REVIVAL OF INK.
THE DISAPPEARANCE AND PRESERVATION OF INK WRITINGS,
AS ESTIMATED BY LA CROIX--COMMENTS OF
OTHER WRITERS--DE VINNE'S INTERESTING EXPLANATIONS
OF THE STATUS QUO OF MANUSCRIPT WRITINGS
DURING THE DARK AGES WHICH PRECEDED THE INVENTION
OF PRINTING--PRICES PAID FOR BOOKS IN
ANCIENT TIMES--LIMITATIONS OF HANDWRITING AND
HANDWRITING MATERIALS AT THE BEGINNING OF
THE FIFTH CENTURY--WHO CONTROLLED THE RECORDS
ABOUT THEM--INVENTION OF THE QUILL
PEN--THE CAUSE OF INCREASED FLUIDITY OF
INKS--ORIGIN OF THE SECRETA--CHARACTER OF
INFORMATION OBTAINED FROM THEM--IMPROVEMENT
OF BLACK INKS IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY AND EMPLOYMENT
OF POMEGRANITE INK.
LA CROIX' preface to his "Science and Literature of
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance," refers to the
Dark Ages:
"In the beginning of the Middle Ages, at the
commencement of the fifth century, the Barbarians
made an inroad upon the old world; their renewed
invasions crushed out, in the course of a few years,
the Greek and Roman civilization; and everywhere
darkness succeeded to light. The religion of Jesus
Christ was alone capable of resisting this barbarian
invasion, and science and literature, together with
the arts, disappeared from the face of the earth,
taking refuge in the churches and monasteries. It
was there that they were preserved as a sacred deposit,
and it was thence that they emerged when
Christianity had renovated pagan society. But
centuries and centuries elapsed before the sum of
human knowledge was equal to what it had been at
the fall of the Roman empire. A new society,
moreover, was needed for the new efforts of human
intelligence as it resumed its rights. Schools and
universities were founded under the auspices of the
clergy and of the religious corporations, and thus
science and literature were enabled to emerge from
their tombs. Europe, amidst the tumultuous conflicts
of the policy which made and unmade kingdoms,
witnessed a general revival of the scholastic
zeal; poets, orators, novelists, and writers increased
in numbers and grew in favour; savants, philosophers,
chemists and alchemists, mathematicians
and astronomers, travellers and naturalists, were
awakened, so to speak, by the life-giving breath of
the Middle Ages; and great scientific discoveries
and admirable works on every imaginable subject
showed that the genius of modern society was not
a whit inferior to that of antiquity. Printing, was
invented, and with that brilliant discovery, the Middle
Ages, which had accomplished their work of
social renovation, made way for the Renaissance,
which scattered abroad in profusion the prolific and
brilliant creations of Art, Science, and Literature."
This author to some extent discredits himself, however,
p. 455, where he remarks:
"Long before the invasions of the Barbarians
the histories written by Greek and Latin authors
concerning the annals of the ancient peoples had
been falling into disfavor. Even the best of them
were little read, for the Christians felt but slight
interest in these pagan narratives, and that is why
works relating to the history of antiquity were already
so scarce."
Another authority writing on the same subject discusses
it from a different standpoint, remarking:
"As in the middle ages invention busied itself
with instruments of torture, and as in our days it
is taken up almost as much with the destructive engines
of war as with the productive arts of peace,
so in those early ages it applied itself to the fabrication
of idols, to the mechanism and theatrical
contrivances for mysteries and religious ceremonies.
There was then no desire to communicate
discoveries, science was a sort of freemasonry,
and silence was effectually secured by priestly
anathemas; men of science were as jealous of one
another as they were of all other classes of society.
If we wish to form a clear picture of this earliest
stage of civilization, an age which represents at
once the naivete of childhood and the suspicious
reticence of senility, we must turn our eyes to the
priest, on the one hand, claiming as his own all art
and science, and commanding respect by his contemptuous
silence; and, on the other hand, to the
mechanic plying the loom, extracting the Tyrian
dye, practising chemistry, though ignorant of its
very name, despised and oppressed, and only tolerated
when he furnished Religion with her trappings
or War with arms. Thus the growth of
chemistry was slow, and by reason of its backwardness
it was longer than any other art in ridding
itself of the leading-strings of magic and
astrology. Practical discoveries must have been
made many times without science acquiring thereby
any new fact. For to prevent a new discovery from
being lost there must be such a combination of
favorable circumstances as was rare in that age and
for many succeeding ages. There must be publicity,
and publicity is of quite recent growth; the
application of the discovery must be not only possible
but obvious, as satisfying some want. But
wants are only felt as civilization progresses. Nor
is that all; for a practical discovery to become a
scientific fact it must serve to demonstrate the error
of one hypothesis, and to suggest a new one, better
fitted for the synthesis of existing facts. But
(some) old beliefs are proverbially obstinate and
virulent in their opposition to newer and truer
theories which are destined to eject and replace
them. To sum up, even in our own day, chemistry
rests on a less sound basis than either physics, which
had the advantage of originating as late as the 17th
century, or astronomy, which dates from the time
when the Chaldean shepherd had sufficiently provided
for his daily wants to find leisure for gazing
into the starry Heavens."
