How medieval monks copied and saved ancient books

HostWe often think of the great books of history as these solid things that were always meant to last. But for a long time, the survival of everything we know about the ancient world basically hung by a thread. It all came down to a few men in cold rooms, scribbling away by hand.

HostI was reading about these personal notes monks would leave at the very end of the books they copied. They weren't writing about holy things. They were complaining. They’d write about how their fingers were frozen, how the light was failing, or how their whole body was in pain from sitting still for so long. It makes you wonder how we ended up relying on these guys to be the guardians of all human knowledge.

GuestIt’s a bit of a miracle anything survived at all. After the Roman Empire fell, the whole system for making books just vanished. For hundreds of years, if a book was going to exist, it had to be made in a monastery. These monks weren't just librarians. They were the only factory for information in the Western world. And they had to change the very thing books were made of to keep them from rotting away.

HostWas it really that close to the edge? I mean, surely there were other people writing things down besides just monks in their cells.

GuestNot really, no. It was a real bottleneck. If the monks didn't copy a book, that book died. One big reason we still have these texts is a shift in technology. Before this, most people wrote on papyrus, which is made from reeds from Egypt. But papyrus is fragile. It rots if it gets damp, which is a huge problem in a rainy place like Europe. So the monks switched to parchment, which is made from animal skin. It’s incredibly tough. It can last a thousand years. But the cost was huge. To make just one large Bible, you might need the skins of two hundred sheep or calves. Think about that. An entire flock of animals just for one book.

HostThat sounds like a massive investment. If they’re spending that much on the skin alone, I imagine the work itself had to be incredibly intense.

GuestIt was grueling. We call the room where they worked a scriptorium, but you shouldn't think of it as a cozy library. These rooms usually had no heat because they were terrified of fire. One spark could burn down the whole collection. They didn't even use candles because the soot would ruin the pages, and again, the fire risk was too high. So they only worked during the day. They sat there in the cold, working in total silence to avoid making mistakes. It was so hard on the body that the law at the time treated it the same as working in the fields. These guys ended up with hunched backs, ruined eyes, and hands that probably never fully unclenched. They weren't being creative. They were trying to be human copy machines.

HostIt feels a bit strange to think of monks as machines. But even a machine makes mistakes. What happened when a monk was ten hours into a page and his pen slipped?

GuestWell, there was no way to just undo a move. They had to be surgeons with a blade. If you made a mistake, you took a razor and very carefully shaved a thin layer of the animal skin away to lift the ink off. If your hand slipped, you’d rip the page and ruin weeks of work. And because parchment was so expensive, they were very careful with it. Sometimes, if they needed to write a new prayer book and didn't have fresh skin, they would just take an old book, scrape the old words off with a knife, and write right over it. We call those palimpsests.

HostWait, so they were actually erasing history? That feels like the opposite of saving it. We might have lost some of the most important works from the past just because a monk needed more space for a hymn.

GuestOh, it happened all the time. They would scrape away an old Greek science book to write down a sermon. But the funny thing is, that actually saved those "lost" books in a way. Modern researchers can use special lights and cameras to see the faint ghosts of the old ink underneath the new writing. We’re finding lost ancient plays and math books that were hidden under prayer books for a thousand years. They were recycling knowledge, but the original stuff stayed tucked away in the layers of the skin.

HostIt’s amazing that we’re still digging through those layers. But even if they saved the words, how did people actually read them? I’ve seen old manuscripts, and sometimes the writing looks like a total mess of swirls.

GuestThat was a huge problem for a long time. For a while, the handwriting was different everywhere. A monk in France might not be able to read a book from Italy. But around the end of the seven hundreds, the ruler Charlemagne pushed for a single, clear style of writing called Carolingian Minuscule. It changed everything. Before this, people didn't really use spaces between words. They didn't use lowercase letters in a consistent way. This new monk-style introduced the stuff we use every single day now: clear spaces, small letters, and standard punctuation. When the first printing presses were built centuries later, they modeled their fonts on this very script.

GuestAll the little letters and gaps you see on your screen right now are there because a monk a thousand years ago wanted to make sure his work could actually be read.

HostThose frozen fingers and bent backs from the monastery are still helping us talk to each other every time we type a message.