Books, Power, and “Truth”: How Manuscripts Shaped the Medieval Mind

In a world before printing presses and paperbacks, books weren’t casual objects—they were handmade technologies of authority. This episode explores how medieval manuscripts shaped what people could know, who controlled knowledge, and how “truth” was established through institutions, commentary, and tradition. We follow the manuscript as both a physical artifact (parchment, ink, illumination, binding) and a social force—one that organized education, reinforced power, and preserved (and sometimes transformed) ideas as they traveled across time and place.

Along the way, we examine the culture of glossing and marginalia, where medieval readers literally wrote their thinking into the page, and we zoom in on two key case studies: the devotional Book of Hours and the university book economy—including strategies like the pecia system that helped meet growing demand for texts. Ultimately, this is a story about how knowledge worked in the Middle Ages: not as endless information, but as curated tradition—guarded, copied, debated, and authorized.

In this episode:

• Why manuscripts were expensive, scarce, and politically meaningful
• The manuscript-making process: parchment, scripts, layout, illumination, binding
• Who accessed books (and how oral reading expanded their reach)
• Commentary culture: glosses, scholastic methods, and layered authority
• Marginalia as evidence of real readers and real intellectual life
• Case study: Books of Hours as devotion, identity, and status
• Case study: universities and the pecia system (scaling book production)
• How manuscripts shaped medieval “truth” through institutions and interpretation

Key terms:

Manuscript • Parchment • Vernacular • Gloss/Marginalia • Scholasticism • Illumination • Book of Hours • Pecia