Medieval Book Production and Monastic Life - Dartmouth Ancient Books Lab - 0 views
sites.dartmouth.edu/...k-production-and-monastic-life
book production manuscript monastery copying classical texts Byzantine medieval ancient books
shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 20
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From the start of the boom in copying practices in the fourth century AD, Greek and Latin mythical and literary classics were the predominant texts copied up until about the sixth century, when Christian texts started to replace them due to the rise of the Christian religion
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Here the “dark ages” of Greek and Latin literature descended upon ancient manuscripts, neglected on monasteries’ library shelves, not to be copied because of newfound disinterest in them as compared to Christian texts. This neglect caused the older manuscripts to decay faster than they normally would, because no one was particularly interested in their well-being. Some pagan manuscripts were even reused for writing new biblical copies down, because of the high cost of parchment. The old ink would either be washed or more commonly scraped off, and the new text written over, to create a “palimpsest”--literally Greek for “scraped again.”
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This was the Carolingian Revival, when the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne reinvigorated the learning spirit in monasteries across the empire. He recruited major scholarly figures and poets from around the world to gather at his palace, which became a center for scholarship with its vast library of Charlemagne himself
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Most manuscripts from antiquity don't survive to the present day because of these and other natural causes. Some interest in pagan literature still survived, of course, in the Greek Byzantine Empire, where the people never truly stopped caring about their ancient mythology, but got close to forgetting about it for awhile. What manuscripts survived only survived because of the strength of the papyrus or parchment they were written on, until about the mid-eighth to the early ninth century, when a classical revival took place.
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Monastic libraries once again flourished and copying of Greek and Latin classics restarted, this time on an unprecedented scale under Charlemagne’s reign. Illumination finally came into use, although very archaic (literally borrowing motifs from antiquity) at first with limited colors, but breaking out into elaborate designs seen in canon tables in copies of the Bible and colored initials to start the major lines of a text. Special scholarly editions of manuscripts also started to be published, with scholia, or commentary paratext, taking up stretches of the page longer than the actual text itself. The Ninth Century Renaissance in the Eastern Byzantine Empire mostly focused on this newfound scholarship, with the founding of literary and poetic groups and the re-founding of schools in major cities
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The Carolingian Revival is the single most important event in classical literary history, because of this sudden extreme interest in classical texts that were copied and spread like wildfire. This single-handedly saved ancient texts which do not have any surviving manuscripts from antiquity, making the Carolingian Era manuscripts the only surviving and most important texts we have. It is because of those book productions in the medieval world that we have most of the Greek and Latin classics we have today, which just may validate all the hard work done by scribal monks living quietly in the far remote reaches of society so long ago.