5 ms·

Hand scribed and illuminated manuscripts used to cost the equivalent of a house today. It's sad to know that those treasures were lost. I wonder how many just e

Hand scribed and illuminated manuscripts used to cost the equivalent of a house today. It's sad to know that those treasures were lost. I wonder how many just ended up in the dump since the owner's descendents didn't think they had value?

yaomtc 4y ago
> Some were destroyed in events like library fires, but others were lost when the parchment they were written on was repurposed. For example, fragments of manuscripts were used to bind books and wrap meat. Tailors also used them as measuring tapes. They were also used as material for a bishop’s miter. I think most of these were lost before any region had one large place known as "the dump", a relatively modern thing
- Bayart 4y ago
  Dumps are as old as urbanism. The largest collection of papyrii is a dump[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri
  - dendrite9 4y ago
    Middens count as dumps I'd argue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden Also that's a fascinating link you shared, thanks.
- bhaak 4y ago
  There's a hill in Rome that's entirely made out millions of amphorae. Gives a fascinating view into Roman mass commerce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio
- bluGill 4y ago
  Parchment doesn't last very long in anything other than ideal environments. Deserts are ideal and so we have found things like the dead sea scrolls in Israel, and Egypt has similar treasures (none I can think of off hand, but they have them). Put parchment in a dump in rainy England and it will rot away in a few hundred years. The manuscripts we have mostly exist because the people of the past (often Christian monks) cared enough about them to make a copy - by hand. (I assume Monks in places like China or India have been making copies in the same way, I just don't know for sure)
  - xhevahir 4y ago
    The Nag Hammadi library is a famous Egyptian one. The story of its discovery and near-destruction is pretty crazy: https://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/nag_hammadi.htm https://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/nag_hammadi.h...
- verbify 4y ago
  They would also rub out the ink and reuse the paper. The term for this is Palimpsest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest I came across this practice when reading the Chapter of Fathers in the Mishna: "Elisha ben Abuyah said: He who learns when a child, to what is he compared? To ink written upon a new writing sheet. And he who learns when an old man, to what is he compared? To ink written on palimpsest. Rabbi Yose ben Judah a man of Kfar Ha-babli said: He who learns from the young, to what is he compared? To one who eats unripe grapes, and drinks wine from his vat; And he who learns from the old, to what is he compared? To one who eats ripe grapes, and drinks old wine. Rabbi [Yehuda] said: don’t look at the container but at that which is in it: there is a new container full of old wine, and an old [container] in which there is not even new [wine]."
coldtea 4y ago
>Hand scribed and illuminated manuscripts used to cost the equivalent of a house today. Somehow, I doubt that. Got a reference?
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Not the OP, but that's an interesting question! Some googling got me to a quote of "Jehan de Sanlis made this for 6 pence per quire", The Hague, Royal Library, MS 71 A 24, 13th century from https://brewminate.com/making-medieval-manuscripts/ https://brewminate.com/making-medieval-manuscripts/ ; I'd guess that illumination and binding these quires (16- or 24-page sheet) doubles the price, so we're at half-pence per page; price summaries from a slightly later time (but different place) like http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html have similar values (~240 pence/ book) and indicate that a small house costs 500-1000 pence, so a house costs something like 1000-2000 pages worth of books, and it's worth taking into account that medieval manuscripts put less words on a page than modern paperbacks, so the same book would be more pages back then. From a different perspective, copying the Bible was said to require 15 months of work (Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies) and the price a small house seems to generally be in the range of 1-2 years salary, so a copy of the Bible - which is on the larger range of books - would be comparable to a house. In any case, an average codex at the time is less than the price of a house but on a similar scale, a collection of a hundred books is comparable to a fancy mansion in the capital.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  Not a house today, but house back then. Another way to look at it was that housing was cheaper (for an arguably much inferior product). I've built some wattle and daub structures and a small house could probably be built in a small number of weeks by a couple of labors. But a manuscript might take a year or more for a scribe to fully copy (with illustrations).
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Books were written on velum. Velum is cowhide. Or more specifically, calfskin. 1 calf -> 1 sheet. How much do 300 head of cattle cost near you? That's before the scribe costs. It also accounts to why parchment was so often re-used, in palimpsests, as discussed by others in this thread. The present-cost equivalent I've heard is from $500k -- $2mm per volume. As of the 10th -- 15th centuries, a large library (e.g., Papal, University of Paris) might contain 2,000 -- 4,000 volumes. The combination of cheap papermaking and the Gutenberg press were an impact that's truly difficult to express today, though of course the webserver is in many ways comparable. If there's a difference, it's that there was simply so little printed material in the 15th century that the flood introduced by printing, and the lifting of previous gatekeepers, was utterly profound. The Web produced a flood of media ... into an already media-saturated world, if one that was centred around a much smaller number of individual works, though even that was large relative to an individual. The US has been publishing ~300k books/year since at least the 1950s. An avid reader might tackle a dozen a year, and a book-a-week is a prodigious pace.
wrp 4y ago
> ...I wonder how many just ended up in the dump... The really sickening part of studying medieval manuscripts is seeing how frequently they were treated as trash by later generations. We have what are now priceless artifacts that were used as cutting boards or had pages ripped out to be used as food wrapping. I think this is especially bad with Old English, because once it became a dead language, hardly anyone saw value in preserving the manuscripts. What we have today of Anglo-Saxon literature mostly survived by accident.