The observations of a still earlier commentator are of
the same general nature. He says:
"In the first ages of Christianity, when the
fathers of the Church, the Jews, and the Heathen
philosophers were so warmly engaged in controversy,
there is reason to believe that pious frauds
were not uncommon: and that when one party suspected
forgeries, instead of an attempt at confutation,
which might have been difficult, they had
recourse perhaps to a countermine: and either invented
altogether, or eked out some obscure traditional
scraps by the embellishments of fancy.
When we consider, amongst many literary impositions
of later times, that Psalmanazar's history of
Formosa was, even in this enlightened age and
country (England, about 1735), considered by our
most learned men as unquestionably authentic, till
the confession of the author discovered the secret,
I think it is not difficult to conceive how forgeries
of remote events, before the invention of printing
and the general diffusion of knowledge might gain
an authority, and especially with the zealous, hardly
inferior to that of the most genuine history."
De Vinne, however, in his "Invention of Printing,"
New York, 1878, best explains the status quo of those
times, relative not only to book (MSS.) making, and
methods of circulation, but the causes which led up to
their eventual disappearance and the literary darkness
which ensued. His remarks are so pertinent
that they are quoted at length:
"The civilization of ancient Rome did not require
printing. If all the processes of typography
had been revealed to its scholars the art would not
have been used. The wants of readers and writers
were abundantly supplied by the pen. Papyrus
paper was cheap, and scribes were numerous; Rome
had more booksellers than it needed, and books
were made faster than they could be sold. The
professional scribes were educated slaves, who, fed
and clothed at nominal expense, and organized under
the direction of wealthy publishers, were made
so efficient in the production of books, that typography,
in an open competition, could have offered few advantages.
"Our knowledge of the Roman organization of
labor in the field of bookmaking is not as precise as
could be wished; but the frequent notices of books,
copyists and publishers, made by many authors
during the first century, teach us that books
were plentiful. Horace, the elegant and fastidious
man of letters, complained that his books were too
common, and that they were sometimes found in
the hands of vulgar snobs for whose entertainment
they were not written. Martial, the jovial man of
the world, boasted that his books of stinging epigrams
were to be found in everybody's hands or
pockets. Books were read not only in the libraries,
but at the baths, in the porticoes of houses, at
private dinners and in mixed assemblies. The
business of bookmaking was practised by too many
people, and some were incompetent. Lucian, who
had a keen perception of pretense in every form,
ridicules the publishers as ignoramuses. Strabo,
who probably wrote illegibly, says that the books
of booksellers were incorrect.
"The price of books made by slave labor was
necessarily low. Martial says that his first book of
epigrams was sold in plain binding for six sesterces,
about twenty-four cents of American money; the
same book in sumptuous binding was valued at five
denarii, about eighty cents. He subsequently complained
that his thirteenth book was sold for only
four sesterces, about sixteen cents. He frankly
admits that half of this sum was profit, but intimates,
somewhat ungraciously, that the publisher Tryphon
gave him too small a share. Of the merits of this
old disagreement between the author and publisher
we have not enough of facts to justify an opinion.
We learn that some publishers, like Tryphon and
the brothers Sosii, acquired wealth, but there are
many indications that publishing was then, as it is
now, one of the most speculative kinds of business.
One writer chuckles over the unkind fate that sent
so many of the unsold books of rival authors from
the warehouses of the publisher, to the shops of
grocers and bakers, where they were used to wrap
up pastry and spices; another writer says that the
unsold stock of a bookseller was sometimes bought
by butchers and trunk makers.
"The Romans not only had plenty of books but
they had a manuscript daily newspaper, the Acta
Diurna, which seems to have been a record of the
proceedings of the senate. We do not know how
it was written, nor how it was published, but it
was frequently mentioned by contemporary writers
as the regular official medium for transmitting
intelligence. It was sent to subscribers in distant
cities, and was, sometimes, read to an assembled
army. Cicero mentions the Acta as a sheet in
which he expected to find the city news and gossip
about marriages and divorces.
"With the decline of power in the Roman empire
came the decline of literature throughout the
world. In the sixth century the business of bookmaking
had fallen into hopeless decay. The books
that had been written were seldom read, and the
number of readers diminished with every succeeding
generation. Ignorance pervaded in all ranks of
society. The Emperor Justin I, who reigned between
the years 518 and 527, could not write, and
was obliged to sign state papers with the form of
stencil plate that had been recommended by Quintilian.
