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  • Handschriften im Mittelalter. Eine Quellensammlung by Martin Steinmann
  • John L. Flood (bio)
Handschriften im Mittelalter. Eine Quellensammlung. By Martin Steinmann. Basel: Schwabe. 2013. 932 pp. CHF 98. isbn 978 3 7965 2890 3.

Martin steinmann, distinguished Swiss historian, Latinist and sometime head of the Department of Manuscripts at Basel University Library, seems to have spent spare moments throughout his long career putting together a scrapbook of snippets gleaned from medieval sources relating to all aspects of book production. The fruits of this obsession are presented in this splendid book, which is a veritable cornucopia of interesting information about writing and reading, scribes monastic and secular, their tools, materials, methods and the problems they faced, pen trials, bookbinding, book prices, patronage, the borrowing, dissemination and handling of manuscripts, the arrangement of libraries and the duties of librarians, etc., etc. The book comprises excerpts, long and short, in prose and verse, from the writings of 905 authors, [End Page 196] many familiar (Aldhelm, Bede, Isidore, Einhard, Boniface, Hrabanus Maurus, Abelard, Roger Bacon, Petrarch, Chaucer, Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini, Caxton, for example) but many scarcely known at all, even to specialists. Chronologically, the passages range from Cicero in the first century bc to the sixteenth-century Donegal chieftain Manus O’Donnell, compiler of Betha Colaim Chille (The Life of St Columba). British sources seem particularly well represented while material from Spain, the Low Countries and eastern Europe is comparatively thin on the ground, while Steinmann has deliberately excluded much of the wealth of relevant Italian material available because its inclusion would have made his book too unwieldy. Most of the texts are in Latin but there are some in Old French, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Middle English, Middle High German, Middle Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Irish. In each case the original text (taken from reliable editions and often checked against the original manuscript source) is followed by a German translation; given the strong representation of British sources a version of this book with English translation instead would be very useful. Commentary by the editor is sparse, all too sparse in some cases.

Some of the sources are well known—for instance, parts of the Benedictine Rule (no. 47), King Alfred’s Preface to the translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis (no. 185), Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon (no. 585), Archbishop Arundel’s condemnation of books by Wyclif (no. 693), Pier Candido Decembrio’s report on the Codex Hersfeldensis containing Tacitus’s Germania (a discovery of major significance to German humanists) (no. 866), and Abbot Trithemius’s De laude scriptorum (no. 902)—but the majority are far less familiar. They range from the bizarre—Caesarius of Heisterbach’s report of finding in a tomb at Wedinghausen in Westphalia the perfectly preserved right hand of an English scribe whereas the rest of his body had completely decomposed (no. 418.3), and a note on Robert Grosseteste’s sandals in an Oxford library (no. 807)—via the merely curious (such as Theodoric the Great’s use of a gold stencil to sign documents (no. 40), and Cambridge University’s 1480 ban on the acceptance of books written or printed on paper as security (no. 868)), to the really informative (for example, detailed job-descriptions of medieval librarians (nos 338, 493.1, 718, 874), Francesco Mario Grapaldi’s account of the paper-making process (no. 882), and regulations relating to the multiplication of textbooks by dictation at the universities of Vienna (no. 641) and Ingolstadt (no. 865)). Altogether, this is a delightful book to dip into and one must be grateful for Steinmann for his assiduity—as Florentius, a monk at S. Pedro de Valeránica, aptly put it in 945, Labor scribentis refectio est legentis, ‘the writer’s labour refreshes the reader’ (no. 201; this whole text, Steinmann seems not to have observed, reappears a century and a half later, virtually verbatim, as no. 305, taken this time from British Library, MS Add. 11695). However, notwithstanding the publisher’s claim that there has long been a real need for a more comprehensive collec tion of such material than is found in Wilhelm Wattenbach’s oft-cited Das Schrift wesen im Mittelalter (3rd...

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