Gone Medieval - Medieval Manuscripts & Their Makers

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

Medieval manuscripts can shed light on some of the most important events of the past. But what about the physical manuscripts themselves? And what can they tell us about the people who made them? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt is joined by author Mary Wellesley as they examine the extraordinary work of the people behind the text.Mary Wellesley is the author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers, published by Quercus Publishing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. Medieval manuscripts are some of our most important sources for the events that took place hundreds of years ago. But what about the physical objects themselves? What can they tell us about their creators, their owners, and even their own journey through the centuries to reach us? Well, if you've ever wondered, I've got the perfect person to

answer those questions for you. Mary Wellesley is the author of Hidden Hands, The Lives of of Manuscripts and Their Makers, one of the most fascinating books I've read in a long time. So thank you very much for joining us, Mary. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. So just to get us started, I guess our 101 history, what is a manuscript? When we talk about a manuscript, I think one of the things you do in your book really well is explain a lot of the terminology that sometimes is taken for granted that we understand. So you point out the differences between a manuscript and a text. So if you could just help us out with a little bit of that to get us going, please. Sure. So a manuscript, well, it's a duet of two Latin words, a manis meaning hand, and from Scriberi Latin to write. So it just means, in its

simplest sense, a handwritten object. So it could mean a map or a charter or a copy of a poem. It's important to make that distinction between the manuscript, which is the physical remains of the text and the text itself. So if we take something like, say, Chaucer's Candid, Canterbury Tales, that survives in around 98 manuscripts in varying degrees of completeness. So when we talk about the text of the Canterbury Tales, we're not talking about one single manuscript. We're talking about multiple different versions of the text over time. And to me, that's part of the magic of manuscripts. It's about what a text meant in a particular cultural moment and what it meant to its readers

and the scribes who made it or the annotators or the editors who handled it. So in essence, when we talk about a text, we're talking about the Canterbury Tales as a narrative story. And when we talk about a manuscript, we're talking about an individual copy of that. Exactly. And of course, a text could be anything from a literary text to say a legal document. I mean, it's a broad definition. And you also point out the differences in your books between scribes, artists, authors. Can you just give us a brief overview of what those different roles are?

Yeah, so I think it's a common misconception that many. of the manuscripts that survive from of literary texts from the Middle Ages were written by scribe authors. In fact, to find a manuscript that was written in the hand of an author is incredibly rare. And so most often what we have with say, well, the Canterbury Tales, for example, what we have is a scribe's interpretation. Sometimes we have the little mistakes that they made and the changes that they felt were necessary. And so the scribes' labour is really quite distinct from that of the authors. And it's one of the things that literies, scholars of the Middle Ages really scratch their heads about, which is, you know, is it ever possible to get back to the original

words of the author when the scribe has been the mediator, perhaps even centuries after the text was first composed? I suppose that's particularly difficult where it might be an oral history that's come down to us and someone at some point has just chosen to write it down in whatever condition that oral history was in at a point in time. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, if you take bear wolf, for example, you know, the great gem of early medieval English literature, I always like to think about the bearwulf manuscript as being a bit like a kind of insect held in amber, that we imagine the kind of life of the text being like the insect going around, buzzing, doing its thing, being an insect. And then it's caught and preserved at this one particular moment in time in its amber.

And that's what the manuscript is. It's holding the text at a particular time. And of course, that poem appears to have been composed or at least to contain elements of a pre-Christian past. And it's then been kind of repurposed in a Christian era. And so it's very difficult to know what the text perhaps originally looked like or whether it perhaps our modern idea of a text as something that is fixed and stable is really an inheritance of printing and of print culture, which conditions us to think of a text as a concrete thing. And actually perhaps in the Middle Ages, the idea of a text was something infinitely more fluid

and perhaps even more web-like that there were multiple different texts and they intersected with one another. And I suppose they could serve a purpose at any given point in time to tell a particular story to reflect the concerns of the day in which it's being told. So as you say, we're seeing a snapshot of what Beowulf looked like

at that moment it was preserved and perhaps affected by everything that's going on around it at that time and the concerns of the scribe at that point. Exactly. And the scribe often seems kind of, well, whether it's the scribe or whoever it is, seems concerned about the fact that what they are describing is this kind of pagan past and probably a bit concerned that these people, well, they're all going to go to hell because they were from this pre-Christian period. But it's nonetheless somehow kind of delights in the description of the pre-Christian rituals. So it's a kind of interesting mixture in that sense.