Respect for literature was dead. In the
year, 476, Zeno, the Isaurian, burned 120,000 volumes
in the city of Constantinople. During the
year 640, Amrou, the Saracen, fed the baths of
Alexandria for six months with the 500,000 books
that had been accumulating for centuries in its
famous library of the Serapion. Yet books were
so scarce in Rome at the close of the seventh century
that Pope Martin requested one of his bishops
to supply them, if possible, from Germany. The
ignorance of ecclesiastics in high station was
alarming. During this century, and for centuries
afterward, there were many bishops and archbishops
of the church who could not sign their names. It
was asserted at a council of the church held in the
year 992, that scarcely a single person was to be
found in Rome itself who knew the first elements of
letters. Hallam says, 'To sum up the account of
ignorance in a word, it was rare for a layman of
any rank to know bow to sign his name.' He repeats
the statements that Charlemagne could not
write, and Frederic Barbarossa could not read.
John, king of Bohemia, and Philip, the Hardy, king
of France, were ignorant of both accomplishments.
The graces of literature were tolerated only in the
ranks of the clergy; the layman who preferred letters
to arms was regarded as a man of mean spirit.
When the Crusaders took Constantinople, in 1204,
they exposed to public ridicule the pens and inkstands
that they found in the conquered city as the
ignoble arms of a contemptible race of students.
"During this period of intellectual darkness,
which lasted from the fifth until the fifteenth century,
a period sometimes described, and not improperly,
as the dark ages, there was no need for
any improvement in the old method of making
books. The world was not then ready for typography.
The invention waited for readers more than
it did for types; the multitude of book buyers
upon which its success depended had to be created.
Books were needed as well as readers. The treatises
of the old Roman sophists and rhetoricians, the
dialectics of Aristotle and the schoolmen, and the
commentaries on ecclesiastical law of the fathers of
the church, were the works which engrossed the
attention of men of letters for many centuries before
the invention of typography. Useful as these books
may have been to the small class of readers for
whose benefit they were written, they were of no
use to a people who needed the elements of knowledge."
In the more ancient times, however, when MSS. books
(rolls) were not quite so plentiful there was seemingly
no difficulty in obtaining large sums for them.
Aristotle, died B. C. 322, paid for a few books of
Leusippus, the philosopher, three Attick talents, which
is about $3,000. Ptolemy Philadelphus is said to have
given the Athenians fifteen talents, an exemption from
tribute and a large supply of provisions for the MSS.
of aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides written by
themselves.
Arbuthnot, discussing this subject, remarks that Cicero's
head, "which should justly come into the account
of Eloquence brought twenty-five Myriads of
Drachms, which is the equivalent of $40,000. Also,
"the prices of the magical books mentioned to be
burnt in the Acts of the Apostles is five. Myriads of
Pieces of Silver or Drachms."
Picolimini relates that the equivalent of eighty
golden crowns was demanded for a small part of the
works of Plutarch.
If we are to believe any of the accounts, the environment
of the art of handwriting and handwriting
materials at the beginning of the fifth century had
contracted within a small compass, due principally to
the general ignorance of the times.
As practiced it was pretty much under the control
of the different religious denominations and the information
obtainable about inks from these sources
is but fragmentary. What has come down to us of
this particular era is mostly found on the old written
Hebrew relics, showing that they at least had made
no innovations in respect to the use of their ritualistic
deyo.
The invention of the quill pen in the sixth century
permitted a degree of latitude in writing never before
known, the inks were made thinner and necessarily
were less durable in character. Greater attention was
given to the study and practice of medicine and
alchemy which were limited to the walls of the
cloister and secret places. The monk physicians endeavored
by oral instructions and later by written
ones to communicate their ink-making methods not
only of the black and colored, but of secret or sympathetic
inks, to their younger brethren, that they might
thus be perpetuated. All the traditional and practical
knowledge they possessed was condensed into manuscript
forms; additions from other hands which included
numerous chemical receipts for dyeing caused
them to multiply; so that as occasion required from
time to time, they were bound up together booklike
and then circulated among favored secular individuals,
under the name of "Secreta."
The more remote of such treatises which have come
down to us seem to indicate the trend of the researches
respecting what must have been in those times
unsatisfactory inks. Scattered through them appear a
variety of formulas which specify pyrites (a combination
of sulphur and metal), metals, stones and other
minerals, soot, (blue) vitriol, calxes (lime or chalk),
dye-woods, berries, plants, and animal colors, some of
which if made into ink could only have been used
with disastrous results, when permanency is considered.
The black ink formulas of the eighth century are
but few, and show marked improvement in respect to
the constituents they call for, indicating that many
of those of earlier times had been tried and found
wanting. One in particular is worthy of notice as it
names (blue) vitriol, yeast, the lees (dregs) of wine
and the rind of the pomegranate apple, which if
commingled together would give results not altogether
unlike the characteristic phenomena of "gall" ink.
Confirmation of the employment of such an ink on a
document of the reign of Charlemigne in the beginning
of the ninth century on yellow-brown Esparto
(a Spanish rush) paper, is still preserved. Specimens
of "pomegranate" ink, to which lampblack and
other pigments had been added of varying degrees of
blackness, on MSS., but lessening in number as late as
the fourteenth century, are still extant in the British
Museum and other public libraries.