In the early 1070s, the monk Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to St. Anselm, abbot of Bec in Normandy, seeking a significant favor: he wanted to borrow a book. Two, actually. The volumes Lanfranc sought comprised the Moralia in Job, a commentary on the Book of Job by Pope Gregory the Great. Written some five centuries earlier, it would have to be copied by scribes in the cathedral city of Caen.
Lanfranc wasn’t the only cleric looking to borrow the Moralia. Among copies of Anselm’s letters, now in the British Library, is one he wrote to a fellow cleric apologizing for not being able to accommodate a similar request. “Do not think we do not want to lend it to you,” Anselm explained. As soon as the copyists at Caen finished with it, the abbot wrote, “we will gladly hand it to your lord’s messenger.”
Frustrating as it could be to have cherished books “forever absent on loan to scribes elsewhere,” that was one price monasteries paid for the privilege of producing and collecting manuscripts, which were often lavishly illuminated. The journey of the Moralia was just one of many examples of how such manuscripts changed hands over the centuries, their tortuous paths compellingly traced in an appropriately lavish volume by British academic librarian and medieval manuscript authority Christopher de Hamel.
De Hamel devotes each of the book’s twelve chapters to a different historical figure, whether producer or collector, from the eleventh through the early twentieth centuries. Some are saints, others con-men, with varying levels of wealth and belief in God. All share a passion for illuminated manuscripts that over time were “bought and sold, neglected or treasured, used, copied, taken apart and not always reassembled, rediscovered, loved, read, ignored, identified,” and ultimately deposited in public collections like the British Library.
For the monks of Bec and other monastic communities throughout Europe, books were “necessary at the very least for the daily recitation of the liturgy” but also facilitated theological study and contemplative devotion. Most surviving European manuscripts dating before 1100 were produced in monastic settings—the continent’s “earliest publishing houses,” as de Hamel calls them—where the copying of a religious text “was itself a devotional exercise.”
Laypeople—almost always wealthy ones such as France’s Duc de Berry—commissioned and collected them as well. The Duc’s Tres Riches Heures, a sumptuously illustrated prayer book made around 1415, ostensibly aided his private prayer. Yet it was also a showpiece, a prized possession that featured among other conspicuous devotional objects, including the supposed engagement ring given to the Virgin Mary by Joseph, acquired in Venice. (The duke’s treasurer was skeptical of the ring’s authenticity.)
Further south, in Florence, book production evolved from the devotional to the transactional, with prominent booksellers like Vespasiano da Bisticci rising to prominence during the late fifteenth century. Noticing the increasingly wealthy lay public’s growing appetite for classic texts in Greek and Latin, Vespasiano “had the acumen to capture the thrill of the moment and to turn it into a business,” stocking the libraries of powerful figures like Cosimo de’ Medici. Tellingly, one of Vespasiano’s scribes signed and dated the last page of a five-volume set of the works of Cicero on a Sunday, when no monastic scribe would ever work.
Religious books remained in demand, however, giving rise to a “fraternity of professionals” that included not only scribes, parchment sellers, and bookbinders, but painters as well. One of the most skilled was Belgium’s Simon Bening, whose detailed scenes of the Nativity, the denial of Peter, and portraits of Mary in pastoral settings made him one of the most sought-after illustrators of the sixteenth century. De Hamel’s visit to Bening’s home city of Bruges yields an encounter with Brody Neuenschwander, a modern scribe and illuminator. Such is Neuenschwander’s dedication to emulating Bening’s work that he even uses quills made from swan feathers gathered along Bruges’s canals.
