Chapter 2 - The Bible as Book

Summary

In popular usage, the Bible is referred to as “the good book.” But was the Bible always a book? Until the beginning of the Christian era, bibles were contained on scrolls or on collections of scrolls. For most of the Middle Ages, most bound “bibles” contained parts of the Bible rather than a complete set of both testaments. Not until the third decade of the thirteenth century did bibles start to resemble more or less what we expect to see in a bible today: a one-volume bound book (called a codex; see the following discussion in this chapter) in a portable format. The process of making a book was immensely laborious, and the materials (especially vellum) were prohibitively expensive. Western Europe became acquainted with the technique of making paper, which was much cheaper than vellum, in the twelfth century, but it did not become common until the fifteenth century. Books, and especially bibles (which were often more elaborately illuminated than other codices), were a precious resource, more than just a carrier of text. This chapter explores the history of the Bible as a physical artifact. It looks at the Bible as a book and at how it became a book in the modern sense. It also explores who made books, who owned them, how they were used, and who had access to them.

A tenth-century Anglo-Saxon riddle describes the elaborate process that went into the making of a bible. The riddle asks, “Who am I? First I was killed by an enemy, soaked in water and dried in the sun, where I lost all my hair. After that, I was stretched out and scraped with a knife blade and smoothed. Then I was folded, and a bird's feather traveled over my surface, back and forth, leaving black marks. Finally I was bound and covered with skin, gilded, and beautifully decorated.”