Academic Reading — Test 125

Reading passage

Between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, the monasteries of Ireland became some of the most productive centres of book-making in western Europe. In an age when the printed page lay many hundreds of years in the future, every manuscript had to be copied by hand, letter by letter, in a dedicated workshop known as a scriptorium. The reputation of Irish monks as careful copyists spread far beyond the island, and the books they produced were valued not only for their religious content but also for the remarkable skill with which they were made. A scriptorium was rarely a grand room. In many Irish foundations it was little more than a modest wooden hut, or even a sheltered corner of the cloister where the light was good. The scribes worked in silence during daylight hours, since candles were expensive and the risk of fire near so much parchment was considerable. The raw material of their craft was not paper but vellum, a fine writing surface prepared from the skins of calves, sheep or goats. Preparing vellum was slow and laborious: the skin had to be soaked, scraped, stretched on a frame and smoothed with pumice before a single word could be written. A large book might require the hides of an entire herd, which made every volume a costly undertaking from the outset. The work of copying demanded extraordinary patience. A scribe sat for long hours holding a quill cut from the feather of a goose or swan, dipping it into ink made from soot, oak galls or crushed minerals. Mistakes were difficult to correct, and the margins of surviving manuscripts sometimes contain the private complaints of weary monks about the cold, poor light or aching fingers. Beyond the plain copying of text, the finest books were decorated by specialists called illuminators, who added intricate patterns, interlaced designs and brilliant colour. Some pigments were obtained locally, but others travelled astonishing distances: a deep blue called lapis lazuli, for example, was imported all the way from the mountains of central Asia, an indication of how far the trade in materials could reach. The most celebrated product of this tradition is the Book of Kells, an elaborately decorated copy of the four Gospels now held in Dublin. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that such masterpieces were typical. For every lavishly illustrated Gospel book, monasteries produced many plain working copies of psalms, prayers and scholarly texts intended for everyday use. These ordinary manuscripts rarely survive, precisely because they were handled so often, whereas the grandest volumes were treated as treasures and protected accordingly. The books that remain therefore give a slightly misleading impression of what most medieval reading actually looked like. Manuscripts were not only made in Ireland; they were also exchanged, given as gifts and carried abroad. Irish monks were famous travellers, and as they founded monasteries across Britain and continental Europe they took their books and their distinctive script with them. In this way Irish styles of writing and decoration influenced workshops far from their place of origin. Books were sometimes exchanged between monasteries to allow a community to copy a text it did not already own, and a particularly fine volume could serve as a diplomatic gift between rulers or churchmen. A manuscript was, in short, both a tool for worship and a form of portable wealth. The disruption caused by Viking raids from the late eighth century onwards posed a serious threat to this fragile world of books. Monasteries were attractive targets because they held precious metalwork, and the ornate covers of important manuscripts were occasionally stripped of their gold and jewels. Some books were lost entirely, while others were hidden, buried or carried to safety. A number of volumes were ransomed and returned, which tells us that even raiders recognised that these objects had value. Despite such losses, the tradition of copying did not collapse, and Irish scriptoria continued to produce manuscripts for centuries. The arrival of printing in Europe eventually made hand-copying unnecessary, but the books created in these monastic workshops remain among the most important sources for our knowledge of the early medieval world.