Page 56 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

back into the private sector, medieval book producers, by producing mainly to order, shifted the capital cost to the buyer, who paid for the costly ma- terials in advance, and presumably paid for the labor either in advance or as the manuscript was completed. In Medieval Craftsmen: Scribes and Illuminators (1992) Christopher de Hamel cited, as one of the earliest manuscripts clear- ly made by a professional scribe in Paris, a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest in the Bibliothèque nationale de France “with an inscription recording its comple- tion in December 1213 from an exemplar in the abbey library of St-Victor in Paris” (p. 35). Although the Abbey of St. Victor was dissolved and destroyed during the French Revolution, remarkably the St. Victor copy survives and is also preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale.
Professional scribes were capable of writing in several scripts. De Hamel also illustrated a display poster written by a scribe that was preserved in a binding from Oxford that can be shown to be dated about 1340. This poster (de Hamel’s plate 31, p. 40) was once tacked up outside a stationer’s shop. It is the “oldest known English public advertisement.” [illustrate]The accounting of the relative cost of the different components involved in the production of a manuscript book from roughly the same time is recorded in a manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque municipale d’Amiens (shelfmark 365). It is a copy of Henri Bohic’s voluminous Commentaires commissioned by Etienne de Conty from the scribe Guillaume du Breuil between 1374 and 1375. The manuscript consists of two large folio volumes, the first contain- ing 370 leaves, the second 388. Inside there is a note stating that the work cost 62 livres and 11 sous, broken down into the following components:
The scribe’s or copyist’s fee: 31 livres 5 sous
The purchase and preparation of the parchment, including the
mending of holes:
Six initial letters with gold:
Other illuminations in red and blue:
The hiring of the exemplar for the copyist, provided by Martin,
Carmelite monk:
4 livres
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11 livres 18 sous 1 livre 10 sous
3 livres 6 sous