Long before the printing press, medieval Europe had a thriving book industry involving scribes, illuminators, bookbinders and booksellers. Lucie Laumonier reveals how specialised workshops, second-hand bookshops and skilled artisans made the production and sale of manuscripts a surprisingly complex business.
By Lucie Laumonier
For a long time, monks were the ones making medieval books. They patiently copied and illuminated manuscripts in monasteries and convents. By about the year 1200, however, book production had begun escaping the enclosure of monastic houses and was gradually becoming a lay commercial endeavour. The book industry slowly structured itself; mentions of guilds of writers, limners (illuminators), bookbinders and booksellers appeared in various documents. These artisans produced and sold a wide array of manuscripts, some richly decorated, some of simpler making, which today are preserved in archival repositories and national libraries.
Material: Ink, Paper, Parchment and Paint
Ink pot – Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 8850, fol. 123v.
To make books, one needed to access ink, paper and parchment. Scribes, or writers, typically prepared their own. A wealth of recipes for making black ink were written down in technical treatises, which displayed great variations in ingredients and techniques, both dependent on the availability of local products. A fifteenth-century Castilian recipe for ink, for instance, read:
In order to prepare ink without using fire, take thirty ounces of red wine, put
in three ounces of galls from the Levante, well ground, and leave it to rest for
three days, stirring six or seven times a day. After the three days you will add
two ounces of Roman vitriol and one ounce of gum Arabic, well ground. After
mixing well, you must leave it to sit for twenty-four hours and you should find
the mixture turned into good ink.
By the thirteenth century, parchment and vellum were primarily used to bind books (or to write charters!). Both are made from animal skin, such as sheep, goat or calf. In England, the oldest evidence of parchment making as a separate and specialised trade dates from the twelfth century, when a parchment maker from Leicester, named Gervase, was named in the city’s records. But parchment and vellum were expensive products. The introduction of paper in Europe (via Spain through North Africa and the Middle East) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contributed to the great expansion of record-keeping and of the book industry. In England, paper only arrived at the beginning of the fourteenth century; it was imported in large quantities by Genoese merchants and English tradesmen to fulfil the needs of the ever-expanding royal administration. Scribes and writers quickly adopted paper to write and copy clerical and secular texts.
Finished parchment made of goatskin stretched on a wooden frame – photo by Michal Maňas / Wikimedia Commons
But the adoption of paper was not a linear process, and many feared it would not have the durability of parchment. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny in the twelfth century, stated that it was “inferior material” and despised its use by Spanish monks, for paper was made of “scraps of old rags, or, perhaps, from even viler stuff.” Indeed, paper didn’t derive from tree pulp like today. Medieval paper was a byproduct of rag-pulp. Rags (pieces of fabric) were dipped into boiled parchment or a liquor typically used in leather tanning, which made the final product more resistant, thicker and stronger than the paper we use now.
For scribes, rag-pulp paper had another advantage: it absorbs the ink—whereas ink on parchment remains at the surface—and thus grants greater longevity to the writing. A fascinating feature of medieval paper is that papermakers, whether Italian, Spanish, French or Flemish, watermarked their production. It is therefore possible to trace the origins of the paper used to make books and records by examining their watermark.
An illuminator at work -Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Latin 4915, fol. 1r.
Last but not least, some books were richly illuminated. The decoration of the pages thus required the expertise of illuminators (called “limners” in English sources) with knowledge of colour making. Treatises on colours, pigments and paint were quite common in the European Middle Ages. One of the oldest dates from the eighth or ninth century and is known as the Lucca Manuscript. This Italian treatise offers recipes related to the preparation of colours (using minerals and vegetables) used in miniatures. Here is a recipe to make green ink, taken from De coloribus et artibus romanorum—a compilation of recipes dating from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries:
Of a green colour for writing. If you wish to embellish your writing with a green colour, mix vinegar together with strong honey, and then cover up the vase itself in very hot dung; and so take it out after twelve days shall have elapsed.
Scholars have identified dozens of manuscripts, some in Hebrew, others in Arabic, in Latin and in Vernacular languages, that address the making of paints destined to illuminate manuscripts. One fifteenth-century treatise, written in Portuguese, was for instance titled The Book on How to Make all the Colour Paints for Illuminating Books. The treatise’s author detailed recipes for ten colours, using insects and plants as base.
