SOURCE: Gasquet, Francis Aidan. “Books and Bookmaking in Early Chronicles and Accounts.” In Monastic Life in the Middle Ages: With a Note on Great Britain and the Holy See, 1792-1806, pp. 92-109. 1922. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1906, Gasquet provides an economic perspective on medieval bookmaking.

Turning over the pages of our annals the reader constantly comes upon some record of books made for, or given to the library of the monastery or house in which the writer lived, or in which he was specially interested.¹ Sometimes also in manuscript volumes, though not as frequently as we could wish, we find some details of the actual making of a manuscript, of the cost, for instance, of the materials, of the payments made for the writing, for the illumination, and for the binding. Less frequently again we...