It's fascinating to think about what the story might have been like before and how it might have developed if it hadn't ever hit the printing press, as you say, and being kind of encapsulated in that moment in time. You're also talking your book about the materials that are used for manuscripts, so a little bit about vellum, paper. What's the main difference between the materials that these manuscripts are prepared on? Yeah, so in the early medieval period, manuscripts were predominantly written on parchment, also called vellum. The terms are often used interchangeably. Parchment is the prepared skin of an animal, most often sheep or calves, and it was incredibly labour-intensive process to prepare the folios. And I went to the only parchment makers that's left in the UK, a place called William Cowley's, and watched this extraordinary kind of alchemy where these

lumpy, hairy, fleshy, animal hides that had come straight from the abattoir, were transformed into this amazing, pristine, milky surface, which kind of invites the scribe to then cover it with words and often beautiful illuminations. And it really isn't an almost magical thing to watch it happening. But it's important to remember how labor intensive it was, how expensive parchment was. Towards the end of the medieval period from around the 14th century, although there are some slightly earlier, a week at paper arrives from the continent. And it's to make a rough generalization, It's a slightly cheaper writing material, and so kind of lower status manuscripts tend to be written on paper. The great thing about medieval paper is that it's made from rags, basically, from material that is sort of boiled down into a big vat,

and then kind of lift it out in a sort of sieve and press between layers of felt. And so it's actually a lot more durable than modern paper. Modern paper is made from wood pulp, and if you've ever seen a kind of paper back from even, well, even say, 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, you'll see it kind of withers like a sort of autumn leaf and it's all yellowed. And one of the things I say in the book is that sometimes in a way, library conservation departments have more of a headache from cheap 20th century paperbacks with glued spines than they do with these extraordinary huge parchment manuscripts, which are very durable. I mean, the Codex Sinaiaticus, an important manuscript of the New Testament of the Bible,

part of it made in the 5th century and it's in pretty amazing Nick given how old it is. It's incredible how much each stage of the process of creating this final manuscript is in itself a huge endeavour, a huge labour of love from creating the vellum to the scribes writing on it to the artists illustrating it to even the bindings and things like that. It's so much of a process to create one of these things. Yeah and if you were to think about say one of these manuscripts was destroyed and you decided that what you were going to do was to create a perfect replica of that manuscript. Think about the number of man hours involved in creating that.

I mean, obviously manuscripts today command a very high price in the sale room because of their cultural value. But if you just think about their intrinsic value, the cost of replicating that object, you have this extraordinary appreciation of their worth. So before we dive into a bit more about the specifics of the stories that your book explores, What inspired you to investigate the makers of manuscripts, the fragility of their survival as well, of some of these documents into our own era? What drove you to write this book? Well, in a simple sense, I was aware that there were very few books written for the general reader about manuscripts.

And I felt like that was a real shame because I really love manuscripts. It's what I wrote my PhD on. And I think they're no less interesting than, say, old master paintings. And yet there are hundreds of books aimed at the general reader about art history. example. One of the problems is that manuscripts are very inaccessible. They're both intellectually inaccessible because they're generally written in languages that have completely evolved today and are now unintelligible to the modern reader, you know, like Old English or Middle English, very different from modern English or Latin, which is no longer spoken. And they're also written

in these scripts, which are very difficult to decipher unless you're a specialist. And they're also physically inaccessible because they're held in research libraries and they're generally reserved only for scholars, it is possible to get to see these manuscripts if you have a valid scholarly reason, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove that you do have a valid scholarly reason to see them. And when you see a manuscript in, say, a gallery setting, what you see is only one opening. And seeing one opening of a manuscript is a bit like deciding to look at a kind of credit card-sized area of an old master painting. It really is not giving you the full picture. But what's really wonderful about writing about manuscripts now is that so many manuscripts are now digitized. And so

you or I could sit at home in our pajamas and look at the bear wolf manuscript in a kind of level of magnification that we could never even achieve in the reading room in clothing more suitable to scholarly study. So I wanted to write about manuscripts for those reasons. But my personal love of manuscripts comes from the fact that when you sit in the velvety silence of a special collections reading room and you turn the pages of a manuscript, what you have is this kind of tangible, smellable, visual encounter with the past, and more importantly with the people who made the object in front of you. And every time I open a manuscript, it feels like an encounter, an encounter or with a person from the past.

And most often that person is the scribe. And one of the things I love is that you have in front of you perhaps many months, even years of somebody's life all laid out in the words that they copied. And most often they're completely anonymous. Otherwise, nothing else of them survives. And so it's this brief connection with this life now long receded. Don't suppose you get too much of that today, do you?