Guilds and the Medieval Book Trade
A 16th-century book merchant – Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Amb. 279.2° fol. 31v
In Paris, book production was already in full swing in the thirteenth century. But unlike the other Parisian guilds, which were subject to the authority of the Provost of Paris, artisans working in the book industry were considered subjects of the University of Paris. Their statutes and the settlement of their disputes were the University’s remit. The Parisian book industry comprised, between c. 1295-1300, 157 artisans such as parchment makers, writers, illuminators, bookbinders, and booksellers.
The artisans had settled in two neighbourhoods. First, on the left bank of the Seine River, about 22 parchment makers, two booksellers and one illuminator resided on the rue aux Écrivains (the Writers’ Street). On a perpendicular street lived 26 illuminators, eight bookbinders and one parchment maker. The second area was close to the cathedral Notre-Dame, on the Île de la Cité. That community comprised 21 booksellers, six illuminators, five book-binders and one parchment maker. Other booksellers were scattered across the city, with higher concentrations of book stores close to the colleges, universities and convents.
An illuminatrix at work by Jeanne de Montbaston, perhaps a self-portrait. Roman de la Rose, BnF fr. 25526, fol. 77v.
Women played an active role in the industry. Out of the 157 Parisian artisans from c. 1295-1300, 18 were women. Tax records show a woman named Aaliz de l’Escurel, a bookseller who worked with her son and one waged employee from 1292 to 1299. Another female bookseller was Julienne le Jeune, widow of a bookseller who took over her husband’s business in 1296. Another Julienne took the reins of her husband’s book-binding business after he passed, in 1297. During the same period, a male bookseller, Guérin l’Englais, lived next door to his daughter Bourgot, described in tax records as an illuminator. The most famous female illuminator is Jeanne de Montbaston, who worked alongside her husband before he died in 1353, and then helmed the workshop herself.
Across the Channel in London, records of the emergence of guilds of book artisans are a little more recent. Guilds of textwriters and limners have been identified in records from the 1350s and, by 1373, the scriveners had formed their own guild. In 1403, the guild of Stationers emerged, which represented the interests of several artisans involved in book production. The term “stationer” is fairly confusing: it was used to denote people who sold writing supplies, book-sellers, or a book-contractor who received an order for a client and contracted artisans in order to produce a book. The stationers ultimately gained a monopoly over printing but had already asserted, in the fifteenth century, their control over the book trade through the commissioning of books, oversight of their production and commercial distribution. In the fifteenth century, some 260 artisans worked in the London book industry. Their activities concentrated in the streets, lanes and rows near the old St Paul’s Cathedral, in proximity to grammar schools. Evidence of women involved in the English book industry is scarcer than in Paris, but some did work in the artisanal trades. Alice Drax, for instance, described as a bookbinder, received payments in 1408 from the Wardrobe Account of Henry IV.
New or Second-hand?
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms-5208 réserve, fol. 1r.
Booksellers (or stationers) sold second-hand books and commissioned the making of new ones. In Paris, rules written in 1275 sought to prohibit booksellers from buying used books at very low prices and reselling them for an insane amount of money. The text said that booksellers should practice “honest” and “just pricing”. Inventories of some London stationers’ stocks show that some of them sold books that were more than a century old.
Stationers acquired used books from estate sales (after a person’s death), from University students and masters, or from readers who had grown tired of some of their books. Because of their expertise in buying and selling books, stationers were sometimes called to appraise a deceased individual’s collection. In the middle of the fifteenth century, for instance, London stationer William Barough was often called on to assess market prices for books seized by courts in actions of debt.
Stationers (or booksellers) could also act as middlemen in the commissioning of new books. Their role as intermediaries between the buyers and the artisans involved in book production is attested in continental Europe, such as in France, Belgium and the Low Countries, and in England. Stationers received orders for new books from clients, then subcontracted and coordinated the work of writers, limners and bookbinders until the books were ready.
Stationers sometimes provided the parchment and paper needed for the book’s completion. Such is the case of bookseller and entrepreneur Thévenin Langevin, a stationer from late fourteenth-century France, who oversaw the completion of several manuscripts for Louis d’Orléans, the duke of Burgundy and brother of king Charles VI. Langevin was receiving payments to purchase the primary material and to pay “the writers and illuminators who write and illuminate said books”. Several artisans sometimes collaborated in the making of a book, as we can see from different handwriting and different styles of illumination in the same manuscripts.
Next time you look at a late medieval manuscript, think about all the artisans involved in its making!
