Blog Post VII - The Butler Library Visit Reflection

The pictures are not showing for some reason... that's too bad. Wonder if there is a way to link them to this post somehow.

Margarita Kravchenko

Prof. Barbara Gleason

Theories and Models of Literacy

11/30/13

Columbia University Butler Library Visit Reflection

            I enjoyed the visit to the library immensely. The collection of rare books and manuscripts is very impressive; it was thrilling to see items like a piece of papyrus scroll that had an excerpt from Homer’s Odyssey on it or a stone tablet with an epitaph to a deceased woman. The stone tablet dates back to late 1^st – early 2^nd century AD, and the papyrus is probably the oldest item in the library’s collection dating back to 3^rd century BCE. Stone and clay tablets were among the first, if not the first, mediums for the scribal literacy; however, they were not very portable, to say the least. In his book A History of Reading Alberto Manguel describes one such text, the “Middle Assyrian Code of Laws… which measures 67 square feet and carries its text in columns” (126). He then continues by affirming that the size of this “manuscript” “surely added, in the eyes of the Mesopotamian reader, to the authority of the laws themselves” (126). It is safe to say that in certain cases, size does matter after all. As for papyrus, it definitely was more portable but it had another problem: it was very brittle and could only be used in a form of a scroll. The material that superseded clay and papyrus as the primary literacy medium was parchment, a material produced from animal skin, primarily that of calves and sheep. The bulk of the collection that was showed to us at the Butler Library was exactly that, codices made of parchment or vellum. It was interesting to find out the difference between these two terms; it turned out that parchment is a material produced from any type of animal skin (calf, goat or sheep skin) while vellum is made specifically from calf skin. In other words, all vellum is parchment but not all parchment is vellum. 

The earlier codices were harder to read because there was virtually no word separation which started around the 9^th century AD. Also, the shape of the letters was very different from the modern ones, and according to Dr. Dutschke, the date of a manuscript could be determined by the shapes of the letters. As for the ink, two different types were used in book production: oak galls formed the base for the black ink used in Northern Europe, and lampblack was used as an ink base in Southern Europe. Later Johannes Gutenberg will use the lampblack combined with varnish to create a new, and permanent, type of ink to be used on paper during the printing press revolution.

It is not clear when illustrations started to appear in the manuscripts but when they did, they became common and with time rather elaborate. One of the manuscripts that impressed me the most was an encyclopedia that during 18^th century belonged to an Italian cardinal Albani. First illustrations were rather schematic; they looked very similar to the doodles one can find in the margins of someone’s notebook. However, later in the manuscript the illustrations grew increasingly more elaborate and migrated from the margins to the middle of one of the two columns of the page. The illustration that was specifically pointed out by Dr. Dutschke was the one of a creature that turned out to be a scribe’s idea of an elephant (fig. 1). The creature bears only a slight resemblance to the real elephant, and the building sitting on top of it only adds up to the whimsy of the illustration. The scribe must have heard about an elephant from someone who had actually seen one, and then drew the illustration based on this description with an addition of his own interpretation. It seems that for common people, such encyclopedias may have been a trusted source of information about faraway places and its inhabitants. However, as in case with an elephant, the authentic accounts were often misinterpreted therefore giving birth to a slew of mythical creatures that, in fact, might have been not so mythical after all.

Along with the encyclopedia, there were several other manuscripts of practical nature. One of them was a so-called commonplace book - something that in our time would be called a journal for noting things the owner wanted to remember. A list of monies paid/owed and a list of rents are among those notes. This shows that literacy was transitioning from being a privilege of the aristocracy and clergy to a functional tool for other classes of society. In his work In the Beginning: the Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture Alister McGrath asserts that “[b]eing able to read was now seen as the key to personal fulfillment; to own books was a statement of social status. … The Renaissance set to promote written and spoken eloquence, and placed considerable emphasis on cultivating both reading and writing” (7). Another functional manuscript from 15^th century Italy was a book of medical recipes with multiple blank pages, most likely for the owner to add more recipes later. This notebook also was one of the few made from paper. Another manuscript made from paper was a 15^th century book of allegorical drawings, produced in Germany.  One of the several illustrations shows a pupil and a teacher who is holding a horn book with Arabic numerals, almost all of which look exactly like the ones used today. A horn book was also in the collection shown to us at the library; I was astonished by the clarity of the horn, a natural material molded to form a cover to protect the text attached to a wooden frame.

However, the majority of the manuscripts in the collection had a religious background, in one way or another. According to Manguel, this was probably because “much of the life of Europeans in the Middle Ages was spent in religious offices” (128). At that time religion was a significant part of people’s life; therefore, religious texts, including the Bible and the so called Books of Hours, personal prayer books, were the ones continuously reproduced. Some of them also served as reading aids called primers, the first textbooks used for the teaching of reading. On the first page of these books of hours, right before the prayer, one could find the alphabet (fig. 2). The letters have hardly changed since then but nonetheless the text is not very reader friendly, probably because of the style and shape of the letters. Also, it is unclear whether or not periods are used in the text to signal the end of a sentence. However, medieval scribes had a different use for periods, or dots: in another text the dots were placed under a mistakenly repeated phrase, therefore marking an error.

Possessing a Bible and books of hours during the Middle Ages signified not only their owners’ literacy but their elevated social standing as well. McGrath posits that “many households saw the possession of a Bible as essential for the private matter of personal devotion, not to mention the rather more sordid and public matter of drawing attention to their social status” (14-15). Owing a Bible, therefore, was both public and private. Another way of showing off one’s wealth was to have a scribe use different colors of ink; in one of the prayer books shown to us at the library the headings were written in blue ink because it was more expensive than the red one. Illustrations and border decorations were also more elaborate and typical for those books of hour. In all, those manuscripts were nothing less but a work of art, and I felt elated to have seen them.

For me, the highlight of the visit to Butler Library was the sheer physicality of the manuscripts. Being able to not only view them but touch them was fascinating; it made me think of not only all the people who touched that manuscript before us but of the other ones, who will possibly get to touch it after we are gone. In a way, those manuscripts have survived and possibly will survive multiple generations of people. Does this mean that scribal literacy has a potential to outlive all other types of literacies, including the digital one? Only time will tell.

Works Cited:

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.

McGrath, Alister. In The Beginning: the Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture.: New York: Anchor Books, 2001.