Page 183 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

example of a physical book, for which an electronic version or website will never be a completely satisfactory equivalent.
The market for scholarly books for university teachers and students in the Middle Ages was quite different from the market for expensive illuminated manuscripts, though some of the same scribes and booksellers were involved in both markets. Even the most basic manuscript books, without illumina- tion of any kind and quickly penned out, were relatively expensive because parchment was expensive. Paper, which was first produced in Europe at Xa- tiva, near Valencia in Al-Andalus in 1151, only very gradually became widely available, and probably did not help lower the cost of book production until paper production increased in order to meet demand after the introduction of printing.98
Though higher education had moved out of the monasteries to the uni- versities, most of the teachers at the early universities came from religious orders, and some developments in the history of the scholarly book oc- curred in both monastic and university settings. In monasteries reading was primarily a spiritual exercise which involved steady reading to oneself in- terspersed by prayer and pausing for rumination about the text as an act of meditation. At the universities reading was a process of study which required a more reasoning scrutiny of the text and consultation for reference purposes. These two kinds of reading required different kinds of presenta- tion of texts, and this was reflected in new formats and features of scholarly books developed outside the monasteries.
98 “Paper seems to have advanced less rapidly in Europe than it had advanced either in China or in the Arabic world. The European parchment with which paper had to compete was a far better writing material than either bamboo slips or papyrus. Furthermore, there were few in Europe who read, and the demand for a cheaper writing material, until the advent of printing, was small. While it was the coming of paper that made the invention of printing possible, it was the invention of printing that made the use of paper general. After Europe began to print, first from blocks and then from type, paper quickly took its place as the one material for writing as well as for printing, though, strange to say, the first paper mill in England was not set up until seventeen years after Caxton began to print at Westminster” (Carter, Invention of Printing in China, 2nd ed. [1955], pp. 137-38).
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