Hand scribed and illuminated manuscripts used to cost the equivalent of a house today. It's sad to know that those treasures were lost. I wonder how many just ended up in the dump since the owner's descendents didn't think they had value?
Somehow, I doubt that. Got a reference?
Some googling got me to a quote of "Jehan de Sanlis made this for 6 pence per quire", The Hague, Royal Library, MS 71 A 24, 13th century from https://brewminate.com/making-medieval-manuscripts/ ; I'd guess that illumination and binding these quires (16- or 24-page sheet) doubles the price, so we're at half-pence per page; price summaries from a slightly later time (but different place) like http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html have similar values (~240 pence/ book) and indicate that a small house costs 500-1000 pence, so a house costs something like 1000-2000 pages worth of books, and it's worth taking into account that medieval manuscripts put less words on a page than modern paperbacks, so the same book would be more pages back then.
From a different perspective, copying the Bible was said to require 15 months of work (Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies) and the price a small house seems to generally be in the range of 1-2 years salary, so a copy of the Bible - which is on the larger range of books - would be comparable to a house.
In any case, an average codex at the time is less than the price of a house but on a similar scale, a collection of a hundred books is comparable to a fancy mansion in the capital.
Velum is cowhide. Or more specifically, calfskin.
1 calf -> 1 sheet.
How much do 300 head of cattle cost near you?
That's before the scribe costs.
It also accounts to why parchment was so often re-used, in palimpsests, as discussed by others in this thread.
The present-cost equivalent I've heard is from $500k -- $2mm per volume.
As of the 10th -- 15th centuries, a large library (e.g., Papal, University of Paris) might contain 2,000 -- 4,000 volumes.
The combination of cheap papermaking and the Gutenberg press were an impact that's truly difficult to express today, though of course the webserver is in many ways comparable. If there's a difference, it's that there was simply so little printed material in the 15th century that the flood introduced by printing, and the lifting of previous gatekeepers, was utterly profound. The Web produced a flood of media ... into an already media-saturated world, if one that was centred around a much smaller number of individual works, though even that was large relative to an individual. The US has been publishing ~300k books/year since at least the 1950s. An avid reader might tackle a dozen a year, and a book-a-week is a prodigious pace.
I think most of these were lost before any region had one large place known as "the dump", a relatively modern thing
Also that's a fascinating link you shared, thanks.
Gives a fascinating view into Roman mass commerce.
The manuscripts we have mostly exist because the people of the past (often Christian monks) cared enough about them to make a copy - by hand. (I assume Monks in places like China or India have been making copies in the same way, I just don't know for sure)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
I came across this practice when reading the Chapter of Fathers in the Mishna:
"Elisha ben Abuyah said: He who learns when a child, to what is he compared? To ink written upon a new writing sheet. And he who learns when an old man, to what is he compared? To ink written on palimpsest. Rabbi Yose ben Judah a man of Kfar Ha-babli said: He who learns from the young, to what is he compared? To one who eats unripe grapes, and drinks wine from his vat; And he who learns from the old, to what is he compared? To one who eats ripe grapes, and drinks old wine. Rabbi [Yehuda] said: don’t look at the container but at that which is in it: there is a new container full of old wine, and an old [container] in which there is not even new [wine]."
The really sickening part of studying medieval manuscripts is seeing how frequently they were treated as trash by later generations. We have what are now priceless artifacts that were used as cutting boards or had pages ripped out to be used as food wrapping.
I think this is especially bad with Old English, because once it became a dead language, hardly anyone saw value in preserving the manuscripts. What we have today of Anglo-Saxon literature mostly survived by accident.