We have a romantic notion of a medieval monk: he sits in a monastery, it's snowing outside, and he peacefully calligraphs the word of God by candlelight. Monks were not allowed to speak in the scriptorium, so they poured their frustrations, pains, and complaints into places no one expected - the margins of the pages and the final notes of the books, the so-called colophons.
Thanks to this, we know today what they actually experienced.
Colophons: where monks dared to complain
Notes have survived from Irish, English, French, and German manuscripts of the 9th to 15th centuries, providing a direct window into the scriptorium. Translated from Latin and Old Gaelic:
Three fingers write, but the whole body suffers. - A very common entry, preserved in several monastic manuscripts
Other notes are even more straightforward: "I am cold. It is cold here." - that's the entire comment in the margin of an Irish manuscript. Someone else complained: "This parchment is hairy" - he must have been writing on poorly scraped skin, where the quill bounced over the hairs and the ink spilled.
A monk from the monastery of St. Gallen in present-day Switzerland wrote a Latin sentence at the end of a gospel that can be translated roughly as follows: "Now I've written the whole thing - for Christ's sake, give me a drink!" A less pious colleague in France, on the other hand, placed a curse for any potential thief at the end of his work: a list of punishments ranging from fever to hanging to frying in a pan, ending with a succinct Amen.
Titivillus: the demon who collected typos
Titivillus became a popular figure of scribal folklore in the 13th century. He wasn't a demon of lust or pride, his specialty was writing errors. He wandered through scriptoria with a sack, collecting omitted letters, skipped syllables, and mangled words. Everything a monk messed up through fatigue or inattention.
Every evening he took his catch to the devil as evidence against the scribe's soul. A copying error was thus more than a matter of craft.
Hours in silence and cold, knowing that every overlooked letter could add to the weight of one's sins. With the arrival of printing, Titivillus did not disappear: a typesetting error now repeated across the whole print run.
The woman with blue teeth: women history overlooked
There were more women in scriptoria than the chronicles recorded. A new perspective came from an archaeological find in the German monastery of Dalheim.
Scientists examined the remains of a woman from the 11th century from the monastery cemetery in Dalheim and found particles of lapis lazuli in her dental tartar - one of the most expensive pigments of the contemporary world, imported from Afghanistan, whose price may have exceeded gold. In illuminated manuscripts it was used, for example, for the Virgin Mary's robes.
She was probably a woman who used the pigment when illuminating manuscripts. The most likely explanation is that she licked the tip of her brush to straighten it, and the precious powder settled in her teeth. The study considers other possibilities too. No written testimony of her work has survived, and the dental tartar is one of the few traces she left.
Codex Gigas: The Devil's Bible from Bohemia
Early 13th century, the monastery in Podlažice near Chrudim. Legend has it that a monk named Herman Inclusus - Herman the Recluse - committed a grave sin and was condemned to be walled up alive. To redeem himself, he offered the abbot to write a book encompassing all the world's knowledge in a single night.
At midnight, he realized he wouldn't make it. He called a fallen angel for help. The devil offered his assistance in exchange for his soul. Herman agreed. The book was finished by morning - and on one of its pages, a figure of the devil is still depicted today as a thank you for the service rendered.
Science has this to say: graphologists thoroughly examined the Codex Gigas and found that the entire 75-kilogram work was indeed written by a single hand. The handwriting is remarkably consistent from the first to the last page - with no signs of aging, illness, or fatigue. If the scribe worked six hours a day, six days a week, it would have taken him an estimated twenty to thirty years of continuous work. No devil - just the incredible discipline of one person.
Today, the Codex Gigas is kept in Stockholm. It got to Sweden as war booty during the Thirty Years' War. The Czechs still consider it their own - and rightly so.
From ora et labora to outsourcing: why monks stopped writing
In the early Middle Ages, copying was the duty of every monk. The Rule of St. Benedict explicitly commanded manual labor and reading - and the scriptorium was the place where both merged. Those who couldn't write went to the fields. Those who could sat at a desk many hours a day.
This began to change in the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing cities and new universities in Paris and Bologna created a demand for books that monasteries couldn't meet on their own. Guilds of professional scribes emerged - laymen who wrote for money, not for the salvation of their souls.
Monasteries hired them. Inside the scriptorium, a strict hierarchy prevailed: antiquarii - experienced monks - dedicated themselves to repairing rare manuscripts and copying complex texts. Scriptores or librarii, often younger monks or newly hired laymen, did the routine copying work.
In the late Middle Ages, just before Gutenberg's arrival, wealthy monasteries acted practically like publishing houses. The abbot accepted an order, hired a workshop of external workers, and supervised the result himself. Some monks reportedly preferred to pay a poor student rather than sit in an unheated cell with a goose quill in hand themselves.
What came after the scribes
When Gutenberg finished his Bible, scribes didn't lose their jobs overnight. Most incunabula, that is prints from the first fifty years of letterpress printing, were printed in black. Red headings, initials, and rubrics were often added to the printed books by hand. An exception was the Mainz Psalter of 1457, printed in both black and red.
Proud creators became finishers. And in many surviving prints from that time, you will find empty squares at the beginning of chapters - places where a hand-painted initial was supposed to go. Often because the book's owner didn't pay the rubricator, and the square remains empty to this day.
You can experience what this world looked like from the inside - from the perspective of a player in a medieval scriptorium - in our game Scriptorium. And you can read about how the printing press itself changed the world of commerce, betrayal, and legends in the article Gutenberg, Fust and Schöffer's betrayal.