The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages
by Sara J. Charles
A pleasant and lively overview of what we know about medieval book production. It appears there weren’t many scriptoria; a lot of book production seems to have been done in cloisters or just wherever the copying could put a stool and a desk. I particularly enjoyed its treatments of different styles of writing, from Insular through Gothic. A good deal of this book focuses on evoking what book creators saw and felt. This is necessarily speculative, and I suspect it works better in lectures than on the page.