Medieval Cities and Libraries

[chatdemon]

I think we need to consider the prevalence of literacy in a D&D game world. The game assumes that all PCs start out literate, except those dumb barbarians . This would lead one to believe that a lot of people in the world are literate. You also have a lot of religions that encourage literacy.
In the reeal world, literacy was rare, and not really encouraged by any major religion to a great extent (oral tradtion being a major cause of this).

I think the image of a huge library holding musty old tomes spelling out the secrets of the world and its history is a key part of fantasy, and I strongly suggest not being too 'realistic' here.

 

[Eridanis]

You might want to flip through Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf, which is a history of storage methods for books. It's interesting. Really.

Ack! You beat me to it; I was going to recommend this book when I finished reading the thread. An excellent book.

One of my home web pages (woefully out-of-date - I just re-uploaded the pages for the first time in over a year) has an excellent photo of a medieval library I scanned in:

http://home.wi.rr.com/bogen/books.html

The chians are there to keep scholars from stealing books. Many of the old books at the great European libraries still to this day have chain links at the top of the spine for this very reason. Talk about theft prevention.

 

[Sir Edgar]

Another side note: In some times and places, historically, reading silently was not common. People read out loud, even if there was noone there to hear them. Being able to read silently might be seen as something supernatural...

Very interesting fact there! Thanks for all the great info, people! I knew there would be a lot of resourceful and knowledgeable folks here! I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what would be a good name for a library in my campaign city. But all this information really helped a lot!

 

[Eridanis]

Well, in the real world, there are prestigious libraries named after the founders and chief collectors of the collections (the Bodlian, the Folger Shakespeare, and the Huntington libraries spring to mind), ones named after the country they're in (the British Library, which until 'recently' was 'just' a subset of the British Museum), ones prosiacally named after the higher institution they're affiliated with (Cambridge University Libraries). For further examples, check out the reference section of your local library and see if they have a copy of ... drat, the exact name escapes me, but it's something like "Libraries of Hgher Education Institutions." A 2-volume set, the last time I looked at it; you might get some cool names from there.

Given all the of above, your best bet to add flavor to your campaign's libraries might be to name them after their founders. Enjoy making up those NPCs (either long-dead or still vibrantly at the helm of their institution), think about what particular interests they might have, and go from there. The real world's best libraries and book collections were formed by men and women with a passionate interest in a subject, and collected in that subject (a particular author, a specific subject (like 18th century English literature by women), a specific imprint (yes, there are people who collect books because they're all from the same publisher), or some other interest).

And thanks for letting me exercise my long-atrophied bookseller skills. I miss doing that very much.

 

[Tzarevitch]

As I recall in medieval Europe, a handful of universities (which were almost always affiliated with the church) and the church itself tended to have the vast majority of the existing books or manuscripts. Wealthy private collectors (nobles) held the rest. As several people have pointed out, libraries didn't exist as they do now.

Until the printing press (and mass production) arrived, "books" were horribly expensive and rare because they were hand-copied and hand illuminated. Even then, books remained rare because there weren't enough people who could read them.

Before mass literacy arrived the few existing manuscripte were held in private collections by the church or wealthy nobles. I remember reading a book (I can't remember it's name) where a medieval noble was particularly proud of his impressive collection of 20 books (which was an impressive collection in those days.)

As others have pointed out, things change if you go east into the Islamic world and to parts of Asia (China in particular) where you have strong central governments that value learning and record keeping and are stable enough to act as patrons of literacy and knowledge. The Catholic Church was the closest Europe could get to this until the Renaissance.

Back to your original question though. Researching information in 1000AD would probably involve getting permission from 3-4 vealthy nobles to peruse their private collections. If you are in a university town or a town worthy of a cathedral or a monastery, you'd have the added option of prevailing on the church (owned the universities and the monasteries) for access to it's collections. You could only get access to a collection if someone of note could vouch for you or if the owner knew you and trusted you around his precious books.

This can give the PCs plenty of opportunity for roleplaying as they have to not only figure a way to convince a noble or the bishop to allow them access to his precious manuscript collection, but they also have to find which of perhaps a dozen individual collections scattered over a significant geographical area has the particular manuscript that they need.

Tzarevitch

P.S. I will join others in highly recommending Umberto Ecco's, "The Name of the Rose". The movie is OK, the book is MUCH better. There is also a lineart map of the monastery and the library inside the book.

 

[Xeriar]

Keep in mind, this -is- the Christian era, which saw the burning of an estimated two million manuscripts and books (from my humanities teacher, anyway, who did extensive research into the period). They were rare for more reasons than simply being expensive to make.

 

[Eridanis]

Keep in mind, this -is- the Christian era, which saw the burning of an estimated two million manuscripts and books (from my humanities teacher, anyway, who did extensive research into the period). They were rare for more reasons than simply being expensive to make.

Thanks for the injection of politics into this thread. Goodness knows we need more of that around ENworld these days.

I'd honestly like to see some data on your teacher's assertion; while much information was indeed lost during the "Dark Ages", much information was preserved by the hard work of Christian and Muslim monasteries through that time period. By the 12th century, individual scholars and wealthy nobles were starting to re-emerge in Europe, preserving more books and manuscripts in that manner as well. An interesting book on this era is A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE by William Manchester.

Which reminds me that I should do some research on scholarship and libraries in the Far East during that time period. The Chinese certainly were keeping busy with their own scientific and cultural explorations; what would their libraries have looked like?

 

[Aitch Eye]

Can you give examples? I'm curious.

Yes. (I would have in the first place, if I'd had the book handy to jog my memory...which I still don't, so I may be over-generalizing.)

Books on vellum were stored in presses to keep them flat, and I believe may have been chained to them as well. [edit: Some confusion in that statement. While vellum books were stored in a press that worked like a press, the term "book press" also was used for shelves with tables attached, which is where the chains would be attached. )

Early books weren't necessarily constructed in a way that lent to being stored upright, so they had to keep them horizontally, even if they were on shelves. If they were chained down, the shelves would have tables attached, or freestanding tables might have bars stretching between the supports that the chains were attached to. There's a quote from the book I found in a review mentioning "cabinets beneath the desks...in triangular attic-like spaces formed under the back-to-back sloped surfaces of desktops or small tabletop lecterns that rested upon a horizontal surface."

I seem to remember seeing some footage of an (I think) Italian renaissance-era library that had the books mounted on a sort of Ferris wheel or something.

If the library in the game needed allow for multiple scholars having access to its books at the same time, some sort of idiosyncratic solutions might come into play.

 

[jester47]

Also, keep in mind that not all "books" were codecies (individual pages between 2 covers). Often they were scrolls or just collections of paper.


Oh and here is the link I forgot to post earlier.

http://www.historylink101.com/middle_ages_europe/middle_ages_maps.htm

Lots of medieval map goodness can be found here.

Aaron.