![]() Cassiodorus’ over-enthused attitude about copying the good word was certainly not shared by the scribes that actually did the copying in monasteries, but that was in fact the point of manual labor. The process of medieval copying, however biblical or holy, was highly taxing. The Process A scribe at work, from an illuminated manuscript from the Estoire del Saint Graal, France (Royal MS 14 E III c. 30), which seems as noble a purpose as any for devout monks to perform daily as part of their grueling manual labor. ![]() He saw copying biblical texts as spreading the message of the Christian religion and “fighting with pen and ink against the unlawful snares of the devil” (ch. Suddenly, as per popular adoption of Cassiodorus’ Institutes rule book, copying texts of all kinds became an important (and highly pretentious) part of life in monasteries. Soon after, Cassiodorus founded Vivarium in South Italy, and pushed for more than just idly reading texts-he made copying them yet another compulsory task. His Rule of Saint Benedict provides some guidelines for monastic life at Monte Cassino, including a section called “On Daily Manual Labor,” where reading is one of the compulsory activities built into a monk’s very regimented schedule. About two hundred years later in 529 AD, Benedict established Monte Cassino, a soon to be famous Italian monastery close to Rome and Naples, and took literacy one step further than his predecessors. His concept spread rapidly throughout the Eastern Roman Empire, and with it, his expectation for all monks to be literate. Bindings are growth stoppers, and many medieval manuscripts enjoyed freedom and expansion as loose quires (folded sheets of parchment) before getting sewn-locked into wooden or leather covers.It wasn’t until the fourth century AD that the Medieval world was introduced to monastic life, in the form of a devout Egyptian Christian named Pachomius that thought it was a good idea to have an isolated space to be humbly miserable and to worship God at the same time. Anyone could write a text and publish it in manuscript, sharing it freely with others. A manuscript of a medieval chronicle, for example, could be updated with new information across generations. There was also no recognised authority to control publication. And that is because they often grew in time by the addition of new content. In many ways, manuscripts were closer to online forums and social media threads than to printed books. Medieval manuscripts were open-ended and subject to organic growth and limited control. Many scholars believe that a medieval text which originated and circulated in manuscript would be better served by being edited and published online rather than in print so as to reflect its many forms, variants and incarnations – rather than reducing it, anachronistically, to one ‘best text’, which may not even have existed as such. This is the source of the philologists” challenge of finding the master text to base all other copies on. This kind of openness produced a large number of textual forms which defy our dominant paradigm of the ‘original’, ‘genuine’, authorised and ‘standard’. No two manuscripts are identical in the way two printed copies are. Manuscripts were written by scribes, humans who made mistakes in the process of copying other texts. Texts in manuscripts are unstable, in the sense that there is no single version infinitely reproducible through technology. They were open in a way printed books are not. Medieval manuscripts were open objects.Unlike modern printed books, manuscripts encouraged exchange along lines similar to our online media forms. The medieval manuscript was a type of book, but it was a rich media object. That is because of the dominance of manuscripts in transmitting culture and providing exchange between educated individuals. The stage in the history of the written word which comes closest to online media is the 1,000 or so years of medieval book culture.
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