WRITING POSTURE AND VARIOUS
CLASSES OF SCRIBES
All of these books were written by the monks themselves
in the scriptorium. The scriptorium served not only as
work room for copying scribes, it was also the monastery's
chancellery, where letters, deeds, and documents were
written. The scribes sat upon stools before tables or desks,
the writing surface of which rose at a sharp angle so that
the scribe wrote almost in a vertical plane. The book from
which a new text was copied was held in a firm position by
a reading frame. This is a posture quite distinct from that
which was in use in ancient times, when the scribes wrote
either standing (as seems to have been the rule in court
procedure) or seated held their writing materials in their
lap, as is shown in the illumination of prophet Ezra, on fol.
5r of the famous Codex Amiatinus (fig. 105), that was
copied, early in the eighth century, in the monastery of
Jarrow and Monkwearmouth in Northumbria from an
illustration of the same subject in the sixth century manuscript
of the Institutiones of Cassiodorus. The transition
from this ancient custom of holding on one's lap the scroll or
codex on which one was writing to the medieval custom of
writing on a desk (fig. 106) was made in the course of the
eighth century, as a recent study has disclosed. It has two
probable causes: for one the growing popularity of large
deluxe codices, which it was well nigh impossible to cover
with writing without the use of some firm support to steady
the hand of the scribe, and second, the fact that the craft of
writing (in ancient times essentially in the hands of slaves),
in the monastic scriptoria in the north had become the
prerogative of an intellectual elite, whose high social
standing called both for greater comfort and greater efficiency.[97]
Medieval sources in referring to scribes distinguish
between antiquarii, the experienced writers whose skills
were reserved for the making of liturgical books; scriptores,
the less trained but still reliable writers; rubricatores,
writers who specialized in the insertion of decorative letters
rendered in different colors, usually in connection with
opening words; miniatores, the highly skilled scribes who
embellished the manuscript with its pictorial illuminations;
and last, but not least, the correctores, the proof
readers. The latter were among the most experienced and
most learned monks. The manuscripts of the Abbey of St.
Gall as well as those of many other writing schools abound
with marginal or interlinear annotations that testify to the
care with which this work was done.
[98]
At Reichenau this
task was performed by Reginbert (d. 847), librarian under
four successive abbots—that same Reginbert who seems to
have supervised the writing of the explanatory titles of the
Plan of St. Gall.
[99]
At St. Gall this work was done by such
famous teachers as Ratpert, Notker, and Tutilo. Purity and
correctness of the sacred texts was a primary concern of the
period (as Alcuin's poem attests) and of sufficient interest
even to the emperor to be singled out as a matter of
statewide importance in a capitulary issued in 789, or 805,
in which it is stipulated that the copying of such sacred
texts as the Gospels, the Psalter, and the Missal should
only be entrusted to men of superior intellectual attainment
(
et si opus est evangelium, psalterium et missale scribere,
perfectae aetatis homines scribant cum omni diligentia).
[100]