We're all keen to put our names on our. our books and make sure everybody knows what we wrote. It doesn't seem to have been so much of a concern of some of the scribes in the past. I guess the monks, maybe they felt it wasn't important that they were doing it, that their name was on it. It was just important that it was done, that it was God's work. Absolutely. And I think that's one of the things I find so endlessly fascinating about studying the Middle Ages is it's just our attitude to say authorship or to fame to literary fame is just so radically different. The number of anonymous literary works that survive from the Middle Ages is huge. And that is almost inconceivable now.

Yeah. So if we dive into some of the stories that are in your book, I think one of the fascinating aspects that you explore is some of the accidental discoveries, sometimes relatively recently, of some of the texts that might still remain lost to us. So how do these things end up hidden and then rediscovered? I think a really good example you mentioned early in the book is the St. Cuthbert Gospel. How was that found? And why is it important? Well, this is a great story. So in 1104, a new shrine had been built at Durham Cathedral, and the monks of Durham Cathedral decided to move the coffin of St. Cuthbert, who was the most venerated sort of relic of the community. On opening the coffin, they discovered on a little shelf

above St. Cuthbert's head, this tiny book. It's only about three and a half inches by five and a half inches. It's this tiny little thing. And I always say about it that it's tiny size betrays nothing of its status as a cultural monolith because it is the earliest intact European book. It was made at some point at the end of the 7th century, possibly the beginning of the 8th, and placed into Cuthbert's coffin probably quite soon after he died. And to look at it today, you might think it looks perhaps a little bit plain, a little bit boring. It has this dark red leather cover with this raised design on the same. the front. But when you examine it and you take in the little details, you suddenly start to get

this wonderful sense of the manuscript as an object created by this lively community that was part of a sophisticated intellectual network. I mean, you might think that a book written by a scribe in the early medieval period, you know, in the end of the 7th century beginning of the 8th, perhaps this was a book written by a monk at the edges of the known world. But the manuscript tells us otherwise, if you were to open it up and you could take the binding off, you would see that it's stitched in a stitching method called Coptic chain stitch. Now, this seems like a boring detail, but what's important about it is that that's a stitching method that comes from the Near East. Equally, the front cover has this design on it, which is almost identical to a design that we find on the doors of a Coptic church that date from around the 5th or the 6th century in Cairo.

And so we have this lovely sense of the intellectual sophistication of the craftsman that made this object. And when you open it up, it doesn't have any illumination, but I mean, this is nerdy, but the folios are incredibly beautiful. It's written in a script called Unseal script, which has these lovely, soft, inky sweeps. It's not written in a cursive script, which means basically like joined up handwriting. It's written in this very painstaking way. and the scribes clearly spent a long time working on it. And the spacing between the words is very generous and the margins are very generous.

Now, again, those are small details. They seem unimportant, but they indicate that this was not a manuscript that was made on the cheap. You know, parchment was a very expensive material and the scribe was not afraid to use this material liberally. So it's like saying, look at all this real estate that I can afford to leave empty, because this is such an amazing manuscript.

Exactly. Incredible to think that if they hadn't opened Cuthbert's coffin for reasons that were at the time they needed to move the body. But if they hadn't opened that coffin, we would never have even known that that was there. Exactly. And I think what's important is that Lindisfarne monastery where Cuthbert was originally from and where the monks had originally come from before they came to Durham had been attacked by Vikings. And after around a century of repeated attacks in the kind of latter end of the 9th century that the monks lived, left Lindisfand, and they went on this kind of wandering course all around the north of England, settling in different places before they eventually came to Durham and set up their community there.

And what's important about that is it shows that so many monastic institutions were attacked by Vikings in this period, and some of the great libraries of the north of England were all but destroyed. And so books that survive from this period are really important. So the fact that it survives in itself is amazing, but the fact that it survives in its original binding is kind of nothing short of a miracle. Amazing. And I mention that some of the discoveries are relatively at least recent, and one of those that you talk about in the book is the book of Marjorie Kemp.

Again, can you tell us a little bit about how that was found and why that's so important? Yeah, so this is a great story. So there was a family called the Butler Bowden family, who were a Catholic family, and they were playing ping pong one day in their house near Chesterfield. And somebody trod on a ping pong ball, and so they went to the cupboard to go and get another ping-pong ball. And on opening the cupboard, this pile of books fell out, and one of these books had a slightly kind of mouse-eaten cover,

didn't look very prepossessing. And Lieutenant Colonel Butlerbaum was infuriated by this, what he described as an undisciplined pile of book clutter, and he threatened to throw the whole lot on the fire the next morning. And mercifully, one of the houseguests said, don't throw them on the fire. Let's have a look at them. Let's see if there's something interesting in here.

