The Lamp in the Storm
One book. Seventy-five pounds of it. To make three copies of a single Bible — the Codex Amiatinus — craftsmen needed about 1,550 calf hides. The finished book weighed more than most could carry. Knowledge was not cheap in the years after Rome fell. Learning and gaining knowledge would be a struggle.
Key Terms
- Manuscript
- A book or document written entirely by hand, before printing existed.
- Scriptorium
- The monastery writing room where monks silently copied texts.
- Codex
- A manuscript bound as a book with pages, replacing the rolled-up scroll.
- Parchment
- A tough writing surface of scraped, stretched, dried animal hide.
- Papyrus
- The older reed-pressed surface — it stopped arriving when the western trade routes broke down.
- Trivium
- Grammar, rhetoric, and logic — the first three liberal arts.
- Gloss
- A note in the margin of a book, often a student arguing with the author.
- Codex Amiatinus
- Three copies took about 1,550 calf hides; the finished book weighed 75 pounds.
- Cassiodorus
- Roman statesman turned monastery founder; ordered the pagan classics copied beside scripture. Lived to nearly 100.
- Vivarium
- The monastery in Calabria where the ancient mind was kept breathing.
- Boethius
- Roman senator condemned to die around AD 524, he wrote his greatest book, the Consolation, in the cell.
- The Consolation of Philosophy
- The last great work of the Classical Period, written by the Christian theologian Boethius.
- Justinian I
- Set hundreds of lawyers to bind a thousand years of Roman law into one ordered code.
- Constantinople
- Eastern capital whose scholars read Greek without a single break for a thousand more years.
- Baghdad
- Where scholars of the Abbasid Caliphate translated Greek science and medicine into Arabic.
- Toledo
- The Spanish city where scholars matched Arabic words to Latin ones, line by line.
- Hunayn ibn Ishaq
- One scholar, 129 translated works of the doctor Galen.
- Aesop
- A slave whose animal tales became a schoolboy’s first reader.
- De Officiis
- Cicero’s handbook on doing one’s duty, wrestled with by older boys.
- Dante
- Wove the ancient voices into The Divine Comedy, finished around AD 1321.