A good amount about medieval book prices comes from colophons or notes left by scribes (or owners) in manuscripts they wrote (or acquired). These notes might detail the place and date of writing, offer a prayer on behalf of the … Continue reading
Ælfric Bata, about whom little is known other than he was a student of Ælfric of Eynsham and that he wrote Latin scholastic colloquies, offers a nice picture of monastic book sales presumably from around the first part of the … Continue reading
I recently started the lucid, engaging, careful and exciting Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire by William Johnson (Oxford UP, 2010). While the body chapters will be of most interest to those specifically engaged with particular authors, … Continue reading
Recently, a colleague was discussing the procurement of personal preachers in particular places during the later Middle Ages, which piqued my interest. So I asked about the arrangement, that is whether these people were paid or if the relationship was … Continue reading
As you can see, I am trying to note medieval book prices as I come across them after Gneuss’s psalter colophon piqued my interest (and so I thought to give categorize the notes). For the Gutenberg Bible, customers paid around … Continue reading
A little later than the note reported by Helmut Gneuss is a notice found in the pastedown of a manuscript in Pembroke College, Cambridge (dated ?1170).* It states:** Pentatuchus. Iob. duodecim prophete. Math. et luc. cum pergameno salterii et epistolorum … Continue reading
References to the price and labour involved in producing early medieval books in Western Europe are hard to come by. However, thanks to Helmut Gneuss’s reconstruction of a scribal comment (aka colophon) now lost (but transcribed by a modern cataloguer … Continue reading