yaomtc 4y ago

> Some were destroyed in events like library fires, but others were lost when the parchment they were written on was repurposed. For example, fragments of manuscripts were used to bind books and wrap meat. Tailors also used them as measuring tapes. They were also used as material for a bishop’s miter. I think most of these were lost before any region had one large place known as "the dump", a relatively modern thing

Bayart 4y ago
Dumps are as old as urbanism. The largest collection of papyrii is a dump[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri
- dendrite9 4y ago
  Middens count as dumps I'd argue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden Also that's a fascinating link you shared, thanks.
bhaak 4y ago
There's a hill in Rome that's entirely made out millions of amphorae. Gives a fascinating view into Roman mass commerce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio
bluGill 4y ago
Parchment doesn't last very long in anything other than ideal environments. Deserts are ideal and so we have found things like the dead sea scrolls in Israel, and Egypt has similar treasures (none I can think of off hand, but they have them). Put parchment in a dump in rainy England and it will rot away in a few hundred years. The manuscripts we have mostly exist because the people of the past (often Christian monks) cared enough about them to make a copy - by hand. (I assume Monks in places like China or India have been making copies in the same way, I just don't know for sure)
- xhevahir 4y ago
  The Nag Hammadi library is a famous Egyptian one. The story of its discovery and near-destruction is pretty crazy: https://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/nag_hammadi.htm https://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/nag_hammadi.h...
verbify 4y ago
They would also rub out the ink and reuse the paper. The term for this is Palimpsest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest I came across this practice when reading the Chapter of Fathers in the Mishna: "Elisha ben Abuyah said: He who learns when a child, to what is he compared? To ink written upon a new writing sheet. And he who learns when an old man, to what is he compared? To ink written on palimpsest. Rabbi Yose ben Judah a man of Kfar Ha-babli said: He who learns from the young, to what is he compared? To one who eats unripe grapes, and drinks wine from his vat; And he who learns from the old, to what is he compared? To one who eats ripe grapes, and drinks old wine. Rabbi [Yehuda] said: don’t look at the container but at that which is in it: there is a new container full of old wine, and an old [container] in which there is not even new [wine]."

coldtea 4y ago

>Hand scribed and illuminated manuscripts used to cost the equivalent of a house today. Somehow, I doubt that. Got a reference?

PeterisP 4y ago
Not the OP, but that's an interesting question! Some googling got me to a quote of "Jehan de Sanlis made this for 6 pence per quire", The Hague, Royal Library, MS 71 A 24, 13th century from https://brewminate.com/making-medieval-manuscripts/ https://brewminate.com/making-medieval-manuscripts/ ; I'd guess that illumination and binding these quires (16- or 24-page sheet) doubles the price, so we're at half-pence per page; price summaries from a slightly later time (but different place) like http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html have similar values (~240 pence/ book) and indicate that a small house costs 500-1000 pence, so a house costs something like 1000-2000 pages worth of books, and it's worth taking into account that medieval manuscripts put less words on a page than modern paperbacks, so the same book would be more pages back then. From a different perspective, copying the Bible was said to require 15 months of work (Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies) and the price a small house seems to generally be in the range of 1-2 years salary, so a copy of the Bible - which is on the larger range of books - would be comparable to a house. In any case, an average codex at the time is less than the price of a house but on a similar scale, a collection of a hundred books is comparable to a fancy mansion in the capital.
jacobr1 4y ago
Not a house today, but house back then. Another way to look at it was that housing was cheaper (for an arguably much inferior product). I've built some wattle and daub structures and a small house could probably be built in a small number of weeks by a couple of labors. But a manuscript might take a year or more for a scribe to fully copy (with illustrations).
dredmorbius 4y ago
Books were written on velum. Velum is cowhide. Or more specifically, calfskin. 1 calf -> 1 sheet. How much do 300 head of cattle cost near you? That's before the scribe costs. It also accounts to why parchment was so often re-used, in palimpsests, as discussed by others in this thread. The present-cost equivalent I've heard is from $500k -- $2mm per volume. As of the 10th -- 15th centuries, a large library (e.g., Papal, University of Paris) might contain 2,000 -- 4,000 volumes. The combination of cheap papermaking and the Gutenberg press were an impact that's truly difficult to express today, though of course the webserver is in many ways comparable. If there's a difference, it's that there was simply so little printed material in the 15th century that the flood introduced by printing, and the lifting of previous gatekeepers, was utterly profound. The Web produced a flood of media ... into an already media-saturated world, if one that was centred around a much smaller number of individual works, though even that was large relative to an individual. The US has been publishing ~300k books/year since at least the 1950s. An avid reader might tackle a dozen a year, and a book-a-week is a prodigious pace.

wrp 4y ago

> ...I wonder how many just ended up in the dump... The really sickening part of studying medieval manuscripts is seeing how frequently they were treated as trash by later generations. We have what are now priceless artifacts that were used as cutting boards or had pages ripped out to be used as food wrapping. I think this is especially bad with Old English, because once it became a dead language, hardly anyone saw value in preserving the manuscripts. What we have today of Anglo-Saxon literature mostly survived by accident.