Writings In An Illiterate World: The Church And Art Of The Middle Ages
It is no secret that the Christian church played a big role in society in Europe. From the first days of the Roman Catholic church through the Middle Ages, churches were a central part of life for people throughout Europe. What people don’t always realize however, is that despite all the austerity so often associated with ‘church’, the church in Europe was responsible (consciously or not) for some of the great works of art produced throughout the Middle Ages. Stained glass windows and illuminated manuscripts are just two styles of art, that have their origins in the Christian church, but managed to develop into their own modes of fine art.
Stained glass windows are works of art, most often found in churches, with pieces of coloured glass placed in a frame and held together by strips of metal, usually lead, to form a pattern or image. Sometimes made using coloured glass, which is made by adding coloured salts when the glass is being blown, they can also be made with clear glass that is then painted and fired in a kiln.
Stained glass windows have been found in buildings as early as 600 CE, but truly reached their peak in the Middle Ages. Creating these windows came at an extraordinary cost, since there was the technical skill involved – of blowing the glass, fitting the glass into the frame, and installing the frame inside the building – as well as the artistic skill required to produce a believable and understandable image.
The process of making a stained glass window begins by first planning the size of the space the window is filling. Once the space is determined, a template is made, first of the outside and then is filled in with all the desired imagery. Once the template is complete, the glass can now be constructed. When using coloured glass, each piece is selected for colour and size. Pieces that aren’t an exact fit for the space it needs to fit can be trimmed down with a small tool. Sometimes even when using glass that is already coloured, small details, such as faces or outlines are painted on once the glass is installed. This allows for elaborate details even when relying on using full squares of coloured glass.
Starting around the 16th century, painting clear glass became a more and more popular method for creating stained glass. The paints used would be made using ground glass particles of whichever colour was desired, but by turning the ground glass into a paint, much more detail could be added to the windows. Time that otherwise would have had to be spent trimming down small pieces of coloured glass to fit could be spent adding details to more standard, square pieces of glass.
Once all the pieces of glass were either cut or stained, they could be installed into the window. This was done by slotting the pieces into lead cames. This is a small piece of lead, shaped either like a U or an H so that the glass could be slotted into place and held between two or more cames.
Since the church would have been the most important building in each city, stained glass windows were a great way to add emphasis to this importance. A king or lord could demonstrate their power and wealth by commissioning a gigantic stained glass window. Monks from a monastery could demonstrate their devotion, by taking the painstaking hours to create a series of stained glass windows. Priests and other church officials also valued stained glass windows for the images that they depicted.
In addition to being decorative, stained glass windows were also informative. The subject of the image created would often be religious. This could range from a stylized portrait of an angel to a re-creation of an exact scene from the Bible. Sometimes a single panel of stained glass could tell an entire story, but just as often, a story or theme would be related across a series of panels. Considering that many churchgoers were illiterate, creating scenes in stained glass was one way that churches could convey messages and stories to the mass public. Even though someone would never have been able to read the story in the Bible, when rendered in a stained glass window, or across a series of windows, an illiterate churchgoer could gain an understanding of any given passage or story from the Bible.
Also, even for those people who could read a Bible in an English or German translation, most church services were conducted in Latin, which was spoken by a small percentage of the population. This meant that many people sitting in church on any given Sunday would have no clue what the priest was actually talking about. Filling a church with stained glass windows was a way to keep the churchgoers interested throughout the service and get the message of the priest across.
While stained glass windows found their origin and popularity within the churches of Medieval Europe, they began to spread to the secular world. The purpose remained to increase the prestige of the given building, both inside and outside, but the subject matter of the window changed to reflect the nature of the building. A government building, for example, might display the coat of arms of the country to kingdom they were in. As schools and universities became more and more prominent within society, they would commission stained glass windows to reflect the academic pursuits of the student body. Also, wealthy members from all parts of society began to feature stained glass windows in their homes. These windows were primarily decorative, and rather than biblical stories, would feature scenes from nature or purely ornamental patterns. Nowadays, stained glass refers not just to windows but also to a more general form of art. Stained glass windows are installed in buildings, churches, schools and otherwise, across cities in Europe as well as North and South America.
An Illuminated Manuscript is simply a document or piece of writing where the words are supplemented with decorations such as pictures, borders, or ornate initials. Decorations of illuminated manuscripts can take a number of different forms. Sometimes, the first letter or initial of a book or page will be elaborately painted and much larger than the rest of the text. Borders are sometimes added around the entirety of a page, or just around the first letter. While this border can sometimes just be purely decorative, it can also relate to the content of the text. Illuminated manuscripts can also be decorated with small pictures or miniatures that usually depict what is happening in the text. Illuminated manuscripts traditionally were also inlaid with gold or silver leaf but the term in a broader sense refers to all manner of decorated texts. The shine that these precious metals would give off however, is believed to be the reason why the decorated manuscripts were called ‘illuminated’.
Most of the surviving illuminated manuscripts that are found come from Europe in the Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts have, however, been found belonging to the Roman Empire that date as far back as the 5th-7th century CE.
