Viewing a Writing History: Response to the Columbia Archive Visit
Today, people all around the world are experiencing one of the largest and swiftest literary shifts that has existed in the history of writing. As the digital world takes a stronger presence in literate cultures, the rich history of writing and printing becomes a point of exploration. From grassroot style beginnings, the history of writing holds many different perspectives and the inventions and developments has reached many parts of the world.
From 3200 BCE., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia invented and used writing independently, and over times other cultures continued to develop writing systems independently while others adopted and modified writing systems to fit their needs. The writing systems varied from picture writing systems (as used in many East Asian languages) to phonetic writing systems (as seen in Romance and Germanic based languages). These writing systems were developed to hold meaning and to record and share information within cultures. Their uses were spread across a wide array of reasons, but the development and understanding could be carried to any person literate in that written language.
Most writings were on papyrus, but this had limits. One disadvantage was the ability to write on both sides; due to being too organic, the papyrus would soak the ink too much. Despite its limitations, the use of papyrus dominated much of the writing world. Columbia University is home to 2000 fragments of papyrus; many of these fragments are were legal and financial documents kept by businesses and households. Homer’s Odyssey was written on papyrus, and the one displayed at Columbia University dates back to the 3rd to 2nd century BCE.
In Europe, the use of writing systems were important and were normally reserved for the elite and the religious; learning to read was not mandatory nor necessarily needed for a majority of the population. With the lack of a printing press, all of the books were handwritten by trained scribes that spent long lengths of time transcribing texts. Many of the texts that exist today from this era are preserved with extreme care in order to maintain snapshots of the pre-print age of writing. Many of these texts were written on parchment and vellum (specifically calf skin). Parchment and vellum were important because they were made of animal skin and capable of having script of both sides of the skin. This was a move that made it easier to create the book; Manguel states in The Shape of the Book that the use of the parchment codex “quickly became the common form of books for officials and priests, travellers and students” (126).
Columbia University’s archive contained one of 12 known copies of the Facsimile of the Vergilius Mediceus which dates from the late 5th century. This interesting piece was written on parchment, and contains a compilation of 14 religious texts, as was common in this time period. The use of parchment allowed pieces to be further decorated with colors and illustrations called embellishments. These decorations were important to help to illustrate the text and to decorate the book itself. Columbia had two Incunable, or books with embellishments, that were on display, and dated from the 1400s AD.
The more elaborately decorated and colored the books were, the more expensive they were, and it noted the economic status and power one (or one’s family) had. For example the two versions of a book of hours were highly decorated to appear beautiful and allowed for full page embellishments to be inserted throughout the book. Bound in wood with nails and threads, these books held prayers for each hour of the day. Although these illustrated pages were decorated, they did not always align with the stories that surrounded them.
The text itself was also decorated, and the varying array of ink colors determined quality and cost of the books. The black inks normally came from two sources depending on where they book was written; in Northern Europe, the black in derived from oak tree galls, and in the south, the ink came from the black soot from lamps. Other inks, such as blues and reds, also represented the worth of the books; blue inks in a book were much more expensive than the books that had red inks. Especially beginning in the 13th century, the use of more color in the books became prevalent, incorporating greens, blues, purples, reds, and other colors.
The style of the texts also changed over time; as scripts developed, the change from Caroline miniscule to “a Renaissance roman hand, known in Italian as scrittura umanistica” (Chappell and Bringhurst 36). These changes did come with some negatives, such as the appearance of being labored and unsteady, often viewed in the earlier models in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
Works Cited
Chappell, Warren and Robert Bringhurst. “The Alphabet.” A Short History of the Printed Word. London: Knopf, 1970. 23-42. Print.
Manguel, Alberto. "The Silent Readers." A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996. 41-53. Print.
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