And he discovered that one of these texts was a Middle English text, and he thought it looked very interesting. So he invited a friend to come and examine it. And the friend then took it back to London, and it was subsequently identified to be the lost book of Marjorie Kemp. Now, the book of Marjorie Kemp is the first piece of autobiographical writing in English. It's a really extraordinary text written by a kind of ordinary, perhaps we might even say middle class, whatever that means in the medieval period, ordinary woman in 15th century Norfolk.

And Kemp had this extraordinary life. She was the mother of 14 children. She worked variously as a horse mill operator and a brewer. And after the traumatic birth of her first child, she had what perhaps today we might term postpartum psychosis, but it manifested itself in her. She describes how she lost her mind and she was chained up and she didn't really know who anyone was. And it's a very disturbing description of her self-harming. And in this kind of terrible moment, she has this vision of Jesus. And this begins a pattern throughout her life of visions of Christ and various saints. And she has this extraordinary life. She chooses to become what's called a vower, so she took religious vows without actually being attached to any kind of institution.

and she travelled all over England. She went to Jerusalem, she went to Compostella. So she had this incredible life, but also what's important about her is kind of although she was extraordinary, she was also very ordinary. And crucially, Marjorie Kemp was illiterate. And so she had to dictate this work

to several different amanuensies, so that's just means a scribe who heard her words and wrote them down for her. She made four different attempts to get it written down. And I really think that story of her kind of determination to make her story heard is really important and very inspiring. Now, the text only survived in one manuscript, and until 1944, when the Butler Bowden family were playing their fateful ping pong game, the only known version of the text was some

heavily abbreviated printed extracts, which were printed in 501 by Winkinder Word, who inherited the printing press from William Caxson, who was England's first printer. and that text is very, very different from Kemp's because in it Marjorie's voice has been completely removed and all we have are the sections in the text where she has a vision of Christ and Christ speaks to her. So she becomes this silent, weeping, submissive woman and Christ is the main voice in the text. So were it not for this manuscript, we wouldn't have this really important piece of literature that describes the experiences of an ordinary illiterate woman from the late medieval period.

Wow, and so that accidental discovery kind of recovered Marjorie for us and inserted her back into her own story for us to be able to see that now. Exactly. And incredible to think that it was a day away from the fire, maybe. And so a slightly frightening thought that brings us on to the next thing we're going to talk about that you cover in your book, which I found really fascinating. and again, horrific and horrible as well. And that's the Ashburnham House Fire in 1731.

Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about and what was involved and what was potentially lost there, please? Yeah, so there was a man called Robert Cotton, who was an antiquarian, i.e. a person who collected the material remains of the past, be that manuscripts or seals or charters or coins or maps or whatever. And in the Elizabethan period, he amassed this extraordinary collection of manuscripts, the biggest collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts ever put together. It was about 1,400 manuscripts in total, 1,500 seals and charters. It included the only copy of Bear Wolf, which survived in one manuscript, the only copy of Saga Wayne and the Green Knight,

the state papers of Henry VIII, the state papers of Elizabeth I, two copies of the Magna Carta. so a really profoundly important collection. He left it to his son and then was left to his grandson. And then his grandson left it to the nation. And it was stored in various different locations, but none of these locations were thought to be appropriate. And so the government set about looking for better home for the manuscript,

at which point they alighted on the ominously named Ash Burnham House, which you would think they might have had some inkling of what was going to happen. Anyway, on the 23rd of October 1731, at this time the collection was being cared for by a man called Richard Bentley. And his father, also called Richard Bentley, was Master of Trinity College in Cambridge. And he came down to London for the night to visit his son. And coming to visit his son, of course, a good fire was made in his lodgings, which unfortunately were on the floor below the library. And at around 2 a.m., a great smoke was detected. and the fire had started in the mantelpiece and then it had spread along the wainscote.

And in the kind of initial instance, this desperate attempt was made to put the fire out, which was actually an error. What they should have done immediately was just to try and get the manuscripts out of the floor above. So it's dark, it's the middle of the night, it's only a very slim crescent moon. Ashburnham House is quite cramped at the time. It doesn't really have very much space outside it. for people to muster. The fire engines, such as they were, were very slow to come.

And the librarians begin this desperate salvage operation. They managed to get some presses, which are basically these big bookshelves out. And the bookshelves, incidentally, each one had the bust of a Roman emperor above it, and that is reflected in the names of the manuscripts today. So the Beowulf manuscript is Cotton Vitellius A-15. So that means it was in the press, the bookshelf,

that had the little statue of Vitellius at the top, and it was on the first shelf, A, and it was the 15th one along. Anyway, so they managed to get some of the whole presses out, but others just succumbed to the flame, so the Otho press was almost completely destroyed. And some of them, the fire traveled up the backs of the presses along the walls, and so there are these terrifying near misses where we can see manuscripts with kind of singed edges.

