Manuscripts and monasteries

B.N.Goswamy

“A monastery without books is like a state without its troops, like a castle without walls, a kitchen without utensils, a table with no dishes upon it, a garden without herbs, a meadow without flowers, a tree without leaves.”

— Jakob Louber

 Prior of the Carthusian 

Convent in Basle

“He (the miniaturist Oderisi of Gubbio) is a master of those arts which are called illumination in Paris. Behind this term lies the Latin illuminare, meaning ‘to light up’. (His work) lights up the pages.”

— Dante

Writing about the Purgatory section of his Divine Comedy

Speaking of illuminated books, my mind travels, inevitably, in two different directions. The first to Umberto Eco’s classic work, The Name of the Rose, in which he describes, at great length, the scriptorium in the monastery where so much of the mysterious action of his novel takes place. In exquisite detail he speaks of the atmosphere inside the scriptorium — literally, a ‘place for writing’: piles of manuscripts lying around, some neatly arranged, others in disorder; monks bending over their desks, patiently copying earlier texts word for word, letter for letter; rulers and pens and ink-pots; superiors keeping a stern eye. A whole scene jumps out from Eco’s pages: textured, colourful and dark at the same time, traces of incense wafting about.

The second direction towards which my mind goes is when I was asked to curate an exhibition of Indian manuscripts at the Frankfurt Book Fair some 10 years ago, when India was to be the honoured guest country. It was a task hard to accomplish on two counts. Remarkably little was at hand when it came to any old texts that described the practice, not the fact, of manuscript writing or illuminating in early India. And, with very little emphasis on calligraphy in our land, except in the Arabic/Persian tradition, one could not hope to display anything of exceptional quality, especially in Europe where there was a long and distinguished history of manuscript writing. One had to develop, therefore, a different strategy for showcasing the Indian tradition. That, however, is another story.

With these two fairly intact memories in view, what I am inclined to do in this short piece is to draw attention to one, just one, aspect of the tradition of manuscript illustration in the West: the sheer amount of technical information we have from there, and how precisely it is recorded. Take the case of writing materials alone. There were three main materials, one learns, on which texts were written: papyrus, parchment, and paper. Papyrus, first documented in Egypt in the 4th century BC, was prepared from the pith of the papyrus stem and glued together into what was called a rotolus. Parchment was made from skins, chiefly of sheep and goats, which were first soaked in limewater and then stretched on large frames and smoothed and polished. As material it was very durable, but it was also very expensive: it has been estimated that for producing a monumental full length Bible, the skin of around 500 animals was needed. Paper, first invented in China from vegetable fibres and torn rags, roughly in the 2nd century, travelled from there to places like Samarkand and Baghdad, and finally, through Arab traders, reached Europe, becoming the material of choice from the 11th century onwards.

In the monasteries of Christian churches, countless manuscripts were produced; Bibles of course, but also psalters, missals, temporals, breviaries, antiphonaries, apocalypses and books of hours. The last category is especially of great interest because it served both the church and the laity, considering that its contents were not only prayers and calendars of sacred dates and events, but also showed common people at labour in different seasons. Probably the most lavishly illustrated Book of Hours that has survived is the Tres Riches Heures which belonged to the early 15th century French prince, the Duc de Berry. One has to see it, or a comparable Book, to take in how exquisitely detailed the plan of a double illuminated page was. There were precise terms established for every single feature: the recto in the book as it opened was the page at right, the verso the page at left; there were illuminated initials and historiated and Fleuronnee initials, text blocks and line fillers and ornamental borders. And, of course, the miniatures around which everything moved.

Is this brief? All too brief? Of course it is. But then there is a whole world out there.