In the days before photocopiers and scanners, the only way people could copy a book was the hard way — by hand. Every book at a monastery, from the Bible to the textbooks used in the schools, had to be hand-copied. This took up much of the monks' time. Monasteries lent books to one another for the purpose of copying; often the borrowing monastery would make two copies, one for themselves and one for the lending monastery.

The early monks didn't write on paper, but on parchment, which is made of dried sheepskin. The most important texts sometimes got transcribed on vellum, which is made from dried calfskin.

How Irish Monks Saved the Classical Tradition

The Irish monks, copying away in their monasteries, didn't realize that their work would have lasting implications for all of European history. But they did, in fact, preserve classical learning for posterity.

After the Roman Empire fell, the state of education fell along with it. The Romans and the Greeks were consummate scholars and wrote learned treatises on all manner of topics — history, science, and literature. In the early medieval period, much of that literature was in danger of being lost forever. People on the Continent didn't know its importance, and many of them were too busy fighting barbarians. In Ireland, though, peace prevailed.

The Irish monks even transcribed their own local epics in Irish. These texts, including Irish epics such as the Táin Bó Cuailnge, are some of the earliest examples of vernacular literature.

Illumination in a Dark World

The Irish monks weren't content to simply copy texts. They had to embellish them, to make them into works of art. They were fascinated with the shapes of letters and experimented with ways of making them more beautiful. They invented a script called Irish miniscule that was easier to read and write than many other medieval scripts had been; it was so successful that monasteries across Europe adopted it.

Monks also used color and drawings to decorate their texts, in a technique called illumination. They took their inspiration from ancient Celtic art, the spirals and zigzags that decorated the tombs at Newgrange and myriad metal objects. Using paints made from various pigments, including insects, they applied brilliant colors to their complicated drawings to create books that would dazzle the eye of the reader. Letters themselves became fabulously embellished; sometimes an entire page would be filled with a fabulously decorated single letter. Sometimes artists even decorated their pages with gold leaf that would catch the light and literally “illuminate” the text.

Ireland is home to several famous illuminated books that survive today: