay seven euros for the card to be activated for three days and to get three paper tickets. Up to the manuscript room, where I handed the ID card and one ticket to the clerk. She gave me a key to a locker, where I had to leave all my belongings except one pencil (not a pen, with which I could deface a manuscript) and a notebook. Reentering the reading room, I had to display my pencil and notebook to the clerk to get back my ID card and the ultimate prize: a plastic block with a number on it. I was then permitted to sit in a chair -- but not look at any manuscripts, yet.

A medieval astronomer. From a
manuscript in Avranches, France.

David Juste, the medievalist from the University of Sydney who had invited me to meet him there, sat down beside me. "What you will see here," he whispered, "is the earliest Latin manuscript to contain Arabic words. The earliest proof of the transmission of Arabic science to the West. Now I will order the manuscript."


He filled out a form and took it to another desk. 

Ten minutes later, the manuscript arrived from the vault. "Believe it or not," Juste said, "I think I have seen two thousand manuscripts in my life, and this was the very first one I saw." 

It was a rather thin little book, with a newish leather binding. The parchment was off-white with brown letters, undistinguished. Juste turned the page, did the classic French kissing of the finger tips: "This is it." 

It was made in Limoges, he told me, slipping on the de riguer white gloves, a hundred miles north of Aurillac, between 978 and 1000 -- during Gerbert of Aurillac's lifetime. Parts were copied from an earlier manuscript, now lost, that Juste believes came from Catalonia; other parts came from Fleury, including a work by Abbot Abbo of Fleury (Gerbert's worst enemy) on cosmology. Most of the book, however, is about fortune-telling and astrology, not what we would call the science of the stars. 

Juste looked around nervously. "Wait a minute. We have to be very careful. I expect we'll get in trouble. We are not supposed to consult the manuscripts together. Why? It's the rules. The rules are very strict. I have an idea." He got up. "I'll try something." He intercepted a different clerk, a young woman who had just come from a back room. She studied me, then curtly nodded. He hurried back and swept up the manuscript.

"This way. I asked for special permission to talk." We went into the back room, where a trio who looked like professor and students were discussing another manuscript. We sat down at the opposite end of the long table; the clerk closed the door.

Juste relaxed. He began flipping through the pages, pointing to letters, running his finger along a line, thumbing pages back and forth -- for all the hoopla, he didn't treat "the earliest proof of the transmission of Arabic science to the West" as a sacred object. It was a book.

photo captions: A medieval astronomer. From a manuscript in Avranches, France. Bernward of Hildesheim presenting his book

to the Virgin (Dom Museum Hildesheim).