Old Manuscripts

My expectations were really surpassed today when I decided to go on a faculty-invited trip to the University of Erfurt's Library.  We were told we would get to see some old manuscripts.  I expected to see a number of 500+ year old books encased in glass, but instead, we got a one hour engaged conversation with their archivist who had hand picked about 15 books to show us with very interesting examples of historical writings.  He was very well educated and really enjoyed sharing.  He studied in Cambridge and probably spoke/read at least 5 languages including old German, Latin, French, English, and probably Greek. 

I feel very bad that I don't remember his name, but he did note that he forgot his name tag, so...

Here he is with a cart full of his historic collection in the individual grey boxes.  He noted that they were kept in the basement in a climate controlled area that was colder than the reading room.  They were given several hours to come up to the same temperature as the room. 

He started by showing us manuscripts dating back to the 1300s that were copied by hand.  They often had the original text in the center portion, with notations in different script/hand by others in the margins.  These were sometimes notations by the professors who were teaching the contents of the original manuscript to their students.

For many years, books were not really written as a single long manuscript, but were actually compilations of papers that were eventually bound together in a collection.  They did not have a title page or an author as we would expect to find in volumes today.  Most often the binding was wooden (brown part), with a leather cover on the spine (white part).

You can see the different sized pieces of parchment in this bound volume, indicating the collected nature of its parts.

The archivist picked a wide range of different collections to share.  This entire volume was a "medical book" full of tables of the moon's cycle, Saturn's cycle, Jupiter's cycle, etc.  It was a critical reference for any doctor who didn't want to inauspiciously bleed his patients at the wrong astronomical time and put them at risk... (!)  Kind of a weird example of how advanced astronomy was compared to medicine at this time.

The archivist also noted that the scribe had to be particularly careful in copying the text, while a mispelled word might be noted and corrected, an mistake in the number tables would probably never be caught.

This book had a biblical geneology dating back to Adam and Eve.  It included Noah and his three sons, along with an explanation that these three sons were the forefathers of the three continents:  Europe, Africa and Asia (prior to the discovery of the Americas). 

The oldest books we saw were made of parchment from sheeps skin. About 4 pages could be made from one sheep skin, so you can image how costly it was to have a 50 page book copied, just for the cost of the sheep skin alone.   I asked about when they switched to paper and he said it varied considerably and that the British parliament still printed its acts of law on parchment.  He explained that the parchment is very durable.  The wooden based paper of the 1700 and 1800s had a lot of acid in it that caused it to be very brittle and degrade quickly.  I asked about 'non-wooden based' paper.  He explained that some paper was made from rag cloth, wet down and separated out, then dried.  The wire strainer they used to lift out the paper sheets would leave a thinner part on the paper which was the original 'water mark'. 

The archivist set out each of the books in a foam padded podium and then turned by hand to the pages he had marked previously for our review.  He explained that the handling of texts with bare hands vs. cotton gloves was controversial.  He preferred to use his cleanly washed hands than to risk the clumsiness of cotton gloves that might cause physical damage by mishandling the book.

Several of the manuscripts had fold out sections.  This was a stylized map of Jeruselem from the Crusades. 

Each book had a different binding. Those that didn't latch like this had a kind of cinch belt around them.  They are preserved better when bound tightly.

This book still had a very heavy chain attached to it that once bound it to a reading pulpit.  Books often used to be bound in place, so rather than taking a book from a shelf and moving it to where you wanted to read, you went to where it book was to read it. 

Those scribes that copied texts were not necessarily the ones to do the art work.  They would leave a blank square for an ornate first letter to be added on each page. 

Also, they used multicolored inks for writing.  When they started using a printing press, the two colored ink pages were very difficult to do well.  They had to be run through the press twice with two different colors of ink, and the hope that the red would align with the black that was already on the page. 

These were sketches of all of the diplomats who participated in the negotiations of the Treaty of Westphalia!!!

This is a book written by an early paleontologist, shortly after they started finding fossils and he was cataloging them.  His students played a joke on him and placed false 'fossils' on his work site.  He was fooled by them and copied them into his book.  They even included rocks with Hebrew symbols on them.  We know better than to think these would be found in nature today, but apparently they did't know a lot about evolution, etc. at that time - ha!