Page 100 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

up manuscript production. Saenger suggests that the writing table may con- ceivably have been a medieval invention as scribes in the ancient world are typically depicted as writing on their knee; however, it is hard to believe that scribes did not have access to such basic pieces of furniture as tables and chairs prior to the Middle Ages. “Evidence of the change to visual copying can be detected at an early date. In his colophon, the seventh-century scribe Mulling boasted of having copied the entire text of the Gospels in twelve days.”49 The earliest unambiguous image of a scribe using a writing table appears in the Lindisfarne Gospels, a magnificent and especially interesting early illuminated gospel book that incorporates word spacing, produced on the tidal island of Lindisfarne off the north-east coast of England circa 715-720.50 Among the earliest evidence of visual copying by a scribe is the graphic relationship between the British Library’s Cotton Tiberius A xiv, an eighth-century copy of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, probably made within a generation of Bede’s death. This manuscript has been demonstrated to have been copied visually from the St. Petersburg Bede, as certain passages are a line-by-line replication of the St. Petersburg Bede.
Outside of monasteries, during the Late Middle Ages, public reading aloud, as distinct from private silent reading, was considered a valued so- cial resource among the literate classes, serving a wide variety of purposes from entertainment to education, political commentary, propaganda, and spiritual guidance. This bias toward public reading is supported by late me- dieval images of people reading history in various late medieval illuminated manuscripts, which invariably depict a public reading. Some of these images are teachers reading to their students; others depict voluntary reading expe-
49 Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (1997), p. 49. The Wikipedia article on the Book of Mulling stated in January 2011 that the Book of Mulling is currently dated from the late 8th century, that three scribes were involved, and that “It remains possible that the manuscript was copied from an autograph manuscript of St. Moling.”
50 The image is a portrait of the evangelist Mark (f.93v). For a color reproduction see Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (2003), plate 14.
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