At a certain point, the librarians just decided to start throwing things out of the window. And we're not sure whether it was thrown out of the window or whether it was carried out, but one of those manuscripts was indeed the Beirwolf manuscript, which has these very fragile edges to its folios because the flames came very, very close to destroying it. And at the time, there was no other copy, there was no printed edition. This was the only what we call witness to the text of Beowulf, the great gem of early English literature. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast,

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You know, literally pulling these things out of the flames and stamping out the fire on the edge. of them and hoping that enough of it has survived? Yeah, and so Ashburnham House was in the grounds of, it still is indeed, in the grounds of Westminster School right next to Westminster Cathedral. And the pupils from Westminster School apparently came in the night to try and help with salvaging the manuscripts, but, I mean, you have to hope that they were actually helpful rather than a hindrance.

And there's this very sad story about them walking around the next day and gathering up these little fragments of manuscripts that were kind of fluttering in the breeze. and you just think what was there. Horrifying. Do we know of anything significant? I guess it's all significant, but do we know of anything really significant that was lost in the Ashburnham House fire?

Yes, many significant things were lost. At the latest estimate, we think that fewer manuscripts were completely destroyed than was initially thought. But there are texts that were completely destroyed. So, for example, one of the best sources we have for Alfred the Great is a biography of him written by Asa. and copies of it were luckily made by a sort of circle of antiquarians around Robert Cotton.

So we do have a witness to that text, but the earliest manuscript, the only medieval copy of that text, perished completely in the fire. And when I was researching the book, I looked into it and I realized that some fragments of that manuscript did survive into the 19th century. And in the 19th century, during the time of Sir Frederick Madden, who was the keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum as it then was, the manuscript was sent to be rebound and there was unfortunately a fire in the boundary and it was burned a second time. Wow, it seems like a cursed manuscript to some extent. Someone was determined that it should burn. Did this event change the way that

some of these ancient manuscripts were cared for and looked after after that? Yes, I mean, I would be wary of attributing kind of causality to the creation of the British Library because there were, well, the British Museum as it was then before it became a distinct entity as the British Library in the 1970s. But certainly the terrible events of the 23rd of October 1731, the night of the cotton fire, really made people aware of how precious this bibliographic heritage was and how important it was that it should be cared for in an appropriate way because it was, you know, the memory of the nation. It was a very important part of our shared literary culture.

well, not just literary, I mean historical culture as well. And so alongside the Harley Collection and the Royal Collection, the Cotton Collection became one of the so-called founder collections of the British Museum, subsequently the British Library. Fascinating. It's frightening how precarious some of these survivals are and how lucky we are that they've managed to make it all the way to us so far. And the other really fascinating aspect of the things that you deal with in the book are the people who crafted some of these incredible and delicate treasures.

And as I think we've said, they're often lost to us, so they're often anonymous, and they get kind of lost amid their work. But can you tell us a bit about who these kinds of people were? So, again, these are divided into, as we talked about earlier, kind of artists and scribes. So I think for artists, you particularly talk about the Winchester Bible. And although we don't have names for the artists in that, they're kind of given titles so that we can identify the individuals who are working on it. Yeah, so the Winchester Bible is this extraordinary, huge, great, big 12th century Bible.

It's now bound in four volumes, but originally it would have been in two. And it's the work of multiple different artists. And the reason I wanted to discuss it in the book is it really reminds us about how different artistic practice was in the Middle Ages to how it is today. I mean, our notion of an artist today, if I ask you to give a description of what an artist is, you perhaps might conjure up, you know, an image of some great genius working alone in a sort of Garrett studio, perhaps. But in the Middle Ages, artistic practice was much more often collaborative. And what I love about the Winchester Bible is that although, as you say, we don't know the names of these

different artists, we can see the way they collaborated. We can see the way one artist would do an underdrawing and another one would come along and do the gilding or the painting. The other thing that's great about the Winchester Bible is it's unfinished. Now, that might, make it sound like it looks a little shabby. It certainly doesn't look shabby. But what's important is that we can see the different stages involved. And I kind of love that. It feels like you're able to sort of lift the lid, you know, lift the bonnet and see the workings of the artistic engine. Another key feature of the artist of the Winchester Bible is that a bit like I was saying about the Cuthbert Gospel that perhaps you might imagine it's made entirely by rather sort of parochial

