Throughout the Middle Ages, text had generally been produced by clerks writing longhand with quills and pots of gum-based ink on stretched and treated animal skin known as parchment or vellum. The best clerks were either efficient copyists or gifted artists—and sometimes both. But none were superhuman. They worked page by page, one manuscript at a time. A long text—a Bible, a book of saints’ lives, a tract by Aristotle or Ptolemy—would take a scribe hundreds or even thousands of hours to complete.
