MEDIEVAL SCRIBE HOGARTH PRESS

BOOKS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS

SCRIBE Noun

A person who copies out documents, esp. one employed to do this before printing was invented.

Verb

Write.

Synonyms: writer - scrivener - clerk - penman - amanuensis

The ManuscriptAlexander John WhiteBetween 1900-1912

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994023138/PP/

Manuscripts were books that were written by hand during the medieval period.

Many manuscripts were produced during the medieval era (A.D. 500-1500).

Manuscripts were used before the invention of printing presses, which meant that they were time consuming and very expensive to make.

Manuscripts were for the most part written on parchment or vellum, which were writing materials made from animal skins.

People called scribes were responsible for copying the works of authors by hand.

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/introlit/ms.htm

SIGNIFICANCE OF MANUSCRIPTS

Manuscripts were very important aspects of medieval society. They represented major religious, social, and artistic beliefs of the period. Because manuscripts were very expensive to make, they often served as status symbols. Most people who owned manuscripts held high-ranking positions in society. The major themes of manuscripts were religion (particularly Christianity), art, and literary characters.

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/introlit/ms.htm

THE ROLES OF SCRIBES

Scribes played the most important roles in the production of medieval manuscripts. Before the invention of the printing press, scribes were people who copied by hand the original works of authors into books. 

Scribes did not live a life of leisure; instead, they took their work very seriously. 

Scribes had to be adept at Latin, Reading, Penmanship, and deciphering the author’s scribbles. 

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/introlit/ms.htm

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/introlit/ms.htm

In 1420, a scribe in (what is now known as) the Netherlands discovers a cat urinated on his handwritten page: “Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.”http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/mischievous-cats-in-world-history-part-3/273412/

WEBLINK

To write is to create something, to invent something, to bring meaning into being through words in a way that did not exist before. Yet writing is also mechanical—the physical act of putting pencil or pen to paper, tracing letters so impossibly familiar that we tend not to register their shapes or how we execute them.

Requires a strange form of composition, in which literary invention is mediated by a reliance upon sources in order to narrate what happened in the past. Such sources were originally oral, but by the end of the twelfth century were more typically textual.

Relies upon generations of texts and narratives being copied, altered, and situated in new texts. Copying, of course, is the province of scribes rather than authors, yet writing, even derived and assembled from previous texts, is authored.…and the work of medieval scribes and the work of the authors mutually inform each other.

–Matthew Fisher

HOGARTH PRESS1917-1946

In 1915, Leonard and Virginia Woolf were celebrating a birthday dinner in a quaint restaurant when they made a list of things they desired for the year:

1) to purchase the Hogarth house; 2) to buy a printing press; and,3) to buy a Bulldog they named John.

It was with this air of simplicity and homespun aspiration that Leonard began to search for a printing press they could afford.

HOGARTH PRESS1917-1946

AUTHORSLeonard had an emotional

attitude towards the Press; as if it were the child their

marriage had never produced.

Hogarth Press published some of the eras most

prominent, forward, and groundbreaking thinkers of

the era.

Forster, E. M. Smith, Logan Pearsall Woolf, Virginia Dostoevsky, F. M. Eliot, T.S. Sackville-West, Vita Stein, Gertrude Freud, Sigmund Woolf, Leonard

“We are thinking of starting a printing press, for all our friends stories.”—

Virginia Woolf

Hogarth Press published authors who were either unknown or who no other Publisher would entertain; thereby putting certain literature into the hands of the middleclass that may not have existed without Hogarth Press;

Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington created woodcuts and designed many of the book covers;

The press originally sat on the Woolf’s kitchen table where they would meticulously choose the font, design the bookcover, and print and bind each book.

BOOKS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS

Medieval Scribes500-1500

Hogarth Press1917-1946

Presentation by: Tanya M. Scuccimarra For: Rollins College

Humanities Medieval – Spring 2013