'They're the most beautiful books that were created.' So said Peter Stoicheff, professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, who wants to reassemble forty boxes of single manuscript pages. May 26, 2005: University of Saskatchewan Reassembles Medieval Manuscripts at Rare Book News and Scattered Leaves at Bookworm started me on a little journey.
Prof Stoicheff's quote is in Pages for the ages: U of S prof on quest to reassemble pages of centuries-old manuscripts.
The hand-written pages were torn from some 50 books in the possession of Otto Ege of Cleveland, Ohio.
In the early decades of the 20th century, a Cleveland book collector named Otto Ege (pronounced egg-ee) removed the pages from 50 medieval manuscript books, divided the pages among 40 boxes, and sold the boxes around the world. Most of the boxes now reside in university and public library collections in the United States and Canada. The remainder have yet to be located, and are very likely in private collections. The pages contained in each box were created between 1100 and 1600 A.D. in medieval scriptoria in Europe and England. ... Almost all of the 50 pages in each box are religious in content: bibles, hymnals, breviaries and missals comprise the majority of texts from which the pages were removed.Source: Remaking the Book: Digitally Reconstructing the Otto Ege Manuscript Portfolios.
The Scattered Leaves exhibition will display thirty-four of the leaves, and there is a virtual tour of the exhibition.
Using the Manuscript on the Scattered Leaves site has some interesting points which got me to thinking:
n the 21st century we have many forms of communication, each designed to serve a different purpose. The leaves in the Ege collection were produced during a period in history when only two main methods of communication existed -- the human voice and the emerging technology of manuscript production.Most people understand that illiteracy was much higher five- to nine-hundred years ago, but the manuscripts were created in scriptoria, where everyone would be able to read them, and created for communal or private reading, not to supply information, but to kindle, excite or awaken devotion.
The many different appearances of the manuscripts in the exhibit reflect the wide variety of purposes they were designed to serve. Some were small enough to be portable, others large enough to be read from a pulpit a few feet away by clergy. On some, the script was so small that it was not intended to be easily read at all. In these cases, the devotional act of writing onto the parchment was the purpose – literally making the word flesh -- not the act of reading as we now know it.
The beauty of most religious manuscripts attests to the fact that writing and reading were experienced as sacred and reflective acts. Our communication technologies now are designed to speed up writing and reading because the user’s goal is to extract information. These leaves reflect a different purpose altogether. Usually the information of the Bible, for instance, was already well known by the manuscript’s reader or owner. The beauty of the manuscript served to glorify the content of the text, or to give it a permanence that the spoken word did not. Too, many of the words on the leaves are abbreviated; they served as cues for readers already very familiar with the content of the text. In contrast, the more barren appearance of the secular leaves reflects their intention to deliver information in as efficient a manner as possible to a reader unfamiliar with the text. These leaves anticipate the look of texts we read today. ...
The words in leaves from the 1400s are spaced further apart than in the earlier texts from the 1100s. Spaces between words, familiar to us now, appeared around 1100. Before that, words ran together on the page the way they do in oral speech. This is probably because those earlier texts were intended to be read aloud, which is a relatively slow process and not dependent on spaces between words. Silent reading, not widely practiced until the 1200s, is far swifter and the eye depends on spaces between words to distinguish them at such a speed.
Psalter - contains psalms arranged for each day of the week, Psalms 36-37
Epistolary. The small red marks above the line are neumes, for chanting the reading. 'The large size of this leaf enabled the deacon to read it from a distance of several feet in a dimly lit church.'
Manuscript decoration also served as an aid to meditation and the glorification of the divine. Beautiful scenes from nature and fantastic creatures in the margins would help direct the readers’ thoughts to the majesty and power of their God. For the medieval clergy, manuscripts were an integral part of worship and were decorated to render them fitting for their sacred purpose.Source: Admiring the Manuscript on the Scattered Leaves site.
Missal - contains the service of the Mass for the Year, Psalms 95 and 17
The communal use would have been by reading aloud. The private use would have been silent.
Now, Jack Perry linked to a post on lectio divina over at Flos Carmeli, discussing how lectio divina, eventhough it is private and silent reading, is 'training in listening' (On Prayer--Lectio Divina). As far as I know, there's no 'first do step A, then step B ...' way to 'teach' that, and the people helping me in my brief attempts some six or seven years ago at lectio divina emphasized that. Steven's remark that lectio divina isn't 'a method as it is a context' shows how silly it would be to look for such instructions or such a how-to. But one also needs to understand that the 'lectio' in lectio divina means transcending our usual purposes in reading: the 'extracting information' mentioned in the first Scattered Leaves quote. We need to disengage from the whirl of thoughts filling our mind, what in another context I heard called 'freight-train brain'.
The Ege manuscript images, not only by their content and beauty, but by returning to a different time and place, assist one in 'retreating' to an advanced form of prayer. 'Turning back the clock' is possible, and in this instance, necessary.