From the onset of the Middle Ages, the monks toiled in their monasteries’ writing rooms, called scriptoria. In the simple life of these monasteries, the labor needed to make these communities self-sufficient was shared by everyone. Work in the scriptorium was an important task. To educate Christians, manuscripts had to be produced for circulation in the various Christian areas of the world. At that time, there were no printing presses, no photocopying machines. All documents were copied by hand with ink on parchment. The entire bible, for instance, was copied over thousands of times. The demand for copies of the Bible and other religious and classical works was always high.

The Scriptorium
The scriptorium was the most important room in a monastery next to the chapel. For this reason these writing rooms were either built at the top of an attack-proof fortress tower or as a separate building within the closed walls of a compound. The monks were carefully to protect the manuscripts that took them sometimes as long as five years to produce. The theft of a manuscript was considered a high crime; often within a manuscript, the monk will have written a warning on the first page such as this one from a Bible produced in the 12^th century:

"If anyone steal this book, let him die the death; let him be fried in the pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen."

The daily routine
The monks who took up the task of producing manuscripts were called scribes. After morning prayer (lauds), each scribe would begin work at a desk or table with a stool offering no back support. No candles or fires were allowed due to the safety hazards of the flames. The scribe sat all day with his simple tools: a quill pen in his right hand and in his left, a knife, used to sharpen the pen, to smooth out roughened areas of the parchment, and to scrape away errors. Nearby sat a pot of ink.

The scribe’s task was a rigorous one, demanding his full attention. If the scribe needed encouragement he would remind himself that each word he wrote was a blow against Satan and a mark in his favor come the day of judgment. He often began his work writing a brief prayer in the upper left hand corner of his first sheet.

And at the end of the manuscripts scribes would often leave explicits, brief comments revealing a variety of concerns—enthusiasm and religious ardor in furthering the Word of God, the desire for better materials, the longing for a glass of wine and a warm meal, or a comforting fire to restore feeling to their fingers.

The abecedarium
The scribes enjoyed playing word games to warm up their pens. One example is the abecedarian sentence, one that contains every letter of the alphabet. One commonly used today in English is: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Often times a scribe had to match a certain script style. So when he practiced the new style he would write out, over and over, an abecedarian sentence. Two such sentences the monks used in the 8^th century:

Te canit abcelebratque polus rex gazifer hymnis. (The Hymn, oh treasure-bearing king, sings of you, and the pole also honors you).

Trans zephyrique globum scandunt tua facta per axem. (Your achievements rise across the earth and throughout the region of the zephyr).

Titivillus: Patron Demon of the Scribes
The repetitiveness of monastic life sometimes took its toll. Monks, because they are human like the rest of us, would occasionally cease to be as attentive as they ought in their daily work of copying manuscripts. Mistakes were made, words misspelled or misplaced. It was a matter of great concern that errors not be introduced into the copying, only to be copied again and again.

Because of this possibility of error, Titivillus was born in the minds of the medieval scribes—created in jest to make a serious point. Slipping about unseen he followed the monks around the monastery looking for errors in their work, especially in their manuscripts. Titivillus, the legend states, was required each day to find enough errors to fill his sack a thousand times. (We do not know, however, how big of a sack he carried.) He would then haul them below to the Devil who recorded each mistake in his little book of errors, to be used against each monk on the Day of Judgment.

The awareness of Titivillus’ presence in the monasteries had its effect. The monks soon took greater care, and by A.D. 1460 he was reduced to sneaking about the churches and chapels taking the names of women who were gossiping at Mass.

But in the next century, when the scribes were overworked by the great demand of manuscripts for the new universities, Titivillus was again sacking the sins of errors. The monks began to disclaim responsibility for the errors in their manuscripts that that had to rush to produce for the schools. Titivillus, they said, had tempted them to err. And so Titivillus was acknowledged as the source of the monks’ errors. He became the patron pest of scribes since he absolved the monks of their guilt over the errors.

Other arts articles from Volume VI (1997-98) of St. Joseph Messenger:

Glaziers and the Windows to Heaven (Stained Glass)
A Brief History of Iconography
Picturing the Four Evangelists
Altar Artistry--Decorating with the Dossal
Picturing the Saints
The Sacred Monograms of Jesus
Symbols of the Blessed Virgin in Art