minded local artisans. It's not. We can tell that the artists who work, worked on it also travelled all around Europe. They probably saw some very important mosaics in Sicily, and it seems as though two of them also worked on these frescoes in a monastery in northern Spain. So we have this wonderful sense of these international travellers who were kind of most likely very highly prized for their skill coming together and working on this great magisterial artefact. So it's quite a clear physical demonstration of the extent to which, which the medieval world, at least Europe and probably beyond, was really connected at this point,

that ideas and people and influences and art would travel across the continent. So as you say, it's not just that these things are restricted to some monk in a northern monastery doing whatever he thinks. He would have been drawing on influences from all over the known world. Absolutely. I mean, of course, it's unclear how much ordinary people travelled, but certainly ecclesiastical, royal aristocratic elites did move around a lot. And there was, as you say, an enormous exchange of books and goods and ideas.

And you see that all the way through the medieval period. And one of the other manuscripts that you talk about a lot in the book that's really interesting, I think, is the literal sultan. And I think the images in there, the kind of marginal drawings, we can divide into two categories. So we've got these really nice pastoral scenes of everyday life in the countryside. And then we've got this absolutely mental stuff going on around it that makes no sense to me whatsoever. Is there a reason behind those two kind of juxtapositions? Is this just somebody having fun after a glass of wine on a Sunday? I don't know.

That is such a wonderful question and one I thought about endlessly. I think the other thing to say about the lateral sultan is a bit like the Winchester Bible. It was produced by a workshop. It was produced by a group of artists. And one of the kind of recent interpretations of it thinks about these group of artists working together and kind of suggests that maybe some of the madder illuminations are just what the scholar Paul Binsky calls small group humor. You know, the idea that they're kind of a bit of an in-joke. And to some degree, I think that is a really helpful explanation for what's going on.

But I also think it's important to remember that we have this modern urge to interpret and to attribute meaning and to see a relationship between the words of the Psalms, because it is a sultan, it is a copy of the Psalms, to see a relationship between this kind of beautiful, devout text, which is so beautifully copied, much like the Cuthbert Gospel, copied in this very formal script that required a lot of pen lifts, it might have even taken years to copy, some relationship between that text, which looks so somber and important, and this kind of anarchic, surreal reality that's happening at the borders of the text. But I think a lot of that is our modern sensibility that the medieval mind didn't see those things as a contradiction.

And there's something so gloriously playful. I mean, I think that we make a distinction between kind of sacred and profane, which probably the medieval mind didn't really see that distinction so clearly. I think we're maybe being far too serious and we're, you know, catching our chins and desperately trying to see what this image means. When it doesn't mean anything, it's just there for you to enjoy or to make you laugh. Or, you know, some artist thought before I hand this folio off, I'm going to dodle something in the corner that will make the next guy laugh, and he'll try and do something a bit more extreme that will make the next guy laugh.

Or that perhaps because religion has been further pushed away from the kind of centrality of our lives today, you know, religion was everywhere. The mass, the performance of the liturgy, you know, the saying of the Psalms was just, the kind of central to medieval people's experience of life. And so they didn't really see, because this was just everyday reality, of course, you could have this slightly wild and anarchic and funny and interesting thing happening at the borders, because that was just sort of part of life. It wasn't that it existed in this kind of separate realm.

So can you give us an example of maybe one of the more rural pastoral scenes that we get in the Lutral Salters? Yeah, there's a lovely image on Folio 170 Verso, and in it we see this man sewing seeds, and what's so lovely here as everywhere in this manuscript, particularly the sections that are done by the so-called lutral master, is the little details here. So we see this man he's wearing, it's probably a kind of cold early spring day, or perhaps he's sewing winter wheat, it's the winter. He's wearing a hood.

He's also wearing a hand. you know, we feel like it's a cold morning. We can see all the little details, the buckle of his belt, and he's holding this basket in front of him. We can see his shoes quite clearly. And he's spreading the seed out in front of him. And right in front of him is a dog, and the dog is leaping up to chase away a crow

that appears to have just come down to try and steal some of the seed. And yet what the viewer sees and this man doesn't see is that behind him there's a sack of grain which another naughty crow is coming to feast on. And there's just something so lovely about this, the kind of playfulness of it. And of course we have to be a bit wary about seeing this as a kind of perfect, realistic example of medieval agricultural life. But nonetheless, I think a lot of these little details give this wonderful lender realism to the images that really connects us to this reality of agricultural life in 14th century Lincolnshire. Yeah, some of those look a lot like the monk, you know, is offering us a photograph, what we would call a photograph.

