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

In this follow-up to our Black Death episode, we step inside the medieval sickroom to answer a haunting question: what did people actually do to treat the plague? Without germ theory or antibiotics, medieval communities relied on the medical framework they had—humor theory, environmental medicine, and the belief that disease traveled through corrupted air (“miasma”).

We explore the remedies that followed logically from that worldview: herb bundles and fumigation, vinegar cloths, bleeding and purging, and attempts to “draw out” plague swellings with poultices and lancing. We also discuss complex apothecary mixtures like theriac, and why many “treatments” were as much about restoring control and meaning as they were about curing illness.

Along the way, we include a brief primary-source moment to hear how medieval witnesses described fear, isolation, and the collapse of ordinary care—and we close with what these treatments reveal about medieval knowledge, culture, and survival under pressure.

In this episode:

• The medieval medical “operating system”: the four humors
• Miasma and the war on “bad air”
• Common responses: herbs, incense, vinegar, and household prevention
• Physician practices: bleeding, purging, and regimen (diet + behavior)
• Buboes and “drawing out” remedies: poultices and lancing
• Theriac and the medieval pharmacy
• What may have helped accidentally: isolation and supportive care

Next up (vote for the follow-up):

1. Why quarantine becomes “40 days”
2. Plague doctors: myth vs. timeline
3. Daily life during outbreaks—work, family, fear, and survival

The Middle Ages weren’t just castles and knights—sometimes they were silence, fear, and a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing. In this episode of Medieval Morsels, we step into the 14th century to explore the Black Death: how it spread, what medieval people believed was causing it, and the strange (and sometimes surprisingly logical) ways they tried to survive.

But this isn’t only a story about death—it’s a story about transformation. The plague reshaped work and wages, power and protest, faith and doubt, art and memory, leaving Europe permanently changed. Join us for a curious, story-rich look at the pandemic that didn’t just devastate the medieval world… it remade it.