3 - Demand and Supply: Production and Provision of Books for Priests

Summary

Books were expensive, labor-intensive commodities in the early medieval period. Their production required the availability of treated and prepared skins, ink, quills, and literate individuals who had received scribal training. Obtaining exemplars for the copying of a particular book would also have been a necessity and may at times have proven challenging, particularly for relatively small centers of book production as opposed to major scriptoria. In addition, copying books took a great deal of time on the part of a scribe, as a skilled copyist might write only seven pages per day, and some books were copied at a considerably slower rate. In short, the production of books in the Middle Ages represented a significant investment of time and resources. Considering the great expense of obtaining books and the modest financial status of many early medieval priests, how were priests able to get access to the volumes they needed to carry out their pastoral duties? The nature of priestly ministry requires the availability of books, and a consideration of the production and provision of priestly books will help to illustrate the accessibility of pastoral texts to priests as well as wider relationships between priests, ecclesiastical authorities, and lay lords.

Issues of medieval book production

Before moving on to consider the production of books for priests in the late Anglo-Saxon period, an important issue to consider is how we define the term scriptorium. This term evokes images of monastic scribes hunched over writing desks, but the definition of what constitutes a scriptorium has been the subject of some disagreement. David Ganz has argued that the defining characteristic of a scriptorium is a “shared scribal discipline”, particularly as an aspect of monastic discipline, and therefore that a scriptorium is not simply a group of scribes working under the same roof but “a means of training scribes and of producing manuscripts in a homogeneous style”. Conversely, Richard Gameson has offered a more inclusive definition of a scriptorium as simply a place in which books were produced, though he also recognizes the more restrictive definition of a scriptorium as “an organised group of scribes, decorators and binders”. The more inclusive definition of a scriptorium is more helpful in thinking about diverse centers of book production, whereas Ganz's definition seems to be conceived specifically with monastic scriptoria in mind and with a view of scribal discipline as integrally related to monastic discipline.