Long before the printing press, medieval Europe had a thriving book industry involving scribes, illuminators, bookbinders and booksellers. Lucie Laumonier reveals how specialised workshops, second-hand bookshops and skilled artisans made the production and sale of manuscripts a surprisingly complex business.
By Lucie Laumonier
For a long time, monks were the ones making medieval books. They patiently copied and illuminated manuscripts in monasteries and convents. By about the year 1200, however, book production had begun escaping the enclosure of monastic houses and was gradually becoming a lay commercial endeavour. The book industry slowly structured itself; mentions of guilds of writers, limners (illuminators), bookbinders and booksellers appeared in various documents. These artisans produced and sold a wide array of manuscripts, some richly decorated, some of simpler making, which today are preserved in archival repositories and national libraries.
Material: Ink, Paper, Parchment and Paint
To make books, one needed to access ink, paper and parchment. Scribes, or writers, typically prepared their own. A wealth of recipes for making black ink were written down in technical treatises, which displayed great variations in ingredients and techniques, both dependent on the availability of local products. A fifteenth-century Castilian recipe for ink, for instance, read:
In order to prepare ink without using fire, take thirty ounces of red wine, put
in three ounces of galls from the Levante, well ground, and leave it to rest for
three days, stirring six or seven times a day. After the three days you will add
two ounces of Roman vitriol and one ounce of gum Arabic, well ground. After
mixing well, you must leave it to sit for twenty-four hours and you should find
the mixture turned into good ink.
By the thirteenth century, parchment and vellum were primarily used to bind books (or to write charters!). Both are made from animal skin, such as sheep, goat or calf. In England, the oldest evidence of parchment making as a separate and specialised trade dates from the twelfth century, when a parchment maker from Leicester, named Gervase, was named in the city’s records. But parchment and vellum were expensive products. The introduction of paper in Europe (via Spain through North Africa and the Middle East) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contributed to the great expansion of record-keeping and of the book industry. In England, paper only arrived at the beginning of the fourteenth century; it was imported in large quantities by Genoese merchants and English tradesmen to fulfil the needs of the ever-expanding royal administration. Scribes and writers quickly adopted paper to write and copy clerical and secular texts.
But the adoption of paper was not a linear process, and many feared it would not have the durability of parchment. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny in the twelfth century, stated that it was “inferior material” and despised its use by Spanish monks, for paper was made of “scraps of old rags, or, perhaps, from even viler stuff.” Indeed, paper didn’t derive from tree pulp like today. Medieval paper was a byproduct of rag-pulp. Rags (pieces of fabric) were dipped into boiled parchment or a liquor typically used in leather tanning, which made the final product more resistant, thicker and stronger than the paper we use now.
For scribes, rag-pulp paper had another advantage: it absorbs the ink—whereas ink on parchment remains at the surface—and thus grants greater longevity to the writing. A fascinating feature of medieval paper is that papermakers, whether Italian, Spanish, French or Flemish, watermarked their production. It is therefore possible to trace the origins of the paper used to make books and records by examining their watermark.
Last but not least, some books were richly illuminated. The decoration of the pages thus required the expertise of illuminators (called “limners” in English sources) with knowledge of colour making. Treatises on colours, pigments and paint were quite common in the European Middle Ages. One of the oldest dates from the eighth or ninth century and is known as the Lucca Manuscript. This Italian treatise offers recipes related to the preparation of colours (using minerals and vegetables) used in miniatures. Here is a recipe to make green ink, taken from De coloribus et artibus romanorum—a compilation of recipes dating from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries:
Of a green colour for writing. If you wish to embellish your writing with a green colour, mix vinegar together with strong honey, and then cover up the vase itself in very hot dung; and so take it out after twelve days shall have elapsed.
Scholars have identified dozens of manuscripts, some in Hebrew, others in Arabic, in Latin and in Vernacular languages, that address the making of paints destined to illuminate manuscripts. One fifteenth-century treatise, written in Portuguese, was for instance titled The Book on How to Make all the Colour Paints for Illuminating Books. The treatise’s author detailed recipes for ten colours, using insects and plants as base.
Guilds and the Medieval Book Trade
In Paris, book production was already in full swing in the thirteenth century. But unlike the other Parisian guilds, which were subject to the authority of the Provost of Paris, artisans working in the book industry were considered subjects of the University of Paris. Their statutes and the settlement of their disputes were the University’s remit. The Parisian book industry comprised, between c. 1295-1300, 157 artisans such as parchment makers, writers, illuminators, bookbinders, and booksellers.
