Manuscript culture
This medieval era marks the shift in manuscript production from monks in monasteries to booksellers and scribes making a living from their work in the cities.
Research from François Avril, Joan Diamond and others has confirmed that two or more artists alternated, or otherwise shared, in the illumination of a single manuscript; however, the detailed logistics of this work remain unclear.
The process of making an exemplar was supposed to be an orderly procedure: Masters of the university who compiled a new work were to edit, correct, and submit this authentic text to a stationer; he in turn copied from it an exemplar in peciae, corrected these against the author's text with utmost care, and finally submitted them to the inspection of the university's delegates for approval and for the setting of a rental price.
[21] The oaths that the librarii or booksellers had to swear to the universities to obey their regulations and requirements for the tax exemption were extremely restrictive in regard to the resale of secondhand books.
There were plenty of other demands for parchment outside the university such as: the record-keeping for the royal government, every similar entity of a commercial or mercantile guild, every religious house that issued a charter or kept a rent roll, every public letter-writer, everyone from major international trader to local shop-keeper who kept accounts.
The bookseller was free to produce and sell books, illuminate, or write for anyone they pleased like the Court, cathedral, or the wealthy laymen of the capital and provinces so long as they met their obligations to the university to which they had sworn oaths.
For instance, careful attention was paid to the punctuation and layout of texts, with readability and specifically reading aloud taking preeminence.
Meaning had to be clear in every sentence, with as little room left to interpretation as possible (compared to the lack of spaces in text and any markings for the purpose of aiding in enunciation), due to preachings' rise in popularity after the Fourth Lateran Council.
These had lost pre-eminence in medieval manuscript culture, characterized by the university, but had begun to undergo a rebirth in the fourteenth century.
[33] Written in 1428 by the German Carthusian, Oswald de Corda, prior of the Grand Chartreuse, the Opus Pacis consisted of two parts.
One dealt primarily with orthography and accent, where Oswald stated that his motive in creating these codification rules was to dispel the anxiety of his fellow Carthusians.
Many members of the order were worried about the omission of single letters, not just phrases, words or syllables within copies of a given text (demonstrating the new concern for uniformity taken to an extreme).
This was a transition from older works with large numbers of lists and regulations that mandated every action a scribe could take in correction, and had been widely ignored in medieval print culture.
[36] In his prologue to the Opus Pacis, Oswald contrasts his work with the Valde Bonum,[37] an earlier handbook compiled during the Great Schism.
The last surviving copy was written in 1514, indicating that manuscript correction remained an important subject sixty years into the printed era.
[39] The Devotio Moderna and the reformed Benedictines relied on reading devotional texts for instruction, and the written word was raised to a high level of importance not afforded by earlier religious movements.
Printing had exploded in Germany and the Low Countries, the home of the Devotio Moderna and Reformed Benedictines, as opposed to England and France.
Johannes Trithemius protested the invasion of the library by the printed book because of the missing aspect of devotion that had been present in preaching with one's hands.
[42] The traditional organization of book production fell apart; they were made up of libraries doling out quires to scribes and illuminators, who lived in proximity.
Still, Paris and more northern areas of Europe (especially France) had been the foremost center of manuscript production, and remained a force in the printed book market, falling only behind Venice.
This process created various "family trees", as many printed sources would be double checked against earlier manuscripts if the quality was deemed too low.
She also incorporated astrology, Latin texts, and a wide variety of classical mythology in fleshing out Ovid's account, maintaining her humanist motivations.
Women were no longer driven into mindless frenzies, but possessed anger that developed from fully considered character interactions.
William Caxton (1415~1424–1492), an editor, was instrumental in shaping English culture and language, and did so through his authoritative Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Through his editing, Chaucer was framed as an early promoter of the Renaissance, who decried Gothic and medieval culture, and who rescued the English language.
he by hys labour enbelysshyd/ornated and made faire our englisshe/in thys Royame was had rude speche & Incongrue/as yet it appiereth by olde bookes/whych at thys day ought not to haue place ne be compared emong ne to hys beauteuous volumes/and aournate writyngesCaxton wanted to discard "old bookes" that were characteristic of medieval culture.
Caxton believed that printed books could set a defined authorship, in which the reader would not feel it appropriate to change the text or add glosses.
He believed that cheap versions of this authorial Chaucer would allow a diverse group of readers to develop common economic and political ideals, unifying the culture of England.
Many classicists also naturally looked to reproductions of classical texts during the period, which were not necessarily characteristic of other work that was deemed more important.
She did not describe Italian humanists in Florence and renewed religious orders of the Modern Devotion in the Low Countries and Germany.
