Being a lover of the written word, a writer, and a voracious reader…I decided to start the medieval history series with books in medieval times! For several hundred years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, book publishing and selling in Europe nearly ceased to exist. So great was the decline of educational opportunity in this period that only the devotion of Christian monks and nuns stood in the way of the complete disappearance of literature. For me, that would truly be–”The Dark Ages” where no books existed or were read.

To keep literature alive, religious orders, in the sixth century, strove to preserve the knowledge of the past. Monasteries built libraries and reading rooms and then divided them into smaller spaces called carrels. In these cubicles, monks would copy texts onto animal skin parchment.

But a monk had other duties to perform in addition to working on manuscripts, and it might take an entire year to complete a single book. As time passed, the proliferation of schools and the birth of the university together with the increasing availability of paper caused a tremendous surge in the demand for reading material, a demand that the monks, with their slow, painstaking efforts, were unable to meet.

To satisfy the growing market for books, professional copyists appeared by the 14th century and began instituting more efficient methods of production in the scriptoria, or writing shops. The resulting volume of books was sold through stationers, so called to distinguish these permanent booksellers from the itinerant book peddlers of the past.

Coinciding with the resurgence of literacy was the creation of the most significant body of literature since classical times. Readers clamored for the works of contemporary writers such as Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, as well as usual biblical and liturgical texts. The demand proved too great even for the copyists and their writing shops. The problem of supply would not be solved until the mid-15th century, when quicker and cheaper methods of book production were made possible by an as yet unimagined invention known as the printing press.