If you think of an illuminated manuscript as an important document accompanied by corresponding pictures or images and inlaid with gold, then even the Ancient Egyptians created them. Documents such as the Book of the Dead have written words (represented by hieroglyphs in this case) accompanied by pictures and are even decorated with gold and other colours.
Most of the illuminated manuscripts that are found are religious in their nature. Sometimes sections or even the entirety of the Bible would be illuminated. Another popular form illuminated manuscripts took was a ‘book of hours’ which outlined certain prayers one should do at different times of the day. Due to the use of gold leaf and coloured paints, as well as the time, labour, and craftsmanship needed to produce one, illuminated manuscripts were expensive to produce and could often only be afforded by the church or religious officials. Churches, and especially monasteries, played a key role not just in the patronage of illuminated manuscripts but in the production of them as well. Already, monks were responsible for a large amount of the written text that was produced in the Middle Ages, being among the small percentage of society that could read and write. Writing out entire books, or as was often the case, The Bible, took weeks and months to produce just the words. With the accompanying images and designs on illuminated manuscripts, the amount of time needed to produce a text increased almost ten-fold. For many monks, this devotion of time towards writing and decorating an illuminated manuscript was just as important a part of their religious life as the actual content of the manuscript.
Over time, Illuminated manuscripts became more and more an art form developed within monasteries across Europe. Beginning at around the thirteenth century however, illuminated manuscripts began to be made that were not religious - such as early books or lists of rules and codices - but they still remained expensive to produce and therefore an art reserved for the elite classes. Nobles would pride themselves on being able to fill their libraries with shelves upon shelves of books. Remember that just having books with written words was impressive enough; consider the prestige a book that looks nice as well would have. Even once the printing press started to replace hand-written books around the 15th and 16th centuries, illuminated manuscripts remained a staple in the homes of the wealthy. Even though the exact same words could be produced much more quickly and at a cheaper cost, the majesty and grandeur of illuminated manuscripts kept them popular.
Illuminated manuscripts were highly valued for a number of reasons. One reason was for the sheer beauty of the illustrations created. Since the texts were often religious texts, and therefore already important to the reader, adding decorations and embellishments simply heightened the reverence for the book/text. Even those who were illiterate could admire the physical appearance of manuscripts inlaid with gold and decorated with pictures.
A large reason for their importance is that they come from a period in Europe where not everyone was able to read. By including pictures or diagrams, an illiterate person could get a better sense of what the text is trying to say. A great example of this at work is the Biblia pauperum or ‘Pauper’s Bible’. This term doesn’t refer to a particular book but was a style or tradition of Bibles, popular in the middle ages, which were filled with illustrations corresponding to the text on each page. The Pauper’s Bible was different from already existing ‘illustrated Bibles’ which had the text of the Bible supplemented with pictures. Pauper’s Bibles made the pictures the main focus, with bits of text at the corners of the page.
These Bibles were likely very expensive (the addition of pictures made them, if anything, more expensive than a normal Bible) so paupers or the lower classes could not have afforded these books. Instead, they were valuable as a teaching aid the church could use to communicate its stories and teachings to the illiterate.
Illuminated manuscripts, much like stained glass windows, serve as yet another example of one of the ways that the Church impacted and influenced art throughout Medieval Europe. For hundreds of years, they controlled much of the wealth of Europe and also had their own labour force in the form of monasteries. This gave them the means and the ability to undertake large tasks such as ‘illuminating’ an entire book, or outfitting an entire building with murals of stained glass. While both of these creations would ultimately branch out to become their own respective fields of art, they both share roots as ways the church attempted to communicate its writings in an illiterate world.
Interested in learning more about Stained Glass Windows or Illuminated Manuscripts? Check out these sources:
- “Introductory History of Stained Glass,” Shannon Fitzgerald, from Light, Color, Glass: Patterns of Illumination, Fall 1998.
- “Stained Glass in Medieval Europe,” Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, in Helibrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.
- “Lights of Faith: Stained Glass Windows as Tools for Catechesis,” by Carol Anne Jone from The Institute for Sacred Architecture, Fall 2008.
- “An Introduction to Illuminated Manuscripts,” The British Library, June 2, 2014.
- “Manuscript Illumination in Northern Europe,” Susan Jones, in Helibrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2002.
Image credits:
“Stained glass window in Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral, San Franciso” by Todd Fong, January 17, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
“Staine Glass, St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall” by @sage_solar, April 8, 2010, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
“Illuminated Manuscript, Duke Albrecht’s Table of Christian Faith (Winter Part), The Trinity (Throne of Grace), with Albrecht of Bavaria, Walters Art Museum Ms. W.171, fol.1r“ by Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts February 15, 2011, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
“Manuscript page” by Kotomi_ March 19, 2010 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
“Illuminated manuscript” by Susan Sermoneta June 10, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Post by Chris Miller, ROMKids Studio Assistant. Last updated: February 2nd, 2015.
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