So they're giving us a snapshot of what they might have seen in the fields when they were walking around one day. Or, you know, I saw this guy chasing off crows from the seeds that he'd sown. And behind him, there was a crow eating the whole sackfall. So he may just be presenting us with something that he's seen or whatever else. But, okay, enough of those images, though. Have you got a favorite, crazy, nutty, weird image in the lateral salters? Yeah, so some of them are. these images that are wonderfully kind of surreal. So there's a great one on Folio, 38 recto,

where we see a monkey who's riding a goat and he's out hawking, clearly going to hunt, using a bird of prey, and he's got an owl on his glove. And again, all the little details are so beautifully realized. We see all the little details of his sword and his belt. And in scenes like this, what we have is all the different elements are recognized. recognizable features of real life. It's their combination together that makes them kind of surreal. But then there are also these other images in the manuscript called hybrids, sometimes called grotesques, which are just these very strange creatures, you know, has the body of a tiger, but it's got, you know, the feet of a cow and the beak of a bird or something like that. Creatures that you just don't know

where they came from. What kind of strange recesses of the artist's mind did they spring from? It's like someone's left a page open on one of those children's books, isn't it, where you've got three different levels of a character or a person in uniform to make up and you can make weird combinations of them out of the animals. Someone's just done that and left it there for us to see and who knows what that means. Exactly. And the joke is now lost to us. And the other people who appear in your book, the scribes who you identify, some of those I think were really, really fascinating story.

So Bishop Edfrith, I was fascinated by with the Lindersfah and Gospels. Can you tell us a little bit about him? what we know about him and his work on the Lindisfarne Gospel? Yeah, so we don't know a huge amount about him prior to or separate from the Lindisfarne Gospels. In fact, we wouldn't have even known that he had worked as the scribe illuminator. He was both the artist and the scribe of this manuscript. We wouldn't have even known that he'd worked on it if it wasn't for an annotator who came several centuries later in about 970, an annotator called Aldred, who wrote this little note at the back saying,

you know, this book was created by Bishop Airdfrith. Bishop Eidfrith made the manuscript in the early 8th century. We're not quite sure exactly what happened, but it seems as though he retreated to a little island off Lindisfarne, which was this monastic foundation on an island off the coast of Lindisfarne. So another little island beyond the main monastery during the period of Lent, and he worked on this manuscript as a kind of form of Lenton devotion. and I love this idea that the manuscript was a piece of devotional labour that took many years to complete.

It's both a beautiful piece of text. The script itself is stunning, but in it the script becomes artwork in itself because the letters have this extraordinary kind of Celtic interlaced pattern, which is almost impossible to kind of make out. But when you look closely, you see this amazing eddying, writhing, writhes, design of different snakes and animals and birds. And here, word, letter becomes artwork. One of the stories that I really, really enjoyed or found fascinating from that part of the

book was this idea about the red dots that the bishop had put in there, and that each word that he wrote, or each of these red dots, was like inflicting a wound on the devil. I think there's a quote in there that says Satan receives as many wounds as the scribe writes words of the Lord. So this idea that you were damaging the devil by going and doing this lenten piece of work of creating this book and all of these little red dots might be little wounds. He feels like he's inflicting on the devil in God's name. Yes, we don't know for certain that that's what Bishop Eidfreyth was thinking about when he created these little dots, but this is

a lovely quotation from Cassiodorus and the de institutions. But again, yeah, I love this idea that particularly for the early medieval scribe, this was kind of almost like religious warfare to copy these texts. But also what I like about this idea of these little red dots being like little kind of wounds on the back of the devil is it does sort of remind us of the fleshiness of what's in front of you, the fact that it was made on parchment, that it was, you know, it was a dead animal skin. And there's something very strange about the sort of fleshiness of the object in front of you. I found his story really, really interesting, I think. And you managed to pull out several female writers through the course of the book for us. So the Book of Nunnaminster and Maria

France crops up as well. And early named female writers whose works survived to us. How hard was it to find some of these women and how rewarding is it to be able to find some really early female poets and things like that? Yeah, it's great that you use the word writer because that can encompass both a scribe but also an author. And one of the things I really wanted to do in the book was I tried to mention women in every single chapter because I wanted to make clear that women were involved in the production of manuscripts at every level. And there is this kind of misconception that manuscripts were only made by monks. And that's wrong on two levels. Firstly, many manuscripts were made in secular contexts. So like, for example, the Lutral Salta, which appears to have been made in a

professional workshop, but also a lot of manuscripts were made by women. And from the earliest period, I mean, there's this wonderful letter from Bonifus, who's a missionary who went to to Germany to bring Christianity to Germany. And he had this circle of highly educated women around him who helped him in his missionary work. He recruited them to come to Germany. And then he was also corresponding with these women back in England. And he writes this wonderful letter to Abbas Erdberg, who is Abbas of Wimborn in Dorset. And he says, I beg you further to add what you've done already by making a copy written in gold of the epistles of my master, St. Peter, the apostle, to impress honor and reverence for the sacred scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach.

