Traveling to the 13th Century:

On the afternoon of November 6, a group of PSU students and Professor Karolyn Kinane made a trip to Dartmouth College. Located in Hanover, N.H., Dartmouth is more than just the Ivy League buildings and bustling students. It is also the home to some ancient manuscripts. Special Collections Librarian Jay Satterfield was generous enough to spend his time with the group to show them the alluring collection. Assisted by Dartmouth Junior Anne Peale, an English major, they had more than enough information to dish on the ancient texts. The first item the group saw was from 1190 AD: a French bible. The luxurious pages had wide margins. This was very fashionable in the time because wide margins proved that the owner had extra paper to spare, meaning they were wealthy. The page was made of vellum, or animal skin. The group was allowed to touch the pages because they would not be affected by skin contact. The words were hand written, and in the margins was colored writing kind of like commentary. These are things that a priest would take note of but not say aloud in church. An English book from the 12th century was made of vellum and once had a clasp. The clasp was there because vellum absorbs moisture so much that the books will pop right off the shelf if not held together. This book was held together by wooden boards that kept the pages flat. I asked Satterfield what happened when someone made a mistake, and he said with vellum it was no problem-one could just remove that layer of skin with the mistake with a knife. One of my favorites was a 13th century bible with gold leaf pages and gold in the drawings. A miniscule bird was blown up with technology onto a large screen to show the detail-the size of one of the brush strokes was probably about the thickness of one hair. Another prayer book from France in 1450 had a page with a coat of arms that had been scratched out. Books back then were very personalized and if someone else owned the book they might have tried to erase the previous families name. We got to see the transition between handwriting and the printing press, and even got to look at the kind of template that would have been made to print pages. People were being replaced by machines and, as a result, books became more widespread and more people could read them. The artistry of the individual who would decorate the inside of pages and draw elaborate pictures, called an Illuminator, was starting to be replaced by wood-cut stamps. Handwriting was a big deal back in the day, much like how many people judge others on their clothing today. First, books were handwritten with gothic looking text, very squiggly and the high parts of a letter went up very high and the low parts very low. When the Italian and French people decided to use the printing press, they wanted to model it after much more humanistic writing, a lot like what our type looks like today. They thought they were modeling their type after the Ancient Romans, because to them everything old was very fashionable. Ironically they modeled the type after their own culture’s writing from 825 A.D., which was a glossary page. They thought the glossary was ancient because of very prominent R’s on the page and the fact that it wasn’t script-like. We got to look at the page and touch the vellum. It was amusing to think that all of the Renaissance humanists must be rolling in their graves knowing now that they were actually not modeling their script after ancient writing. Some of the most interesting parts of the trip were learning about the significance these books had to people and what a status symbol it was to have a nice, personalized bible. We saw a pocket bible that was from Florence in 1490. It was made for a specific woman because she appears in all of the pictures. It even shows her watching Jesus and Mary on the sidelines. What would make animal activists squeal today is that the pocket bible was made from Uteran Vellum, or the fetal skin of baby cow or goat. Even weirder than that, many Europeans at the time would choose at their death to have their favorite book bound in their own flesh! Image that trinket lying around the house. The trip ended with Peale showing us Shakespeare’s First Folio, a part of their special collections library. After seeing so many ancient manuscripts that have survived to this day, it gave me confidence that technology is not the only way to preserve knowledge and that good old paper (or animal skin) can last a long time on its own. The Dartmouth Library is open to the public and anyone who is interested in visiting any of the items in the special collections is encouraged to contact Jay Satterfield at Jay.satterfield@dartmouth.edu.