Medieval Books

It is very difficult for us in these our days of mass production to grasp what it meant to own a book in the 14th century. We have them flowing off our shelves, massed in teetering stacks, in the den, the kitchen, the bathroom, cast about on the floor around our beds...I mean...I've heard some people do. We have our first editions. I myself have the first American edition of Tolkien's Tree and Leaf--not a particularly rare volume by bibliophile standards, but one that is dear to me all the same. (Tolkien, by the way, will almost certainly be a main character in this here blog at some point, but I've held off.) I've also got a beautiful 19th century edition of Thomas Moore's poetical works (that's the English Romantic poet, not the 16th century martyr, hence the spelling). Books are, for the most part, easily attainable wherever you live, because internet is available and FedEx (a Memphian innovation) delivers "the world on time." Most of my books I've acquired in just this way, including Tree and Leaf. I find booksellers online from anywhere and have them send stuff to me at work. Those are hard days to get through, let me tell you, when a book comes in and I've got to do a bunch of stupid stuff.

I'm not saying this is bad (it's not), or that books, even just as objects, aren't dear to us (they are). Still, compared with a medieval book, the things we have are ephemeral. A book in the 14th century would be literally incarnate--written or indeed almost carved on vellum, on animal skin. I was reading Chaucer (surprise!), in his complaint to his scribe's bad copying, and he says, "So ofte a daye I mot thy werk renewe,/ It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape." Rub and scrape! Not, "mark a line through it and type it up again later." Every edition was a unique edition, not simply by virtue of it belonging to someone, the rather spectral value of it having been read by my dear aunt Ida, dead these many years and so on. You could see and feel the labor put into it, and, my dear, you were going to pay for it. A good book on vellum could cost as much as a burgher's house. No book bargain hunting. No shelves either, unless you were extremely wealthy (normally you'd lock them in a chest) or in a library, in which case the books would have been chained up to prevent people stealing them. Worth their weight or more in gold. Procuring books, then, would have required planning. I mean, financial planning, for it was an investment in every sense of the word. If Chaucer's Prologue to The Legend of Good Women is to be believed, he owned around 60 books, probably not on vellum and beautifully illuminated, but a huge investment all the same.

One of the most interesting things this does is obliterate the modern idea of plagiarism. Well, it didn't obliterate it, because it hadn't come along yet. We're so picky about that kind of thing! But this of course has to do with the fact that any yahoo can write any old thing any time...doesn't even require paper. Witness what you're now reading...yahoo! If you could write or translate, then, and you had the means and leisure to do so, it would be a service to "steal" ideas, or even to mock. It's quite possible that a man could have written an excellent book that was never known outside of his town, and if you came across it, you probably wouldn't be able to buy it. So, you'd remember. And write it again, in your own language (if it was different) or with your own "spin." Chaucer did this a lot.

To know--really know--a book is a huge feat. I think I'm close to knowing two. If Chaucer knew 60 and wrote nothing, though we wouldn't know it, he would still be a genius. Sometimes I think I would know better if I knew less. Think if you could, with hardship, acquire one book a year every year of your life--and that's still a lot more than most people would ever see back in the day--how well you would know them! How much you would have to give for them! Something to think about.