Parchment and Paper

Abstract

In later medieval Europe literacy spread from the clergy to lay landowners and merchants. The literacy of mothers and wives, who owned their own prayer books, was a very significant extension of education in the home. Although most books were still in Latin, the writing of vernacular languages became increasingly common. Nevertheless, this was still a scribal culture producing magnificent works of art in parchment books, like the Luttrell Psalter in England or the Codex Manesse in Zurich celebrating German vernacular poets. At Treviso (near Venice) the Dominican Friars, the most powerful religious order in the Church, had themselves depicted as scribes writing doctrinal texts. When Gutenberg developed his invention of printing in the 1450s, he depended first of all on the traditional market of scriptural texts in Latin. Printing succeeded because it imitated and drew on centuries of development of books and of a widening literate public.

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