The artisans had settled in two neighbourhoods. First, on the left bank of the Seine River, about 22 parchment makers, two booksellers and one illuminator resided on the rue aux Écrivains (the Writers’ Street). On a perpendicular street lived 26 illuminators, eight bookbinders and one parchment maker. The second area was close to the cathedral Notre-Dame, on the Île de la Cité. That community comprised 21 booksellers, six illuminators, five book-binders and one parchment maker. Other booksellers were scattered across the city, with higher concentrations of book stores close to the colleges, universities and convents.
Women played an active role in the industry. Out of the 157 Parisian artisans from c. 1295-1300, 18 were women. Tax records show a woman named Aaliz de l’Escurel, a bookseller who worked with her son and one waged employee from 1292 to 1299. Another female bookseller was Julienne le Jeune, widow of a bookseller who took over her husband’s business in 1296. Another Julienne took the reins of her husband’s book-binding business after he passed, in 1297. During the same period, a male bookseller, Guérin l’Englais, lived next door to his daughter Bourgot, described in tax records as an illuminator. The most famous female illuminator is Jeanne de Montbaston, who worked alongside her husband before he died in 1353, and then helmed the workshop herself.
Across the Channel in London, records of the emergence of guilds of book artisans are a little more recent. Guilds of textwriters and limners have been identified in records from the 1350s and, by 1373, the scriveners had formed their own guild. In 1403, the guild of Stationers emerged, which represented the interests of several artisans involved in book production. The term “stationer” is fairly confusing: it was used to denote people who sold writing supplies, book-sellers, or a book-contractor who received an order for a client and contracted artisans in order to produce a book. The stationers ultimately gained a monopoly over printing but had already asserted, in the fifteenth century, their control over the book trade through the commissioning of books, oversight of their production and commercial distribution. In the fifteenth century, some 260 artisans worked in the London book industry. Their activities concentrated in the streets, lanes and rows near the old St Paul’s Cathedral, in proximity to grammar schools. Evidence of women involved in the English book industry is scarcer than in Paris, but some did work in the artisanal trades. Alice Drax, for instance, described as a bookbinder, received payments in 1408 from the Wardrobe Account of Henry IV.
New or Second-hand?
Booksellers (or stationers) sold second-hand books and commissioned the making of new ones. In Paris, rules written in 1275 sought to prohibit booksellers from buying used books at very low prices and reselling them for an insane amount of money. The text said that booksellers should practice “honest” and “just pricing”. Inventories of some London stationers’ stocks show that some of them sold books that were more than a century old.
Stationers acquired used books from estate sales (after a person’s death), from University students and masters, or from readers who had grown tired of some of their books. Because of their expertise in buying and selling books, stationers were sometimes called to appraise a deceased individual’s collection. In the middle of the fifteenth century, for instance, London stationer William Barough was often called on to assess market prices for books seized by courts in actions of debt.
Stationers (or booksellers) could also act as middlemen in the commissioning of new books. Their role as intermediaries between the buyers and the artisans involved in book production is attested in continental Europe, such as in France, Belgium and the Low Countries, and in England. Stationers received orders for new books from clients, then subcontracted and coordinated the work of writers, limners and bookbinders until the books were ready.
Stationers sometimes provided the parchment and paper needed for the book’s completion. Such is the case of bookseller and entrepreneur Thévenin Langevin, a stationer from late fourteenth-century France, who oversaw the completion of several manuscripts for Louis d’Orléans, the duke of Burgundy and brother of king Charles VI. Langevin was receiving payments to purchase the primary material and to pay “the writers and illuminators who write and illuminate said books”. Several artisans sometimes collaborated in the making of a book, as we can see from different handwriting and different styles of illumination in the same manuscripts.
Next time you look at a late medieval manuscript, think about all the artisans involved in its making!
Lucie Laumonier is a medieval historian and professor at Concordia University, Montreal. Her newest book is Charity and Community in Montpellier, 13th–16th Centuries: The Multiplication of Loaves. You can follow Lucie on Instagram @lucie_in_academia
Click here to read more from Lucie Laumonier
Further Readings:
Kouky Fianu, “Familles et solidarités dans les métiers du livre parisiens au XIVe siècle”, Médiévales, n°19 (1990)
Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (eds.), The Production of Books in England 1350-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Ricardo Córdoba (ed.), Craft Treatises and Handbooks: The Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the Middle Ages (Brepols: 2013)
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