Overview

Until the 1200's, most medieval books were produced in monastery workshops much like the fictitious Monastic Scriptorium in this feature. Monasteries sold some of the books they copied and traded some for volumes made in other monasteries. But the range of books available for copying was quite narrow. The Monastic Scriptorium, for example, would never have been able to offer books from Japan. The Canon of Medicine only became broadly available in Europe after it was translated into Latin in the 1100's.

Today, book publishers print copies of a book and then attempt to sell them. In contrast, nearly all the books produced in a monastic scriptorium of the 1000's were commissioned works. People who wanted a personal copy of a particular book would pay the scriptorium to copy an existing manuscript. The scriptorium might produce copies of a few popular books, such as Bibles and prayerbooks, that were likely to sell. Even then, however, the copies often were personalized to meet a client's requests.