Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Manuscript culture persisted in its essentials across the whole medieval millennium from 500 to 1500: the use of parchment, the privileging of the clergy, the use of the Latin language and of Latin alphabetical script (even for writing vernacular languages), the practice of illumination, the form of the codex itself – all these features persisted, though in varied forms. The period after 1100 witnessed thinner parchment (together with the increasing use of paper), new orders of clergy, the Twelfth-century Renaissance in scholasticism and then Humanist Latin, Gothic and cursive scripts, illuminated books for lay people, and even some challenges to the codex form itself from the use of rolls: one thirteenth-century manuscript of the English lawbook Glanvill is in the form of a roll more than eight feet long.The most obvious difference from the preceding period is that many more writings survive from the years after 1100 and there is no doubt that more writing was being done, both for purposes of secular government and commerce and for religious reasons. By 1200, most scribes were professionals instead of being monks. But the clerical orders reinforced their ideological control over literacy through the new institution of the university, instead of the monastery, and through the Dominican and Franciscan Friars who took the lead from monks in the thirteenth century. Their Bibles and ... log in or subscribe to read full text