Medieval Literature

Medieval Book (Cluny Museum, Paris)

Books were very expensive in medieval Europe, and so there weren't very many of them. Each book had to be written by hand by a trained scribe (often a monk), and that took a long time. And they had to be written on parchment, which was very expensive. People who had books took very good care of them. You can see in the picture that this book cover has jewels and carved ivory on it. Sometimes library books were chained to the tables so people couldn't steal them (the way we put security sensors in library books today).

But even though books were so hard to produce, and most people couldn't read, there were still a lot of people writing books. In Early Medieval Europe, Augustine in North Africa and Pope Gregory the Great in Italy wrote books about the Christian faith. Cassiodorus wrote a History of the Goths. In France, Gregory of Tours wrote a History of the Franks (mostly about the Merovingians). In Spain, Isidore of Seville wrote a History of the (Visi)Goths, and a book about the origins of words called the Etymologies. And at the same time in Arabia, the Koran was written as well, in Arabic. Around 800 AD, at the court of Charlemagne Einhard wrote a biography of Charlemagne imitating the Roman biographer Suetonius. All of these books (except the Koran) were written in Latin, but in Constantinople, Procopius wrote in Greek about Justinian's conquests. In England, the epic poem Beowulf was written in Anglo-Saxon, and in Germany, about 850 AD, the Hildebrandsleid.

More books were written in Europe in the High Middle Ages. People gradually began to write more in languages that people still spoke instead of in Latin, and that made it easier for people to learn to read their work. In France, Abelard and Heloise wrote letters to each other in Latin. In Egypt and Spain, Ibn Rushd and Maimonides wrote books about philosophy in Arabic. In Africa, Ibn Battuta wrote a long travelogue in Arabic about his travels from Morocco to India and China and also south of the Sahara desert in Mali. In Italy, Dante wrote in Italian. He wrote the Divine Comedy, about the Christian Heaven and Hell. After Dante did it, Boccaccio and Petrarch wrote in Italian too. About the same time, somebody also wrote sagas like the Niebelungenleid in German.

Then in the Late Middle Ages, in England, Chaucer wrote a series of great stories in English (though it is a very old-fashioned English you would find hard to read). In Italy, by the 1300's, the Renaissance was already happening, and men were eagerly scouring the monastery libraries for old copies of Greek and Roman texts. Many men were inspired by these ancient texts to write new books. Most famously, Machiavelli wrote "The Prince", a book of advice for North Italian rulers of this time.

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