A medieval art form, digitized

The medieval prayer book looks modern from the outside, with its elegant white leather cover added by a conservator for safekeeping. However, open the pages and peer into a bygone era. There, images of flora and fauna of rich nuances are intertwined with saints, dragons, birds and beasts. Gold borders and backgrounds shine, bringing to life biblical scenes depicted in bold burgundy, greens, blues and yellows. “It is a small but incredibly beautiful ‘book of hours,'” says historian Earle Havens of the pocket-sized devotional book commissioned in 1492 by Hans Luneborch, a wealthy merchant in the northern German market city of Lübeck.

Donated to Johns Hopkins University in 1909 by Baltimore banking and railroad magnate Michael Jenkins, the book disappeared from the George Peabody Library in the mid-20th century, only to return approximately 50 years later in a mailed box with no return address. “What happened remains a mystery,” says Havens, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and inaugural director of its Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance. Today, the returned piece is a treasured work and one of more than 100 books and fragments from the Sheridan Libraries’ collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, which Havens and her team of curators are cataloging and digitizing to make it accessible to people around the world.

“Our pre-1600 collection is full of unique and impressive pieces, and will now form part of one of the largest digital libraries of medieval and Renaissance books in the world,” Havens says of Digital Scriptorium, a free online database of premodern works owned by libraries and museums in North America. Teachers, academics and the general public will be able to see, analyze, write and teach with “these time machines that transport us to the past and allow us to interrogate the past in new ways,” he says.

Two of the Stern Center’s world-renowned antique book collections have already been largely digitized, thanks to support from the Arcadia Fund, a UK family philanthropy. One of them, Women of the Book, presents more than 2,000 books and manuscripts about women dedicated to the life of the mind: nuns, saints, healers and miracle workers who lived between 1450 and 1800. Another, the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of literary and historical falsificationIt consists of more than 3,000 forged and forged manuscripts and books by and about forgeries from the ancient world to the 21st century. Among them are a fabricated “eyewitness” account of the fall of Troy; a forged book from Shakespeare’s library, with annotations suggesting the bard’s interest in a plot to kill the king of England; and a first edition of the infamous “miscegenation pamphlet,” devised by political enemies to tarnish Abraham Lincoln’s second presidential campaign.

Now, Havens and his colleagues are beginning to comprehensively describe and digitize Johns Hopkins’ collection of ancient manuscripts, each handcrafted in a monastic or secular scriptorium across Western Europe, before the printing press (invented by Gutenberg around 1450) became a mainstay of book creation. The collection offers a window into the rise and dominance of Catholicism in Europe during the Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the growth of learned societies and universities.

“Copying a single book could take up to a year and involved a complex division of labor,” Havens says of the arduous tasks performed by scribes and other bookmakers, who made pages from vellum (or calfskin) and parchment (sheep, goat, or calfskin). The process involved soaking and softening the hide, scraping the animal’s hair, and stretching and cutting the hide into an appropriate page size. Rows of straight lines were drawn or etched on each sheet, upon which scribes wielded quills and ink to hand-copy word after word of an existing text. In the best books, illuminators rendered intricate scenes with vibrant pigments and thin sheets of gold and silver, creating an art form that many consider exquisite to this day.

Highlights of the collection include the enormous Sentences by theologian Peter Lombard, a 12th-century book that shaped church doctrine and served for centuries as the standard textbook for Christian theology. “Lombard took fragments of biblical Scripture, ancient philosophers, and other theologians and compiled them for the first time into a single book that attempted to identify and rationalize a uniform orthodoxy within the Roman Catholic Church,” Havens says.

Made of thick vellum, the book’s pages show imperfections in the animal’s skin (a cut or scar, for example) that scribes used to write on or sew with thread. They abbreviated as many words as possible to save space and make production more efficient and less expensive. Still, “a book of this length was expensive and probably took a whole herd of animals to make,” Havens says.

The oldest medieval manuscript dates back to 10th century Germany. A fragment of a liturgical book, it presents 14 lines from the New Testament gospels of Luke and John about John the Baptist. “It is worth noting the markings in the margins and above some of the words; they are the oldest form of Western musical notation, a primitive, largely gestural style that we now call adiastematic neumes” says Havens. “Priests and monks probably knew the melody by heart, but they used these freehand notations as a memory aid when practicing the liturgy.”

Marginalia, the notes and marks scribbled along the edges and between lines of text, are another central research focus for Havens, who is trained in paleography (the study of early handwriting) and can delineate, say, the more rounded, legible letters of Carolingian script from the narrow, pointed letters of German Gothic script. “What is written or scribbled in the margins allows us to look over the shoulders of readers hundreds of years ago to see how they interacted with texts at specific moments in history,” he says. “The passages they underlined or marked, the thoughts and (criticisms) they noted, all of this is fascinating to study,” capturing fleeting notions and ideas of those who lived long ago.