So what he's saying in this letter is that he wants the penwomenhip of Airdberger, is only her craftsmanship that will pass muster, that will convey the sense of the importance of the scripture to these unconverted heathens. We also know from another letter that Airdberger wrote poetry, and she clearly had this very high level of education. I think it's a common misconception that women in the middle ages weren't educated. Certainly ordinary women weren't, but women who were part of an aristocratic or royal or ecclesiastical elite definitely were. And some of them were very, very, very highly educated.

So you mentioned that when I said writers, that could mean scribes and authors. So are authors another important element to what you talk about in the book? Yes, I talk about several female authors. they range from authors the earliest named English female poet who was a woman called Leoba, who wrote a little poem in a letter that was addressed to Boniface. And I go all the way up to this fantastic Welsh poet called Guavelle Mechain, I hope I pronounced that right, who lived in the 15th century and left this extraordinary earth of poetry behind

that ranged from the kind of sober and religious material that perhaps we might expect of a 15th century woman, but she also wrote about sexuality, about domestic violence, about scatological themes. I mean, a range of verse that is really quite striking. And what's fascinating about her is that her work was really obscured for a very long time. It just wasn't taught on university syllabuses. It was excluded from anthologies of medieval Welsh poetry. And it's only now that she's being kind of welcomed back into the fold and sort of studied afresh. And she's got so much to tell us about women's experiences in the 15th century, but also about the kind of literary culture that she participated in.

I also talk about Marie de France, who lived at some point, well, we're not entirely sure, but at some point between the end of the 12th century and the sort of beginning of the 13th. She wrote in Anglo-Norman, which was the language of the educated elite after the Norman conquest, the sort of anglicized version of French. and she wrote these strange mercurial very playful texts. We know precious little about her, but what's wonderful is that she embedded her name within her texts and she used the kind of controlling device of rhyme

to make sure that that name was cemented in the text and it wasn't going to be miscopied by scribes later on. Although one of the things I talk about in the book is the way that scribes came along afterwards and did change things within her text to kind of change their meaning, often introducing these kind of misogynistic readings into her texts. So she's another interesting example like Marjorie Kemp, of a woman whose work gets changed over time,

and it's only later that we come to appreciate it anew and attempt to get closer to something like the original words of the author. And she's perhaps a really good example of someone quite early on in the period who did want their name associated with their work, who did want themselves recorded as the author or creator of some of these texts. So a lot of it's anonymous, but Maria France was keen to have her name on it and that her name shouldn't be removed from it and everyone should know that she wrote it. Yeah, and there's a fascinating nun called Huguerberg who encoded her name in this secret code

in the space between two texts that she had composed. So at the prologue of one of the texts, she describes herself as an indignant sexonica, so, you know, a lowly Saxon woman, basically. So we know that the author is a woman, but we had no idea of her name until the 1930s when a scholar called Bernard Bischoff managed to decipher this code and realize that she had put her name within it. So that's an interesting example of somebody who perhaps didn't want to draw attention to her name, but also there was some part of her perhaps that wanted the name to be recorded. Incredible. I feel like we've only scratched the surface of this. And from reading your incredible, book. I can assure listeners that we have only scratched the surface. When is the book available for everyone to go and get their hands on? It's available on the 7th of October in the UK as hidden

hands, the lives of manuscripts and their makers. And it's available in the US on the 12th of October as the Gilded Page, The Secret Lives of Manuscripts. Incredible. And I encourage everybody to go and grab a copy because I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think one of the things it does brilliantly is to really clearly and excessively explain some of the baffling language, if nothing else, that sometimes surrounds manuscripts. The words are really clearly explained as Mary talks about parts of the manuscript and elements that come together to make them.

Thoroughly enjoyable book, I recommend it to everybody and thank you so much for sharing some of the information with us today, Mary. Thank you so much. So that's all for this episode of Gone Medieval. Join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode and don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts from

and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. I would like to give a quick mention to an episode of the ancients on history hit. There's an episode with Tristan called The Rise of Hannibal, which is well worth listening to. There's nothing to do with today's episode of Gone Medieval. It's just a really good listen, so I thought I'd suggest it to you.

Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.