Hello, my name is Tim Ternes and I am the Director of Programming and the St. John's Bible at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, more commonly known as HIML. HIML is located on the St. John's University in Abbey Campus in Collegeville, Minnesota. Now like many of you, I find myself working from home these days due to COVID-19, and since I can't continue my programming around the country, I decided to put together a series of mini-programs to share with you via HIML at home.
Ancient Methods, Modern Results is a series of short talks which will take a look at the historical roots of the tools, methods, and materials used in the making of the St. John's Bible. Today's topic is, To Err is Human and to Correct Divine. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the St. John's Bible, please feel free to check out our website shown on the screen in front of you. The St. John's Bible is a handwritten illuminated Bible.
It is written on parchment or animal skin with a quill and hand-ground inks. Now imagine you're sitting and writing this beautiful manuscript. You've spent hours and hours working on one page and suddenly you realize you spell a word wrong. Or maybe your pen made a blot.
You know, it's a mistake on a manuscript like this is enough to make even a medieval monk turn to drink. Well, you know, those medieval monks didn't always take it so seriously as we do. On a beautiful manuscript page like this from a book of ours from the 15th century, imagine making a mistake on the bottom line on one of these pages. Well, it wouldn't be uncommon for a medieval monk to be unhappy about it, but to simply maybe take and cross it out, put a few dots under it and say, you know what, skip that reader and go on to the next section. Or maybe you're writing an entire manuscript page and you realize you've made so many mistakes, you...
You brought in wrong words, misspelling, misphrases. You know what? It might just be easier to cross off the entire page altogether. Here's a wonderful page from a 13th century manuscript at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
And you know what the scribe just decided in the end? You know what? There are so many mistakes. I'm just going to cross it off. Now, he did cross it off very elegantly, but it still crossed off and said, I'm starting over.
And that's exactly what he did. The next page has a beautifully written corrected page. So you have this manuscript.
You're writing this elegant page. And let's say, now this is from the St. John's Bible, you spell this word wrong, or your pen makes a blob over here. Because you're writing on vellum, you do have a way of correcting it. If you were writing on paper, you'd be out of luck.
You'd have to probably start over or make a correction you could see. But vellum is a little more forgiving. And the ancient scribes knew this as well.
Take your pen knife. Or take your Victorian correcting knife, that's what's shown over here, and you simply scrape it away. I shouldn't say simply because it does take some time and some talent. And you don't want to make sure you go through the other side of the skin. You scrape it away, take some sandpaper and sand it.
And pretty soon you'll never even know that that mistake was there. You can write on it and there's just a little bit of a change in the texture or nap of the surface. It really is quite forgiving and allows you to be human.
So. Here's another page from the St. John's Bible, a beautiful page of work like this. Now, as a scribe, you may have taken 7 to 13 hours to write that page.
And let's say all of a sudden you realize that this page of text is missing a line right here. Maybe the proofreader found it a couple of months from when you wrote it. And that missing line means, if that line is here, it means to put that line in, you would have to scrape all of this off.
And if you take a look closely, you can see that there's writing on the back side of this skin already. Or maybe there's going to be a decoration like this on the other side. Well, when you make a mistake like that, leaving out a line that's too big to scrape off, then you have to turn it into something nicer. And again, a calligrapher has a few tricks up his or her sleeve. Here's another page from the St. John's Bible, our sower in the seed.
You can see the beautiful sower here. Well, take a look. This page also has something else.
When this page was written, it was written first and then the artwork was added into it. So when they got to the bottom of this column, they discovered that, oops, this column ended up one line longer than this column, which means they left out an entire line. As you read through this column, you're going to see a tiny red diamond over here in the margin. That red diamond points back to the bird. The bird's feet are holding a rope.
that rope travels down the side of the text saying, oops, this line belongs right here. And the crowd came together again so that they could not even eat, lest when his family heard it, they went out to restrain him. Isn't that fun?
That little bird or whatever symbol they use to mark the place of the insertion is commonly known as a sign of return. And it's a method that any medieval scribe would recognize and use. In fact, they made miscorrections like that 800 years ago. Here's a wonderful book of ours.
from the Walters Collection in Baltimore from the 13th century and take a look. This little monk is saying, oops folks, look this line belongs right up here. And from that same manuscript you have these two monks up here in the top of the page fighting and they're saying, oops you know what, these two, this line here actually belongs right in this area here. Quite a bit of fun.
From the British Library there's this one where this little man is saying, oh my gosh, all of this text belongs way over here under that first column. Or how about this scribe that simply hung the missing text out on the side of the margin using an elegant little scroll. And one of our own manuscripts at the Hill Museum has this one.
Take a look at this page here. On the very bottom of the page, you'll see a tiny flower. That flower tells you that, oops, that line actually belongs right up here where the flower is marked again. It's kind of an early form of an asterisk if you think about it as well. Out of 1100 some pages, the St. John's Bible ended up with only nine major corrections.
That's pretty incredible when you think about it. Now four of those corrections use a bird. You saw the first one with the sower and the seed, but there's one in Genesis, one in Exodus, and one in Leviticus.
The first volume, Pentateuch, ended up with three mistakes in the St. John's Bible, the most of any other volume as well. Now, another method of correcting a manuscript is found on this page. Here is a two-page spread written by all six of the calligraphers.
They wanted to have one page where they showcased all their different hands. And you can see at the bottom here, there's also an area where they've signed their names. They've given their calligraphers marks. But if you look closely at that area, let me blow it up here, you can see that it also contains something else. Like that scroll that was hanging up in that earlier 13th century manuscript, this little line down here, so it doesn't distract too much from the scribes'marks, simply is done with a bracket and a couple of lines that say, oops, it belongs right up here.
Another simple kind of fun way of marking an error in this manuscript. Another one in the St. John's Bible. as a simple correction in which two gold diamonds mark the placement of a missing line. These two gold diamonds show that this man on the bottom actually belongs up here in that missing, in that same spot.
Now, a little fun, two favorite corrections in the St. John's Bible employ some fun as well, like our pulling man in that 13th century manuscript. Here we have a bumblebee attached to a pulley system saying, this line actually belongs way up here. and the pulleys are going to help make that job easy to put it into place.
And look at the detail of that bumblebee. You would swear they killed it and stuck it to the page. It's so detailed. And probably my favorite one is our wonderful little lemur here saying, oh my gosh, look what I've done.
His eyes all bugged out saying, oops, this line here actually belongs right up here. Every single calligrapher in the St. John's Bible made a mistake. But it also begins with a mistake. This is the very first page of the St. John's Bible. We have this stunning artwork of creation on the left, and then the nice, heavy, beautiful text.
Now imagine finishing this and thinking, this is how the whole project is going to begin, and then suddenly realizing that you forgot a line. The artistic director and world-renowned scribe Donald Jackson must have been heartbroken when he discovered that his missing line was on that first page. So rather than make a big fanfare out of it, what they did is simply move that into the margin with an elegant little bracket, and it just fits in quietly, proving that we may have the Word of God, but it's definitely written by human hands.
Thank you for joining me. If you'd like to learn more about the St. John's Bible, please visit our website. And if you'd like to learn about the preservation work, of endangered manuscripts done by Himmel, please visit our website at hmml.org and consider becoming one of our donors. Thank you.